Jets welcome 5-year-old Morris Plains cancer survivor

EAST RUTHERFORD – Neal Spickert-Fulton didn't say much as he walked through the tunnel into MetLife Stadium. But his blue eyes grew larger with every hesitant step.

As the 5-year-old looked around at the nearly empty seats stretching up toward the bright blue sky, sometimes he grabbed for one of his parents' hands. Neal and his family – parents Sharon and Shawn Spickert-Fulton and grandmother Loraine Bray – watched the Jets and Atlanta Falcons warm up for Friday night's preseason NFL game from the sideline.

Just 43 inches tall and 44 pounds, Neal perched on the edge of a wheelchair waving his arms, "I got it, I got it" as the Jets receivers ran through pre-game drills.

His conclusion about the players he'd previously only watched on TV with his mom? "They're big. Very big. Big, big. They're about 10 feet tall."

Already a cancer survivor, Neal was given a "Dream Day" by the Jets and SNY, part of the TV network's "Play Ball" community-outreach program.

He was greeted just inside the MetLife Stadium gates with a gift bag, including a Jets-logo flag, which he waved while giving the now-familiar "J-E-T-S, Jets! Jets! Jets!" chant. On a shopping spree at the team store, Neal picked out wide receiver Eric Decker's No. 87 jersey – because his favorite player, defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson, didn't have any available in his size – a T-shirt and hat and oversized duck bank.

Family, faith and football

Neal had been diagnosed with a cantaloupe-sized neuroblastoma on Aug. 6, 2013, not long after his third birthday. He had recurring belly pain, which was originally believed to just be gas. However, a gastroenterologist at Morristown Medical Center sent him for an MRI which revealed the tumor.

Chemotherapy started four days later, the beginning of 19 months of treatment in Morristown and at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Neal had six rounds of chemo, and surgery to resect the tumor which had grown around his kidney and aorta and crossed over his spinal column. He had a stem-cell transplant at CHOP, and spent about a month in the hospital, then 20 days of outpatient proton radiation therapy.

Words like "neuroblastoma" and "cancer" don't mean anything to Neal, so his parents explained he has "a booboo in his belly, and the doctors will make it better." When Neal got a port implanted, that was dubbed his "tubey," and he got medicine through the tubeys. Anesthesia was "sleepy tubey medicine," and Neal soon became proficient at giving it to himself.

He would tell the anesthesiologist, "I'm going to help you out today" and push the medicine into his own port. As it kicked in, Neal would say, "Whoa, What's shakin?"

He had clean PET scans and MRIs in January and March. His June MRI was clear, but the PET scan lit up with what the family believed was just a virus. His next scan is in September, but first he will start kindergarten at Littleton School in Parsippany.

"When he'd come by, he had no hair and he was losing weight, but the kids looked past that with him and just took Neal for Neal," said Jen Ward, a pre-kindergarten teacher at Carousel of Learning in Parsippany, whose daughter Samantha is Neal's best friend.

"When he came back in September, they just picked up right where they left off. … He's exactly who he used to be. He's a lighthearted, lovely little kid you just love to be around. You'd never believe he's gone through everything he did."

Neal was selected for the Dream Day by social workers at the Valerie Fund Children's Center at Goryeb Children's Hospital in Morristown. They remembered how he spent so much treatment time in a hand-me-down Jets jersey – Brett Favre's No. 4 – and a diaper, a sippy cup of water in hand. A post-chemo growth spurt caused that Favre jersey to shrink down to a midriff, so Neal got a Jets T-shirt where his head tops a cartoon body.

That's what Neal wore, along with Batman sneakers with light-up soles, when he arrived at MetLife Stadium on Friday.

"This is really amazing," said Sharon Spickert-Fulton, an attorney and law clerk for a federal judge, in a Darrelle Revis T-shirt and green-painted fingernails.

"To see him well enough to be here, two years ago is something I would not have thought possible."

Game time

Watching the game from the Coaches' Club, Neal said his favorite moment was "When the fireworks went off, and everyone said, 'J-E-T-S! Jets! Jets! Jets!' They went 'boom!' all at once."

After a few anxious moments, the Jets came from behind to defeat Atlanta, 30-22, on Friday night. About a dozen Jets players stopped to sign autographs for the small boy twisting himself pretzel-like in his wheelchair outside their locker room, including massive tackle D'Brickashaw Ferguson, long snapper Tanner Perdum and fullback Tommy Bohanon. Even Sharon Spickert-Fulton, who confessed "I watch these guys Sundays, Thursdays, Mondays, and now Friday," didn't seem to recognize the Jets without their uniforms. But when Decker introduced himself and asked for the football, Neal excitedly responded, "I think that's me!"

He also showed off his J-E-T-S cheer for the players.

"To see him light up, that's always been my highlight," said Shawn Spickert-Fulton, a research analyst at Picatinny Arsenal. "Places come and go, but the heart shows up in the eyes of a little boy sometimes. … There are no words to really describe something like this. It's surreal."

Staff Writer Jane Havsy: 973-428-6682; jhavsy@gannettnj.com; www.dailyrecord.com/writerjane/