Meet Eddie, the 2025 Tree of Hope lighter
If you ask Edison “Eddie” Golden how he wound up getting chemotherapy at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, he can tell you all the details.
“It was April 7, the start of everything,” he says, wrapped in a fuzzy Grinch blanket, examining his breakfast. “For a couple of weeks, I just really didn’t have a lot of energy and I didn’t want to do the stuff I normally would.”
He had a cough that wouldn’t go away and he wasn’t his normal active self, says Melissa Golden, his mom. “Since birth we’ve called him Sweaty Eddie because he just doesn’t stop. He loves to play outside. We usually have to call him in when it gets dark.”
That night, Michael, Eddie’s dad, took him to their pediatrician who worried about pneumonia and sent him to urgent care. From there, they were told to get to a hospital right away, where a blood test revealed it was leukemia.
“It was T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” Eddie says.
Two diagnoses in one
As they did the X-ray for pneumonia and found a mass between Eddie’s lungs, physicians saw something else they didn’t like. “We learned he has a double aortic arch, an extra part in his heart,” Melissa says. “The heart surgery will come later, after Eddie is done with his leukemia treatment,” she says.
With the Roswell Park Oishei Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders program, kids like Eddie benefit from the experts of both hospitals, inpatient care at Oishei Children’s Hospital, where he spent a month, and has been receiving outpatient care at Roswell Park for several months.
“He was very high-risk when he came to us,” says pediatric hematologist/oncologist, Kanwaldeep Mallhi, MD, Eddie’s doctor at Roswell Park. “He had a very high white blood cell count. He was quite sick. The family was overwhelmed initially, but they were very much ready to do whatever we needed to do. From the start, they were a resource family, very supportive of each other.”
Learning from other families
Eddie’s treatment consisted of four rounds of chemotherapy so far, resulting in his latest blood work showing no evidence of disease. He’ll next go into a maintenance round, which will last for two years.
Eddie and his family have become active members of Courage of Carly, where they find support, friendship and — something that’s important for any child — fun.
“We’re so grateful to the club that no one wants to join. We know every path is different. There are families who have had very hard journeys and they’re all still willing to share experiences and help us in the fight,” says Melissa.
A bright opportunity
Eddie will be bringing his star power, and his friends and family, to this year’s Tree of Hope celebration on Friday, December 12.
“He really feels like a celebrity already,” Melissa says with a grin. “He’s waiting for his contract.”
Eddie will be joined by his parents, his older and younger brothers, and extended family including his grandmother, who is also a Roswell Park patient, for the festivities. He’s excited to see the lights and to have the most important job of the evening.
The twinkling lights pale compared to Eddie’s outlook.
