Christina Pressley said she was hesitant at first to bring her son, Teyton, to Barnes & Noble near Concord Mall in Delaware on Thursday for Joe Biden's book signing tour.
A 13-year-old brain cancer survivor with a different result from a different cancer than the Biden family went through with Beau Biden's glioblastoma, Christina Pressley said she didn't want to put that on her son.
"We try to look positively. We take it day by day," she said.
But Teyton said he wanted to meet the former vice president. So his mother arrived without him Thursday morning at 5:30, even though she was at Madison Square Garden the night before for a Billy Joel concert. Christina was 24th in line; the first people in line arrived before midnight.
Pressley wanted to let Biden know that his book – "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose," the memoir that chronicles the last grueling months of his son Beau's life and his decision not to run for president – is one she's going to relate to.
"To me, I felt like I knew maybe part of what the Bidens had been through," Pressley said. "I said that Teyton was a survivor and I wish that Beau was a survivor."
That's what Pressley said when she and Teyton approached Biden. The longtime Delaware senator told Teyton to come around to his side of the table, where he told the boy that he was brave, courageous and that his most important job now was to take care of his family. Then he hugged Teyton while Christina wiped tears from her eyes.
He then wrote a note in each of their books and exchanged contact information with Christina.
"He said that he wishes me the best of luck throughout my life and would like to see me again sometime and see how I'm doing," said Teyton, an eighth-grader at P.S. duPont Middle School. “It meant a lot. It made me feel like I was very special.”
"Promise Me, Dad" is a book about time, and Biden details the minute-by-minute journey of navigating a private family crisis while still attending to global matters as vice president.
The Pressleys, who reside in North Wilmington, know all about time. Christina said she hadn't read the book yet, but started paging through some of it Thursday while she waited in line.
“At the beginning, he's talking about wanting to slow down time," she said. "It's a strange thing. You want more time to figure things out and for things to take hold and you want them to be cured and to have it behind you."
It was Christmas Day 2015 when then-11-year-old Teyton first complained of headaches. Three days later, a visit to Nemours Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children revealed a brain tumor that was causing hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain. Within two hours, doctors drilled a hole and drained the fluid.
“When you take your child to the emergency room because you think he has a virus and maybe he's dehydrated because he has a headache and he was throwing up and they tell you that he has a mass in his brain, it's like walking through a door into another world that you can never leave," Christina said. "It changed our whole world, our whole family, Teyton especially."
Teyton ended up going through six rounds of chemotherapy and 30 radiation treatments to treat a mixed cell germ tumor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia over the next nine months.
He missed a lot of school but attended classes when he could and was tutored in math throughout the year and into the summer of 2016.
He's been through countless MRIs, both brain and spinal, and a similar total of spinal taps. His tests are good now and a regular lifestyle has nearly returned.
Teyton still has tests every four months and the process has left him with occasional tremors and some blurry vision. This Christmas, mother and son said, they're just happy to have the whole family together, including 10-year-old Hobie, Christina's other son whose stress was so high during Teyton's treatment that he developed shingles.
“You learn to take everything a step at a time. You learn that there's always someone worse off than you," Christina said. "You learn to be appreciative of things that maybe you took for granted before. You learn that you have family and friends that love you and support you."
"It makes you want to help others even more because you know what they're going through," Teyton said.
