It’s #GivingTuesday !! Please consider donating to @TheJimmyFund and @BostonChildrens to help guys like Hudson 🙌🏼☺️
Nate Solder is the left tackle for the New England Patriots. While he spends time on the field protecting Tom Brady, he spends his time off the field with his family: his wife, Lexi Allen, and their two children, daughter, Charlie, 8 months, and son, Hudson, 2.
The whole Solder family will be in Minnesota today to watch Solder and the Patriots take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LII, but they won’t all be watching from the stadium. Hudson is undergoing chemotherapy treatments and will have to watch the game from a hotel room because he is too susceptible to germs and other contaminants. Lexi’s parents are going to be with him for the day.
“I don’t know how that’s going to go over,” Solder told the media in Minnesota last week, laughing.
Hudson was diagnosed with kidney cancer when he was just 3 months old. He underwent chemotherapy treatments when he was just a few months old, and his doctors saw some improvement. Although Hudson was closely monitored, his doctors decided to remove his port — a plastic or metal disc placed just under the skin in a patient’s chest that fits a needle to administer chemotherapy medicines or draw blood — because his tumors stopped growing.
A full year with good news had passed, but the Solders received some heartbreaking news this past October.
“[The tumor] wasn’t growing, wasn’t growing, wasn’t growing — boom, it started growing again, so they had to reinsert the port, start chemotherapy again, and that’s where we’re at now,” Solder told the media last week. “They brought us over to a private room. I felt kind of numb to it, I didn’t know how to feel until a doctor kind of had a tear in her eye. And I was like, ‘Man, that means we’re starting this all over. That means that he’s at risk for so many different things again. I tried to keep my cool, but I think when I started telling some of our coaches, I lost my cool a little bit, I broke down in front of them. They said if I ever need to take time that they would allow it, that they would not only allow it but support it,” Solder added.
On Nate Solder’s off days from practice at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, he and his wife take Hudson for chemotherapy. “Tuesdays are chemo days,” according to Sports Illustrated. He told the press that Hudson’s next chemo session will take place on Tuesday, February 6, just two days after the Super Bowl.
As far as a prognosis for Hudson, Solder admits that he isn’t sure what’s going to happen.
“It’s all based on statistics and there’s not a lot of statistics because he is in a category of maybe like 20 kids. But they think like when he’s 5 years old his risk goes down and when he’s 7 years old it goes down again, based on other kids. It’s difficult because there’s multiple tumors throughout each kidney, so you can’t remove one or take out a kidney because there would still be more left,” he explained.
“He is a hero,” Solder added.
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