Ask Me Why I’m Bald

“Ask me why I’m bald”. This is a phrase that Kristine Doyle, a 45-year-old Granada Hills housewife and a mother of three, wears proudly pinned to her shirt every day.

Growing up with a passion to change the world, Kristine was raised in Hayward, California with an older sister, a stay-at-home mother, and a father who worked as a police officer. Wanting to follow in her father’s footsteps, she began pursuing an education in Law Enforcement. Without completing college, she started working as a police dispatcher, where she soon met her police officer husband, Greg Doyle. Three months after the pair met, they were engaged and moved to Los Angeles, California to be married a year later. Now married 23 years, they have three children, Nina, Tom and Will.

In the year 2000, ten months after the birth of her youngest son Will, she would begin on the journey that would change her life and the lives of those she has affected, forever. After taking her ten-month-old son to the doctor’s for what they assumed to be pneumonia, she demanded the doctors take a chest X-ray. To her horrified disbelief, the results showed that his left lung had collapsed and had pushed his heart into the right side of his chest cavity. Shocked by the diagnosis, he was promptly rushed to the Northridge Pediatric Care Unit where doctors cut a hole into his side to insert a chest tube and inflate his lung.

“Sometimes when bad things are happening and you’re right in the middle of it, time slows down and you don’t have an opportunity to process things,” she said. “We could actually hear him screaming. They didn’t put him out.”

After performing a CT scan, the doctor discovered small air blisters known as blebs forming on Will’s lung. After staying in the hospital with her son for a week, he was discharged without an explanation for his condition. Panicked, she began searching for answers. Calling in a personal favor from the head of the Oncology department at UCLA, she was able to get an appointment to run several tests. After waiting three hours in the exam room for the results, the doctor returned and told her and her husband that they probably needed to sit down. His disease did not fit the criteria of anything they had seen before. There was nothing they could do.

Four weeks later Will’s symptoms returned and again she pushed the doctors to perform a chest X-ray. His lung was 75 percent collapsed, but this time it would not inflate. As he began getting worse, his lung completely collapsed and they were forced to surgically remove the three cysts that were infringing on his lung. The cysts were sent to the three top specialists in the country. The findings resulted in what was referred to as Type 4 CCAM, a disease that was not yet recognized in the medical field. Will was placed on a series of steroids and asthma medications to subside the symptoms.

Life returned to normal for a while, but soon after Will’s second birthday he was again taken to the hospital for difficulty breathing. They found a cyst the size of a lemon on his lung and he was immediately rushed into surgery to remove it. Kristine recalls Will waking up from surgery and looking into her eyes; calling out for her. She was helpless. In the middle of the night she was abruptly woken up by a nurse asking her if his face was always that pale. Will was bleeding out.

“The doctor said, ‘Sometimes we can’t fix the leak and in that case he will die’,” she said. “He allowed us to walk with our son to the door of the operating room and say goodbye.”

For four hours she paced, screamed and cried in the hospital waiting room, bracing herself for the horrific news of her son’s death. But then good news arrived. They had fixed the leak in his lung. Will was alive.

Two weeks after Will’s fourth birthday he returned to the hospital again for another cyst removal. This time she had been researching alternatives to his previous diagnosis. Pleuropulmonary Blastoma, a rare lung cancer, was at the top of her list of ideas. Urgently pushing the doctor for the results of the pathology report, he confidently reassured her that it was not cancer and there was nothing to worry about. After two days spent sleeping in the hospital, nervously awaiting the results, the pathology results came back.

“The surgeon walks in and just looks at us. I made eye contact with him and he whispered something to the nurse, and I just know,” she said. “ He looked at me and said, ‘You’re right. It’s cancer’.”

The surgeons immediately took Will back into surgery to make sure all of the tumors had been removed. One had ruptured and was rotting from the inside out, releasing cancer cells into his bloodstream and chest cavity. Kristine began preparing for the next six months of watching her son be put through chemotherapy. As his first day of chemo drew closer, Kristine was required to fill out paperwork, signing away permissions for the doctors to pump poisonous toxins into her four year old son, knowing the risks could result in hearing and cognitive issues or death. Feeling powerless, knowing this was the beginning of his torture, she entered the hospital for Will’s first session. They were met by a nurse in full protective gear, holding the toxins she would be injecting into him through the port that had been previously hooked up to his chest.

