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When the school year started in August 2023, Weston Hutson started getting intermittent fevers. The five-year-old had just started third grade, and teachers were telling his mother Lauren that he was struggling to focus during class.
Weston and his family quickly discovered that he had a stage 4 Wilms tumor, also called nephroblastoma, a type of kidney cancer that primarily develops in young children. Wilms tumors are rare, with approximately 650 cases in the United States per year, according to the National Cancer Institute. They are often caused by random genetic mutations, the National Institutes of Health says, but can be made more likely by exposure to air toxics; Lauren said all of tests for genetic heredity came back negative.
In the year since Weston’s diagnosis, he has gone through multiple surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy. Yet, Lauren believes Weston’s diagnosis has brought her family closer together and the best out of the local community; on July 9, dozens of locals showed up at East Main Street in the Town of Williston for a blood drive and fundraiser for Weston that raised $3,000. A GoFundMe for Weston has also raised $13,730 of a $20,000 fundraising goal. Americans spend more per capita on cancer care than any other country, the National Library of Medicine finds.
The People-Sentinel’s Elijah de Castro spoke with Lauren about how her family has navigated her son’s diagnosis, and their reaction to the community event and fundraiser..
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elijah de Castro: How did you find out about Weston’s diagnosis?
Lauren Hutson: It started with some low grade temperatures, which I thought was just him starting at school and being around other kids, just germs. He said that he had fallen at school in the hallway. It just kept getting weirder and weirder. I was thinking ‘let’s take him to the clinic.’ That was August 19 last year. When [the nurse] laid him flat, we saw that there was a bulge on his stomach. … They sent us over to the hospital to get some imaging. I didn’t even know anything about the children’s hospital, or where to go. They told me they had found a mass tumor and that we were going to be admitted and put on the fifth floor of the Augusta hospital. They told me it was a Wilms tumor in the left kidney … the surgeon came in and showed me the mass on the computer.
Elijah: What was your reaction?
Lauren: Oh my gosh, I still don’t remember everything because I had just had [my daughter] Lumley three or four months before. So I was still breastfeeding her and I was worried about him and my two-year-old daughter too. I was still working, I’m a nurse, [so] I actually was scheduled with a patient that Saturday and I had to call out of work. Whenever they told me about the tumor, they said it was about the size of a large baking potato. I was thinking it was just a little tumor. When I looked at the screen, [the tumor] was surrounding things like his aorta. It really got concerning. They did the biopsy and he had an allergic reaction to the medicine they use for sedation. It was pretty traumatic. They decided to do six weeks of chemo before taking this big ol’ tumor out. After that we got some images, and the tumor had shrunk in half. As a mom, [the scars] were one of my main concerns. I cried before the surgery. I was thinking, ‘how big is the scar going to be?’ Thankfully, it was even smaller than I was originally told.
Elijah: What was it like learning about all this as you went through the process?
Lauren: It’s still very unbelievable. I struggled a lot with it to where I was driving myself crazy. I had never been to Atlanta in my life, I’m just a country girl. … I don’t even like driving in Augusta and here I was trying to drive in Atlanta. The city scared me.
Elijah: There were a lot of people at the fundraiser. What was your reaction to the community’s event and the success of the fundraiser?
Lauren: I cried and cried and cried. I got out of the car and couldn’t even talk. [To Weston,] I was like ‘all these people are here for you.’ He didn’t know how to react. That’s a lot of this, you don’t know how to react. You don’t know how to react to your child having cancer and you don’t know how to react when people are so generous. It feels unreal still. We’ve met wonderful families throughout this process. We’re so thankful he’s going to be done and going back to school. I will eventually get back to work. It's going to take me a little time to emotionally be able to let go. … It was shocking to see how people just stepped in and helped, even people we didn’t know. There were people from Wagner, Barnwell, different churches out in Olar who heard about us and wanted to help.
Elijah de Castro is a Report for America corps member who writes about rural communities like Allendale and Barnwell counties for The People-Sentinel. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep Elijah writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today.
