The night before Halloween, Nate Solder took his son, Hudson, an angelic 2-year-old with wispy blond hair, to a party for kids at Gillette Stadium.
Hudson went as Where’s Waldo. He walked in clutching his dad’s hand and made a beeline for a table with a cookie-decorating station. Nate followed, sat down, and scooped a dollop of orange frosting onto a cookie. Hudson promptly flipped the cookie over and smushed the frosting into a paper plate.
Hudson munched on gummy worms while Nate took photos with Power Rangers and Disney princesses who took breaks from trading candy for a moment with the Patriots left tackle. It was a perfect Halloween party in every way except for its reason for being: the party-going children were also fighting cancer.
The next day the Solders would don their costumes again to trick or treat around the reception desks at the Jimmy Fund Clinic in Boston, where Hudson is being treated for kidney cancer. He had restarted chemotherapy a couple weeks earlier.
“He’s handling it really well,’’ said Nate, now in his seventh season with the Patriots. “It’s really difficult to have to restart all that stuff, but we kind of knew it was coming so we’ll do whatever it takes for him to be healthy.’’
Hudson was diagnosed in October 2015, when he was 3 months old. Nate and his wife, Lexi, were giving Hudson a bath when they felt a lump in his belly. They took him to their pediatrician, who said Hudson needed an ultrasound immediately.
The doctor asked if they’d like an ambulance ride to the hospital. “No, I don’t think so,’’ said Lexi, in shock. They drove themselves to Boston Children’s Hospital through fits of tears.
“I felt very guilty,’’ Nate said. “I felt like I had done something wrong.’’
Hudson was diagnosed with bilateral Wilms tumors, a form of kidney cancer found most often in young children. They stayed in the hospital for a week while Hudson had a chemotherapy port put into his chest and had his first round of treatment.
Last October brought good news: Hudson was able to stop chemo. The tumors in his kidneys had not gone away, but they had shrunk to the point where he didn’t need treatment, just monitoring. A week before the Super Bowl, Hudson was able to have his port removed.
Since he was diagnosed, Hudson has been scanned every four weeks. It’s usually an ultrasound and an MRI, which requires him to be put under anesthesia. The Solders got almost a year’s worth of scans followed by good news. They’d been told there was a 50 percent chance the tumors would grow again, but they started to hope.
Then, at the end of September, a routine MRI showed that all the tumors, in both of Hudson’s kidneys, had started growing again. He restarted treatment on Oct. 3.
The original diagnosis was shocking and frightening, but going back into treatment has been sobering in a different way.
“It’s been a little tougher this time because it’s like, OK, we didn’t think we’d still be dealing with this,’’ Lexi said. “We didn’t want to keep doing this. But it’s just one of those things that you just do.’’
The gravity of the situation weighs on their minds every day, but they find little moments of joy in the things they do regularly, such as drives to the Jimmy Fund Clinic.
Hudson has treatment every Tuesday morning, and the Solders have to be up and out of their Foxborough house around 6 a.m. That means rush-hour traffic on the way into Boston. The trip often takes close to two hours, yet they look forward to it each week.
“Even those car rides have been so enjoyable,’’ Lexi said. “It’s not that often that Nate and I just sit down for two hours and just talk.’’
Their 7-month-old daughter, Charlie, comes too, and usually snoozes while Hudson hangs out in the back seat.
“We do it all together as a family so when we look back years and years from now we can say we did it and she was there and we were all part of that,’’ Lexi said.
Hudson has always had treatment on Tuesdays because the Patriots are usually off that day. Occasionally, a bye week or prime-time game will throw the practice schedule out of whack and Solder will take a personal day, which the Patriots always grant him.
“They basically told him that any time he needs he can take,’’ Lexi said. “Obviously, Nate doesn’t want to take advantage of that, he wants to be there as much as possible, but there’s just a couple things that Nate won’t miss in terms of being there with the family.’’
Friends and favorite toys
Treatment takes about an hour, but the Solders stay all day at the Jimmy Fund Clinic, where Hudson has friends and a favorite toy box with his preferred stuffed animals. He loves the receptionist who works at the ultrasound desk and the music therapist who sings and plays the guitar with the kids.
“He runs in there,’’ Lexi said. “We’ll literally say, ‘Hudson, you have chemo tomorrow,’ and he’ll say, ‘Oh, play with toys.’ ’’
To Hudson, chemo means toys and doctors and nurses and car rides with his mom and dad. Being sick is when he feels a little nauseous or when his baby sister has the sniffles.