“We watched as the poison made its way down through the tube,” she said, as tears filled her eyes. “Just before it went in his vein, I remember thinking that now it was real. There was no turning back.”

As Will began chemo, it soon became apparent that cancer was a disease that affects the entire family. Her kids’ friends began not wanting to be around any of them, in fear of catching what Will had. After each chemo treatment, Kristine would have to administer G-CSF shots to Will at home. The vaccine would burn as it entered his vein, forcing her to hold him down while he screamed. Immediately following the shots, Will would hold her tight and whisper in her ear, begging her not to hurt him anymore. Needing someone to blame for this agony, she found herself frequently angry toward the children who didn’t have to suffer such torture and at all of the parents who never had to hurt their kids.

The day she had dreamed about for six months finally came. Will had beaten cancer and she was going to get to take him home. As happy as she felt, the day was bittersweet. The day Will had began chemotherapy, she was envious of an 11-year-old boy named Dustin who had beaten cancer and was getting to go home and back to his life that day. A month after Dustin was released, the cancer returned and he was back in the hospital for another round of treatment. Dustin was losing his battle against cancer and the night before Will’s last treatment, she found herself in Dustin’s room saying goodbye.

“Dustin was dying,” she said. “You could tell when he passed because there is a sound a mother makes when she loses her child. I heard that sound too many times on that floor.”

Pasting a smile on her face, she entered Will’s room and began discussing his future. Walking out of the hospital with Will’s hand in hers, she was haunted by the idea of how many parents would be leaving heartbroken and empty handed. Each day in the United States, 36 children are diagnosed with cancer and 7 die. Statistically, so many children had to die so Will could live; she began to feel like she hadn’t done enough.

Dedicating her life to finding a cure for childhood cancer, Kristine first began by teaming up with a Minnesota organization that had been researching Will’s type of cancer, Pleuropulmonary Blastoma, about which there was very little information. After six years of studying numerous cases, she was part of a team that was responsible for locating a genetic finding for the cause of the cancer. Broadening her efforts, she then became involved in organizations that focused on finding a cure for all childhood cancers.

Her husband became the co-organizer of the LAFD/LAPD Fire Station 89 St. Baldrick’s event, a charity that funds childhood cancer research grants. She became heavily involved in volunteering for the St. Baldrick’s organization and was in charge of contacting parents who have had children with cancer and honoring them in their newsletter. St. Baldrick’s events are known for raising money by shaving the heads of sponsored participants. In March 2014, on Will’s 10th anniversary of being cancer free, Kristine decided to take the plunge and shave her head. Although feeling hesitant at first over the emotional effects it might have on her, she knew it was something she needed to do. Holding Will’s hand in hers, the older brother of Dustin (the young boy who was in the hospital with Will and had lost his battle with cancer), shaved the first piece of hair off of her head. Kristine was responsible for organizing the shaving of 234 heads and raised $106,000 that day toward ending childhood cancer.

“You can either forget the lessons in life you have learned or you can take those lessons and do something with them and try to be the force of change,” she said. “For me, I feel there is a sense of responsibility if you’ve made it through the fight. If you’re strong enough to be an advocate, then you should do that. There is no walking away.”

Kristine has shaved her head at two St. Baldrick’s events now and will be shaving her head again in July with 46 other mothers working toward a cure. Lexus recently teamed up with the St. Baldrick’s foundation, holding a video competition with a donation of $2,000 going to the winner. Kristine made a 15 second video encouraging others to get involved with the fight against childhood cancer and won the competition. She promptly donated the proceeds to St. Baldrick’s.

“I’m proud of Kris and the cancer warrior she has become,” said Greg Doyle. “Lots of people just walk away when the short-term fight is over, but she continues to work on awareness and fundraising for the long term, with the hope of someday eradicating the menace of childhood cancer.”

Pushing for media awareness and funding, she is currently working on two children’s books for cancer patients and their siblings that explain cancer in a simple and understandable way. As she describes, 11 years ago there were only whispers about childhood cancer and she is rigorously working toward getting to a place where our society is screaming it down the street. Her bright yellow pin has become a permanent accessory to all of her outfits. As it states, “Ask me why I’m bald”. Kristine Doyle hopes more people do.