A teenager who has spent two years undergoing cancer treatment has received an extraordinary show of solidarity from his family, with his dad and older brother getting tattoos designed to match one of his surgical scars.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Jasper O’Briant, from Jal, New Mexico, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in October 2020, per Good Morning America.
The 16-year-old has since been undergoing chemotherapy, regularly travelling from his home to a children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas for treatment.
Osteosarcoma is a form of bone cancer which primarily affects children and teenagers, with teen boys particularly affected.
Speaking about what he has experienced since his diagnosis, Jasper told Good Morning America: “It’s just a really terrible thing to be honest.”
But throughout an incredibly difficult period, Jasper has had the support of his family.
His father Jody O’Briant and older brother Nathan recently decided to make that support permanent by getting tattoos replicating one of the scars Jasper was left with following surgery.
“We’d all been like, ‘Oh, that’d be something really cool to do together,’” Nathan recalled to GMA.
“I was fully on board when we had discussed it. It was never a second doubt in my mind as to what was going to happen there. It was something I wanted to do immediately for him,” he continued.
The gesture carried particular significance for Jasper because nobody in his family had previously had a tattoo.
“I didn’t get to choose to have [surgery] done to me. It was, to be quite frank, it was that or death. So I didn’t get to choose and the fact that they chose to put something permanent on their body was very meaningful,” Jasper said, adding that he thought “the idea was really awesome.”
Jody, a pastor at a Baptist church in Jal, had his tattoo placed along his left shoulder to mirror the location of Jasper’s scar.
For him, it represents not only support for his son but a permanent reminder of what the entire family has endured together.
“As we age, sometimes we forget how hard life was, how good life was, and all the ups and downs, and I think that was kind of the neat thing, that we would remember some of these things,” the father of three said.
Nathan echoed that sentiment, explaining: “I think we can try to push those thoughts out, those hard times out, like, we’ll get through them and then not try to remember them again. But this is just a remembrance of that hey, we’re through it now, we’re through those first hard few years.”
The tattoos could now serve another purpose too: starting conversations about osteosarcoma.
“When you have such a striking tattoo such as this, people are going to ask, ‘Well, what’s that for? Why do you have that?’ So it’s just small little bits and pieces [I’m] able to share with people over time and this is just part of spreading that awareness,” Nathan said.
For Jasper, greater awareness could ultimately mean greater support for research into the disease.
“If we can raise money for awareness for osteosarcoma, [it] would be the best thing because there’s not a lot of money raised for it, for research or just telling people it’s out there,” he added. “It’s a very real disease. A lot of times people forget that teenagers get cancer, too.”
Featured image credit: Elizabeth O’Briant / Good Morning America