“In terms of cancer, or him knowing he has tumors or him knowing that’s why he has chemo, he has no idea about all that stuff,’’ Lexi said. “We tell him, it’s not something we try to hide or try to fake it, we try to be really, really honest with him. We want him to trust us so we tell him when things are going to hurt or the medicine is going to taste bad.’’
Eventually, the Solders will grapple with how Hudson feels when he understands he’s fighting cancer and that his trips to the Jimmy Fund Clinic aren’t typical or just for fun. Childhood cancers account for less than 1 percent of cancers diagnosed each year and about 5 percent of those cancers are Wilms tumors, according to the American Cancer Society.
“He’s starting to get some words and he says, ‘Dad, you can take the port out. I feel much better now,’ ’’ Nate said. “And it’s like, you don’t even know, really, what sort of circumstances you’re in.’’
For Nate, who beat testicular cancer in 2014, and Lexi, medicine and treatment have become normal. When Charlie was born, it almost seemed strange that she only needed to go to the doctor for regular checkups.
“She’s 7 months old, and I think I gave her Tylenol the other day for the first time,’’ Lexi said. “It was like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I felt like oh, I don’t want to do it but we do it all the time with him because it’s normal. It’s just a strange, strange feeling.’’
Having kids changed the Solders’ perspective on things in general, and Hudson’s fight even more so. For Nate, football has gone from the No. 1 thing he worried about to an escape and a release. Though getting to have Hudson and Lexi in Houston for the Super Bowl made that win infinitely more special, football just isn’t the most important thing in Nate’s life anymore. He’s a lot more emotional, too.
“I cry so much more now,’’ he said.
Lexi laughed and agreed.
“He used to be so stressed,’’ she said. “He still is, he obviously takes his job very, very seriously, but he used to be so stressed about football and all that kind of stuff, and just having your son, your infant, diagnosed with cancer just puts everything into a different perspective.
“What’s important and what’s not just becomes much more clear. It’s a much clearer picture I think, so that’s been awesome, too. There’s so many little blessings in this that have just changed us in ways that we never expected when he was diagnosed.’’
Knowing what’s important
What is far less important now is fretting over bad press or the Twitter trolls who descend after every imperfect play. Nate has taken his share of criticism this season, particularly early in the year when the Patriots’ offensive line wasn’t playing to its usual standard.
“I like to look on Twitter. I always think it’s funny,’’ Lexi said. “Nate yells at me for it and he tells me not to do it, but really for me it’s just entertainment. If you wait like 10 minutes after Nate gives up a sack and search his name on Twitter, what you find is amazing. It really is.
“I just look at it and a lot of times what’s different now is you just read those things and it’s like, ‘Oh, Nate is so bad, he’s the worst left tackle, blah, blah, blah.’ It’s like, if you only knew. That’s all I think of is if you only knew what he was going through every single day at home and at work. The fact that he can even walk out on that field, to me, is amazing.’’
Social media can be cruel. It doesn’t discriminate based on what challenges someone might be facing at home.
“You see what these people say and it can be funny,’’ Lexi said. “It’s definitely put that all into a much different perspective and it’s definitely like, ‘Who cares?’ They obviously have no idea.’’
A few hours after the Patriots-Buccaneers game in Week 5, Lexi retweeted one of her findings, this one particularly horrible.
“I hope your family [expletive] dies. Please [expletive] kill yourself. You are the worst LT ever. You should be shot. [Expletive],’’ user @Cwaehrer10 wrote, tweeting at Nate’s account.
“I’m going to say a prayer for everyone that takes a game to this level,’’ Lexi wrote.
“I always think if that’s what you’re worrying about, if you care so much about how they play football right now, God bless you,’’ she said. “You don’t have that many things to worry about.’’
Thankfully, the Solders get nothing but support from their real-life network.
Three times a week, some of Nate’s teammates and their wives and girlfriends bring over food. They used the website mealtrain.com to put together a rotating schedule. Rex and Danielle Burkhead recently brought over Mexican food, Nate’s favorite.
Lexi’s parents are only two hours away in Connecticut, and Lexi can bring the kids to their place for some extra hands when Nate is on the road.
Mostly, the Solders rely on each other, making sure they’re there every Tuesday and learning to appreciate even rush-hour traffic when it means they can spend more time together. Hudson’s diagnosis was a nightmare, but they’ve never let their lives become dark.
“You enjoy the good things even if they’re few and far between. When you get those moments, Hudson has good days and you just appreciate that,’’ Lexi said. “I think we all love each other just a little bit more.’’
Nora Princiotti can be reached at nora.princiotti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @NoraPrinciotti.
