On this Christmas Eve, 4-year-old Christian Reynoso’s family received the best gift possible.
“There’s nothing else I could ask for the holidays other than this,” his mother Kate Annunziato said. “He did not need a transfusion today and all his blood work came back negative for leukemia cells, so he currently is in remission.”
Christian is home for the holiday with a new haircut and Santa Claus pajamas.
“I promised him as soon as we got home from his appointment that he could put them on,” Annunziato said.
Christian always had the Facebook posts from firefighters near and far to cheer him up during the past few months of chemotherapy, Annunziato said.
A Branford fire captain started Fire Trucks for Christian after his leukemia diagnosis in August. Now the page has more than 7,900 likes.
“It’s nice to have that to look at night or when we were in the hospital for the month and he was really sick,” Annunziato said, “to kind of look at it every day and to see that people really care, even people that don’t know us.”
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Turns out this youngster who loves firefighters is also interested in fishing.
“He asked for a fishing rod for Christmas and Santa got him a fishing rod,” Annunizato said, “so hopefully once the weather is nice again we’ll be done with the chemo and he can go out and go fishing.”
While there’s no better Christmas gift for this mother than to be home celebrating with her son, Annunziato is thinking about other families that aren’t as fortunate.
“The only other thing I could ask for is that everybody recognize that there are plenty of patients that aren’t going to be home for Christmas,” she said, “and there’s plenty of people that work at the hospitals, the firefighters, the EMTs, police officers that are working tonight and tomorrow to keep your family safe.”
Christian heads back to Yale New Haven Hospital next Tuesday to continue chemotherapy that will hopefully keep his cancer in remission.
“The goal now is to keep him with no leukemia cells in his bone marrow,” Annunziato said.
