Positivity: Superheroes save a boy’s birthday
From Metro Atlanta (HT QandoBlog via Triticale e-mail):
Dan Peterson wanted to do something special for his son’s 10th birthday Friday, and who could blame him?
His son, Justin, had endured three years of chemotherapy, and then his leukemia returned last fall. A bone marrow transplant in February brightened his long-term prospects but left Dad in a quandary as the birthday approached.
The boy’s immune system is so weak that just being around other people leaves him vulnerable to infection. He doesn’t go outside his Marietta house much, and when he does he has to wear a mask. That put a crimp in his parents’ plans for his birthday.
“Can we play miniature golf?” Justin asked as the big day approached.
Too risky, doctors said.
Could some friends drop by from Fellowship Christian School in Ros-well?
Sorry.
“Well what can we do?” he finally asked.
Then his dad got an idea. Maybe —- somehow —- he could arrange for his son to see “Spider-Man 3.”
Justin loved the first two Spider-Man movies. He dressed up as Spider-Man a few Halloweens ago. Snapshots show him crouching on a living-room table in his red-and-blue Spidey suit, ready to pounce.
He really, really wanted to see “Spider-Man 3.”
“But what about the crowds?” his father thought. “The risk?”
Dan Peterson drove to the Georgia Theatre Company’s Park 12 Stadium Cinemas in Marietta to ask an extraordinary favor of assistant manager Sarah Martinez.
Justin’s mom, Michele, already had told the boy that they probably would have to wait for the DVD, but his father figured there was no harm pitching his idea to Martinez.
“Do you think there’s any way my boy might be able to see ‘Spider-Man 3′?” he asked. “And could you make sure there’s no one else in the theater? He can’t be in crowds. It’s dangerous.”
Martinez asked her boss, Christopher James, the theater’s general manager.
James didn’t blink.
“We knew he’d always remember this, and we wanted to create that memory,” James said. “It was the least we could do.”
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