BRUNSWICK

A n hour had passed and still 4-year-old Spencer Hawks remained in the pool, splashing and kicking from inside an inflatable tube with green floaties on his arms.

He squealed with joy like any child in a pool on a hot sunny day but walk to the pool’s edge and look closely and you’d see a light-colored blotch on his chest. It is actually his PICC line, he said, where they put needles in at the hospital and cancer clinic. Everyone at the Maine Children’s Cancer Program is fantastic, said his mother, April Hawks.

In August 2012, Spencer was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia three days before his third birthday. While in remission, he continues treatment.

On Sunday, April will be at The Prudential Center in Boston to have her head shaved as part of the fifth annual St. Baldrick’s 46 Mommas: Shave the Brave event. The 46 Mommas Team was created in 2010 to raise awareness and funds for lifesaving childhood cancer research. She has raised close to $900 so far.

It will also be her job as “Hair Mom” to collect qualifying hair, package it up and send it to Wigs for Kids — a nonprofit organization that has been serving children suffering from hair loss since 1981. Her own hair won’t be used for a wig because Spencer asked her to dye the thick curly locks blue last time instead of the normal red she dyes it. Hair can’t be dyed, permed or shorter than 12 inches to be used for the wigs.

As Spencer played in the pool with one of his brothers, Austin, at her grandparents’ house in Brunswick, April sat poolside and remembered it started on a Sunday. Spencer wasn’t feeling well, was lethargic and had a fever of around 103. She brought him to the doctor the next day and the doctor’s office called the following Thursday to see if he was better.

“He wasn’t, so we went back to the doctor’s office, they did blood work and we waited for the results,” April said.

They gave Spencer an antibiotic and sent him home and said they’d call with the results of the blood test. She waited two or three hours and called the office, learning it had set up a room at the Barbara Bush Hospital, “and I asked the doctor do I have to worry about leukemia, and she said, ‘Honest- ly, yes.’”

“When we got there he had two bags of blood in a transfusion and medication,” and Spencer was set up with a bone marrow biopsy for the next morning as well to have a PICC line put in so he wouldn’t have to keep getting stuck by needles, April said.

Three hours later, the biopsy staff at the Barbara Bush Hospital confirmed it was leukemia. They were at the hospital for two weeks. Spencer started chemotherapy right away and responded well.

“I don’t know how well I would have responded to them but he is a trooper. His nickname is Thug Monkey,” and has been since birth, but the family didn’t realize just how fitting it was, April said. “He has earned that.”

The treatment for the kind of cancer Spencer has lasts 2.5 years for girls and 3.5 years for boys, according to April.

“They shoot for remission after the first month, which he did,” she said. “But what they found is that in the earlier treatments, they were getting it gone within a month and then the cancer was coming back. It was hiding in the spinal column.”

Part of the treatment for the first nine months involved a lumbar puncture spinal tap every 10 days to check his spinal fluid and to put chemotherapy drugs into it to make sure the cancer is gone. He continues this treatment every three months now, until the treatments end in November 2015. He is put under anesthesia for each lumbar puncture.

At 16, 16 years ago now, April remembers she had an 11-year-old friend who died of a form of leukemia. When hearing the doctor give her the diagnosis for Spencer, “I freaked out when they said the word leukemia and then he said the word cancer, and I was like, they’re the same thing, and then I lost it again,” as she realized, “My kid has cancer.”

Spencer knows he has cancer, April said, and the words cancer and leukemia, but how do you grasp that concept at his age?

“What we’ve told him is he has Green Goblin cells in his blood and he has Spiderman cells in his blood and the medication that he takes everyday helps his Spiderman cells fight the Green Goblin cells,” April said, adding she told him this within days after his diagnosis and “he gets it.”

She has to be on the lookout for fevers, which can be a sign his central line is infected, so he sleeps in bed with her and her husband, Christopher Hawks, at night. That’s when he would normally throw a fever — usually meaning a trip to the emergency room.

April’s mother Joyce Bergeron-Lawrence goes with Spencer and April to the hospital and cancer clinic so Christopher can be with their other children. Spencer has three brothers: Austin Hawks, 11; Kayden McKinley, 8; and Greg Hawks, 17. Aunts, uncles — the entire family pitches in to get the family what they need, Bergeron-Lawrence said.

Anytime they have a chance to be part of a study to make it better for other people fighting cancer, they do it, April said, so she is absolutely excited about shaving her hair to help with cancer research.

“If something I do helps in some small part, so kids don’t have to be held down to have their port accessed again or don’t have to get anesthesia to go under for a lumbar puncture; if I can help and contribute to that in any sort of way,” she will, April said. “I feel lucky,” because when it comes to cancer, “there are so many worse things we could have.”

A writer normally of sci-fi fantasy type stories, April has now had a personal essay about Spencer’s diagnosis published in a collection of horror stories, personal essays and poems edited by Lori Michelle called “Blood.” Michelle had invited people to submit stories “where the monster in the story is an allegory for cancer.” Hers is titled “Slippery Love” on page 261. Sales of the book benefit the National Children’s Cancer Society. The book is very well written, she said, illustrating amazing talent from the genre.

The project got her into writing again, and writing short horror stories. It is hard to deal with rejections when submitting writings for publication but “hearing your kid has cancer; after that, trying to submit a story somewhere is nothing.”

To learn more about or donate to the Thug Monkeys Unite team, visit www.stbaldricks.org/teams/ mypage/89079/2014. Follow Spencer’s journey at the Thug Monkeys Unite Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ ThugMonkeysUnite? ref_ type=bookmark.

dmoore@timesrecord.com