‘Normal’ is Good

Chevy Chase teen Griffin Marette embraces life after battling childhood leukemia.

May 24, 2010 1:00 p.m.

When Griffin was 6 or 7, he started taking growth hormones almost daily after doctors discovered he had virtually none of his own. He still gives himself a shot of the growth hormone six nights a week, as doctors think there’s a chance he could grow more.

His adult teeth never formed proper roots, and he already has had significant dental and orthodontic work. Vision problems also emerged, and in sixth grade “he sat with all the little old ladies and had his cataracts removed,” Bensen says.

“You realize when you go to the doctor more in a week than most kids go in a year that something’s different about you,” Griffin says. Other kids noticed Griffin was different, too, and started asking the questions he has heard more times than he can count: “Why do you go to the doctor so much?” and “Griffin, is something wrong with you?”

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Griffin took it in stride, explaining his medical past matter-of-factly. Eventually, kids stopped asking. Over time, elementary school classmates would explain his situation to new middle school classmates, and middle school classmates would fill in his high school classmates.

Some fixes were medical: physical therapy for the joints, and specially made shoes for the flat feet. Others were routine, such as sitting in front of the class so he could see the chalkboard, or picking up an ice pack from the school nurse for his sore leg after gym class. Griffin’s parents let him decide when he wanted or needed help—which turned out to be almost never.

Instead, he adapted. Griffin had played in an organized ice hockey league since age 6. But he devoted himself to the sport in sixth grade after concluding that skating was a more natural motion for his bowed knee than running.

When he proved too slow to keep up with other kids on the soccer field, he became a goalie. “I’m not the fastest runner, but with goalie, all you have to do is be quick for three steps and dive,” Griffin says. “And I don’t mind taking hits.”

Though doctors had warned that the radiation might cause learning issues, Griffin is a straight-A student on track for B-CC’s full International Baccalaureate Program as a junior.

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“I thought, other people have to work harder intellectually than I do, and I have to work harder at sports than they do,” Griffin says. “Everyone has hurdles to overcome, and that’s one of mine.”

Dinndorf, now a medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration, says a recurrence of the leukemia is “almost inconceivable.” But the transplant, chemotherapy, radiation and growth hormones all increase Griffin’s risk of developing other cancers, so he has annual checkups at Children’s. He also has his growth monitored at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, and visits a variety of other doctors. He no longer goes to physical therapy, but stretches on his own to keep his joints flexible.

In between the appointments, there are long periods when the family forgets there’s anything different about Griffin’s life.

“‘Normal’ was a big thing for us when Griffin was really sick,” Bensen says. “We would say over and over, ‘We just want to be normal.’ A lot of our time now is normal.”

In Griffin’s ninth-grade honors English class, teacher Rachel Gold asked the class to write journal entries about a recurring motif in their lives. Griffin wrote about the hospital: how it gave him the perspective to shrug off trivial adolescent problems, how it made him risk-averse and responsible beyond his years, how it brought him closer to his parents and his sister.

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“I had to stop reading it because I started crying,” says Gold, now an administrator at Westland Middle School in Bethesda. “At first, it just made me so sad that his motif was the hospital. But once I thought about it, the way he turned it into a positive experience just speaks to who he is as a person. He is charismatic and confident, and he is overwhelmingly positive, even though he has every reason to not be.”

Griffin brings up his medical past so rarely that many of his teachers and classmates have only a vague idea of what he has been through. But he discusses it easily when asked, and even starred in a televised public service announcement for the school’s Leukemia & Lymphoma Society fundraising campaign earlier this year.

Hearing the family describe the experience, it becomes easy to see where Griffin gets his easygoing outlook. Marette jokes that Griffin’s heightened sense of caution made him the kind of kid who would tell his peers, “Jumping off the roof sounds like a bad idea. You go ahead. I’ll wait here.”

Bensen says the elevator key that helps Griffin avoid B-CC’s four flights of stairs has made him “a whole set of new friends between classes.”

And Griffin jokes that his frequent absences for doctors’ visits make him the envy of classmates.

Griffin and Terryn both say it’s hard to know which personality traits were present before Griffin’s illness, and which developed because of it. Both want to go into medicine, but that could stem from their natural aptitudes for math and science. Both were cautious and mature as young kids, but who’s to say those aren’t innate characteristics.

The one thing they know for sure: The experience left them “uncommonly close,” Terryn says. 

“We have a bond I really can’t explain,” she says. “Sometimes older siblings look down on their younger siblings. But I respect Griffin so much. He’s three years younger than me, but he’s been through more than I have in my lifetime.

“All he’s ever wanted is to be normal,” she says. But “he’s more than normal. He’s extraordinary.” 

Amy Reinink’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, Entrepreneur and Women’s Running. She lives in Silver Spring. 

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