Fighting again

On a Tuesday afternoon, about the time school is letting out, Rowdy Knapschafer is curled up under a blanket on the couch, his head resting on a pillow.
His days are mostly spent playing on his Xbox. During a break from the games — his favorite is “Call of Duty: Black Ops III” — he grabs a whiteboard and starts drawing tractors. It’s no accident that he’s using the green marker; he’s a John Deere fan.
Video games and tractors.
For most 8-year-old boys that probably sounds like a dream day compared to hours in the classroom.
But Rowdy can’t wait to get back to his desk at Bloomfield Elementary School, to spend days learning with his fellow second graders, to play football at recess with his friends.
He hasn’t been able to do any of that since mid-March. That was when he and his family got the news that so many close to him have described with a single word:
Devastating.
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Rowdy had missed some days of school because of illness, but his parents, Jeremy and Ashley, didn’t think much of it.
However, on the last day of school before spring break, his mom got a bad feeling.
“I guess what really freaked me was that Friday morning when he woke up the first thing he said was his leg hurt,” said Ashley. “And he was complaining about his shoulder blades hurting. He’s one of those kids who doesn’t complain a whole lot ...”
She called and told her husband she was going to take their son to get checked out, simply for her own piece of mind.
By that afternoon, they were at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, where Rowdy had a blood transfusion. The next day, bone marrow was taken for testing. And on Sunday, he had surgery to put in a port near his left collarbone and start treatment.
He had been diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, again.
“That mother’s intuition,” Ashley said. “It was right that time.”
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This isn’t new to the Knapschafers.
Rowdy began his first bout with ALL when he was just 2 years old.
He had been limping a lot. He had some bruising. He was in general whiny and not himself.
When he started crying as Ashley attempted to drop him off with his babysitter — not typical behavior for her son — she decided to take him to Bluffton Regional Medical Center to find out what was going on. The doctor had an immediate answer.
“She knew right away,” said Ashley. “She said, ‘Either he’s got a blood disorder or he’s got cancer.’”
That started a run of more than three years of treatment, also at Riley, which came to an end on Rowdy’s sixth birthday. He started kindergarten on time — though he sometimes had to take a week off at a time to deal with treatment — and everything seemed to be going well.
In October, his ALL had been in remission for five years. That’s a milestone that usually means a child has overcome cancer for good, but just five months later Rowdy is back in treatment again.
“It’s very difficult,” said Ashley. “Life’s not fair.
“We were finally getting to where we just weren’t worrying about things. He was being a normal kid. He wasn’t on any medicine.
“So now here we are again.”
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Following the diagnosis in March, Rowdy and Ashley spent about a month at Riley.
Meanwhile, Jeremy and the couple’s older son, Dylan, 12, were at home, making things work with the help of family and friends. Ashley’s mom, Freda Corwin, would come to the house each morning to get Dylan on the bus, because Jeremy leaves earlier to head to work at J&M Manufacturing in Fort Recovery. Friends have helped make sure Dylan gets to and from track practices, meets and other activities.
For the first four weeks, Rowdy was limited to just four visitors, all of whom had to be over the age of 18. That meant he couldn’t see his brother for a month.
While the emotional toll of having the family split for weeks at a time — half in rural Bryant, half in the hospital in Indianapolis — is difficult, the treatment has also been more grueling.
Rowdy has already lost 15 pounds because he’s regularly nauseated and has trouble keeping food down. He has sores in his mouth, and most likely an ulcer as well.
This is just the beginning. He’s set to start a new regiment of treatment on June 1 that will run in cycles — a month of chemotherapy followed by a month of a new drug called Blinatumomab — for about six months. The chemo will probably require Rowdy to be in the hospital, but they hope to be able to stay at home while he’s on Blinatumomab.
“We’ve got a long way to go in treatment,” said Ashley. “It’s probably going to be two years. The next six months are going to be pretty rough.”
The good news is that Rowdy went into remission on day 29 of his treatment last month.
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Bloomfield principal Ben Dues gathered second graders at the school together on the day they returned from spring break.
Learning that their classmate was sick — the kind of sick that would keep him out of school for the rest of the year — was a shock to everyone.
“We were all devastated,” said teacher Alison Harmon. “But the first the first thing they wanted to do was help him.”
That’s been the response from the entire Bloomfield community, and beyond.
A group of parents got together and created “We Get Rowdy” T-shirts, selling hundreds to help raise money for the family. Some parents have stopped by the school just to drop off donations, wanting ease the burden on the Knapschafers.
“I think we saw the best of human nature,” said Dues, “because people just felt they wanted to do something.”
Though Rowdy hasn’t been at school, his desk has not been empty. Instead, a giant teddy bear sits in his place and travels with the class throughout the school day.
“They kid of felt like (Rowdy) was there in spirit,” said Harmon. “They miss him so much.”
The acts of kindness, from fundraising, to chipping in to help get Dylan from place to place to the two large envelopes full of cards Rowdy has received, have helped lift the family’s spirits.
“It’s amazing that a community like this would just pull together and do that,” said Jeremy. “I love living here. You go to a big city and I don’t know if you’d get that support or not. But around here, this small community, everybody knows everybody. I could ask anybody in the neighborhood and they would help me out any way I need.”
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Rowdy is happiest when life can be as normal as possible. That’s when he’s at home, where his bed is much more comfortable than the one at Riley and where his friends can come to visit.
His buddies — a tight-knit group whose members refer to themselves as the “family huddle” — have been over to play video games and horse around. They say he still has plenty of energy, enough to chase them around the house and tackle them if, by chance, they beat him in a game of Madden football.
The significance of the battle Rowdy is going through, for the second time, is not lost on them.
“It’s amazing that he can beat it two times in a row,” said Max Dues.
“He’s tough,” added Nick Laux.
That spirit of still chasing his buddies and wrestling them to the floor is Rowdy in a nutshell.
He loves to be outside, playing sports with his friends, riding four wheelers, fishing with his family. He has his own small engine, and visits the Tri-State Gas Engine and Tractor Association show with his dad, grandpa and uncles every year.
“He lives up to (his name),” said Jeremy, a wry smile creeping across his son’s face as he keeps drawing his tractors. “He’s ornery. Always up to something.”
When one drawing is complete, he lifts it up and shows his mom.
“That’s going to be me,” he tells her. “I’ve got a tractor, and a house.”
Rowdy’s case of ALL is considered low risk because it went into remission so quickly. But he still has a long road ahead of him.
“It’s just a lot tougher, because whatever they did, he had a dormant leukemia cell for five years that didn’t show itself until all this time later,” Ashley said. “We’re hoping we get it for good this time.”