Nicole Cianciotti had driven only about 4½ miles from UPMC Children’s East when she got the call that her son Braeden’s left lung collapsed.
The 17-year-old Penn-Trafford junior — Nicole’s oldest of six children — sat next to her in the passenger seat Nov. 22, seemingly unaware of the battle raging inside his body.
Braeden got an X-ray at the Monroeville hospital earlier that morning. He had requested doughnuts and coffee from Dunkin’ in Murrysville, and Nicole agreed. It would be a nice treat for her husband, Bryan, whose birthday fell that same day.
Apart from a cough that had plagued Braeden since August, he was talking and breathing just fine.
“I’m not kidding you, I was literally just sitting there talking to him,” said Nicole, a Penn Township native. “There were no signs.”
But the doctor on the other end of the line insisted, instructing Nicole to pull over and wait for an ambulance to take Braeden to UPMC Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh.
Nicole didn’t want to wait. She rushed her son to the hospital in the city’s Lawrenceville neighborhood.
An ultrasound, CAT scan and a few blood tests later, the doctors returned to the consultation room to deliver the news. Braeden asked his mother to speak with the doctors privately. They led Nicole down the hallway to a separate room and offered a chair.
“That’s when they told me it was cancer,” Nicole said. And she had to tell him.
The diagnosis
Braeden developed whooping cough in late August. As he approached the end of the cough’s typical 100-day period, Nicole could tell something had changed — but not necessarily for the better.
“(The cough) just sounded different and he had been acting a little different,” she said. “I couldn’t even tell you how different, but he was just different.”
Hoping to rule out pneumonia, bronchitis or a common cold picked up from classmates, Nicole took Braeden for a checkup appointment on Nov. 21. She scheduled an X-ray for the next morning to test for pneumonia’s milder counterpart — atypical or “walking” pneumonia.
Instead, it was T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, an aggressive form of blood cancer.
Fluid had seeped into Braeden’s lung from a cancerous mass in his chest cavity that was positioned above his heart between the trachea and left lung.
Doctors inserted a chest tube to drain the fluid and placed a line to administer chemotherapy treatments.
The cancer is treatable, Nicole said, but it will not be an easy road. Treatments could take as long as 2½ years.
Limiting social interactions to protect Braeden’s immune system — made fragile by the chemotherapy — is crucial for the first year of treatment. That means virtual schooling — a challenge for Braeden’s ADHD — and time away from his job bussing tables at Texas Roadhouse in Hempfield.
“That’s one thing I hate about this, besides the stuff I have to go through,” Braeden said. “I can’t go back to work.”
Braeden started at Texas Roadhouse at the end of September 2023. He got a badge and a new hat on the day of his one-year anniversary at the restaurant.
“I love the people there. Everyone there is very understanding and it feels like a family, a big family that wants to be around you. Not saying that this family doesn’t,” he said with a laugh, glancing over at his mother. “It’s just a very positive place to be for me.”
Braeden even misses school.
A Rocket League player for Penn-Trafford’s esports team, Braeden spends his free time practicing with his teammates. He is enrolled in the esports class, an elective at the high school.
“I liked taking esports, and I miss the good times I had with my buddies in that class,” he said.
If a computer or monitor in the team’s esports lab malfunctions, Braeden is the first volunteer to fix it, said esports teacher and coach John Carlisle. After a water main break flooded the esports lab this summer, Braeden helped rewire nearly every device in the room — which contains between $50,000 and $75,000 worth of PCs, monitors and keyboards.
“It’s like he lives and breathes it,” Carlisle said.
Esports players hold fundraiser for teammate
Carlisle awoke Nov. 23 to a message from one of his esports players, informing him of Braeden’s cancer diagnosis from the day before.
“It was devastating to say the least. I had to read it twice,” Carlisle said. “I just couldn’t believe what I was reading.”
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Carlisle knew he had to do something.
“I talked to my wife for a while and I talked to my esports team members. We had a meeting the next Monday — the Monday right after we found out — and we just kind of brainstormed,” Carlisle said.
“I said immediately, ‘The gaming thing to do would be to run a fundraiser stream where we kind of play games and we talk about Braeden and maybe even have him on for an interview.’
The team will collect donations while competing in various video games from 3 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. It will be streamed on Penn-Trafford’s Twitch livestream page.
“Dealing with high school students … they’re usually not the most excited,” Carlisle said. “But I tell you, I kid you not, everybody immediately was willing to help out, give ideas.
“It kind of cheered me up a little bit seeing his fellow teammates that are in 9th grade, 10th grade, maybe 11th or 12th, just stop in their tracks and just wait and think ‘What can we do here? How can we help them out?’ ”
Carlisle started the fundraiser Dec. 9. It has generated nearly $2,000.
“I didn’t really think that they would do (the fundraiser),” Braeden said, “because we just did a fundraiser a couple of weeks ago for (the esports) program.
“I didn’t think there would be much funding left in families and stuff like that to get put in,” he said. “I wasn’t really expecting anything, so it really was just a shock to me.”
Some of Braeden’s neighbors started a meal train for his family. Just days after the diagnosis, families in the community signed up to provide more than two weeks worth of food, Nicole said.
“I never imagined how helpful it would be just to not figure out dinner one day. Sometimes you don’t have the brain to figure out dinner, because you sat there and listened to all of the information or you’re talking to schools or social workers,” she said.
“I cannot thank the community enough for doing that.”
‘We’re taking it one wave at a time’
Nicole and Bryan have their hands full. In addition to Braeden’s treatments, they manage significant daily medical care for their 7-year-old son Lukas.
After suffering a stroke at birth, Lukas was left with vision impairment, a severe form of cerebral palsy, kidney failure and developmental delays. He relies on a gastrostomy tube to deliver nutrients to his stomach, and he attends the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children in Pittsburgh’s North Oakland.
Not to mention the parents have four other children to care for — Bently, 14, Aryahanna, 9, Dominik, 7, and Khloe, 2.
“We’re taking it one wave at a time,” Nicole said. “Sometimes those waves come in tsunami waves and they’re relentless, and sometimes we have a calm ocean for a few hours or maybe a day. But one day at a time.”
Steroid medications have alleviated some of the nausea and discomfort often associated with chemotherapy. But Nicole knows the day will come when her son will have to face the full brunt of his treatments without the mask of steroids.
Fatigue, muscle and joint pain, nausea and loss of appetite are just a few of the laundry list of chemotherapy side effects.
“There’s a promise for tomorrow. We just have to keep getting through it. The cancer will hopefully be gone and he’ll live a long, happy life after,” Nicole said, the glow of the family’s Christmas lights reflecting on her watery eyes.
“It’ll be a long road ahead, but it’ll be an even longer road of life. There’ll be a day where he can have kids if he wants to, travel the world if he wants to,” she said. “It’s just going to be a rough couple of years. We’ll get through it, one day at a time.”