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Dear Carol,

I do not know how my son got Osteosarcoma. As I said it is a great mystery for me and you have no idea what it has done to my family. When my son first went to the Mass General hospital, there were two other boys in the same room who were recovering from 'orthopedic oncology'. They also did not survive the disease. That was in late 1985 when he had the surgery. From that point until his death, it was like being caught in a snowball rolling down hill. It grew worse with ever increasing momentum and there was nothing we could do but stand by him and love him. We had no control and no way of control.

He was a very healthy child and young man. He was a great young athlete. Anyone who knew him would tell you this even though he has been gone now for almost 19 years. I saw a woman a few years ago who was the mother of a boy a year or two older than he was and played on the same soccer team. She told me she still carried his picture in locket. I only knew this woman from a few soccer games that I saw her at.

As you can imagine, losing a child is probably the worst experience parents can endure. Not knowing how you lost your child leaves many questions unanswered. Was it how we fed him? Was it somewhere he went and was exposed to something that we should have been more aware of? The questions go on and on. If, on the other hand it was something in our water that we trusted the local government's decision to add, that leaves a real knot in your stomach. Why did it effect him and not others? Maybe I will never know, but it something I will always be searching to answer.

Tony Vallentine
Dedham MA

July 18, 2005

Dr. Connett,

I feel a bit shell shocked right now. If there is any substance to this, I don't know what to say. My wife, especially, and I were, I thought, fairly conscientious with the parenting of our children. If the loss of my first born has anything to do with our municipal water, then I feel a real sense of failure for him. We opposed adding fluoride to our water, but for very different reasons. I did not know of this controversy about bone cancer and fluoride at that time and even now until I read about it in the news recently.

You may share my story, as little of it as you know, with my name. That was always one of the great despairs in my life, that others did not share their stories. When my son was ill and in the hospital, my elderly next door neighbor, went in to visit him while recovering from surgery. The neighbor came to me a day or so later with great remorse telling me he could not get out of the elevator. He went on telling me that his own daughter, who had died in the 50's of osteosarcoma, was in the same ward on the same floor as my son here some 30 years later. All the grief he suffered came back to him like Mac truck. Thinking about that now I don't know what exposure his daughter had to fluoride. There was none added to the water way back then although there may have been other ways. As I said before, I do not know how my son contracted this cancer. I do feel certain that it was not something he was born with, some kind of genetic defect. I believe it was an environmental exposure to something to which his body was caught off guard and was not mature enough to resist.

Tony Vallentine