Parting of a ‘White Cloud’ Ends Suffering of Boy, 11

David Junghans, an 11-year-old cancer patient who gained attention for his unusual last wish, quietly drifted away early Monday, dying as his mother lay at his side touching his hair and the rest of his family surrounded his hospital bed in prayer.

The Huntington Beach boy had fought for one year, five months and 24 days against a rare tumor in his brain. Ultimately, what killed him was a blood clot that had formed in his leg, said his mother, Susan. The distinction is important, she said: “The tumor did not win.”

The Times wrote about David’s dying wish in June 1999, when he was given only a few days to live. His last request was to watch his doctor perform brain surgery to help somebody else live. Surgery was impossible for David because doctors were unable to reach the cancer in his head.

Shortly after he died on the fourth floor of Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange, the same hospital where he watched his doctor perform surgery, his family called his death a blessing, the merciful passing of a child who had suffered enough.

A funeral was being planned for later in the week, but final arrangements were pending Monday, family members said.

Although the tumor’s strength had wavered between vicious and dormant since David’s diagnosis April 15, 1999, his condition and outward appearance had steadily worsened. Eventually, he was confined to a sofa, unable to move without help, or speak, family members said. On Sunday, a blood clot reached his brain and he fell into a coma.

“It’s a blessing he didn’t live until the tumor could finally take him,” said Susan Junghans, who had spent 1 1/2 years watching her son deteriorate, searching the Internet for answers as David slept, and, at every chance, flying across the country visiting doctors on the slimmest of hopes.

The clot formed because of complications from various medications, his mother said. But it meant that “The White Cloud,” as David’s relatives called the tumor because of how it looked on X-rays, never took over entirely.

David, a freckled young man with butternut-brown hair and dreams of being a doctor, was extraordinarily strong, doctors said. That, in part, explains why he lived long past the expectations of experts and textbooks. One in 10,000 people gets the sort of tumor David had: anaplastic astrocytoma of the brain stem. Experts say only half of those diagnosed with it live for six months and hardly anyone survives more than nine months. It is impossible to cure.

When David was diagnosed, doctors and his friends and family marveled at his final request, one that pointed to such an adult acceptance of reality, and at his ability to be so spry in mind: David was a fierce and accomplished Monopoly player and, even in what appeared to be his final days last year, insisted on playing.

On Saturday, he still was a marvel.

He looked like “he [had] one foot in the grave,” Susan Junghans said. But he played a full game of Monopoly that night with his family. And in small ways, just before he fell into a coma, he somehow looked better than when he was first diagnosed, relatives said.

Not long after winning that last game of Monopoly, he began to fade, dying at 12:20 a.m. Monday.

But so did the white cloud.