How we got the photo: 'Cancer fighter' makes a personal connection

How does a middle-aged man with two cameras come to be in a 11-year-old shirtless boy's bedroom and it still be socially OK? Let me explain ...

I met Michael Carr of Bloomingdale on an assignment with our estimable columnist Burt Constable. Michael was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 7 and has been through a number of treatment plans in the years since. What struck me about him, what strikes everybody he meets about him, is his indefatigably positive attitude. This kid has been through rounds and rounds of chemo and radiation, through remission and recurrence and still seems like nothing is ever going to slow him down. In fact, we met him a couple of days before he was going to lead a team up 1,643 steps as part of Aon's Step Up for Kids fundraiser to support families at Lurie Children's Hospital.

His strength and courage resonated with me even more since I went through a battle with cancer myself last year.

As a photojournalist who prefers to focus on community stories like Michael's, I've met lots of people who are suffering with cancer, who have beaten cancer, who have lost loved ones to cancer. But this was the first time for me since going through it myself. Like Michael, I had chemo and radiation. 35 visits to Rush Hospital downtown. Monday through Friday for seven weeks caged in one of those insufferable radiotherapy masks.

That plus a few rounds of chemotherapy led to a couple of months of recovery where making it up or down the stairs was a chore. All said and done, it's a year later and I don't have cancer right now. And I felt like I kept a pretty decent outlook. Just kept my head down and powered through it. I was assured that if I could make it through the treatment, there was a really, really good chance that the particular kind of cancer I had could be treated successfully.

Michael hasn't had any of those kind of assurances. And still you'd never know. He told stories about how he likes to help the other kids, the “younger” kids, who get scared or upset. “I'm the Mayor of the 18th Floor,” at Lurie's, he said. And he told us how a lot of times when he gets to the hospital he takes off his shirt since it bugs the area around the port on his chest.

I saw photos of him taken by his family and hospital and there he was, roaming the hallways shirtless, often striking the pose you see above.

I asked him about that while he was showing me stuff in his bedroom while Burt was talking with his parents in another room. Michael asked if I wanted to see the scar where the port was and he jumped up on his bed and ripped off his shirt. As soon as he pointed it out he started giving me the flex. I immediately started doing what I was there to do, capture an image of my subject that told readers what they need to know about him.

I had already made a few pictures in there beforehand so the manual settings on my cameras were set for the light in the room. All I had to do was grab the camera with the wider angle lens, focus and start making some frames. It didn't last long. I shot a handful of pictures and then Michael, with a near manic energy that you only get from a kid, was ready to show me something else cool in his room.

Soon we went back to join Burt and his parents and I immediately “confessed” to being in a shirtless boy's bedroom. His parents just laughed. I think they halfway expected that to happen. I'm glad it did, because that pose sums up who he is. He wasn't striking the pose to look brave or tough, he was just having fun and being himself. Fun, brave and tough.