What the
Bar Mitzvah
Boy Really
Learned Ben Ross
BY MELISSA JACOBS
Ben Ross doesn’t
believe in God.

He doesn’t like
the violence in
the Bible, nor
does he think that its stories ac-
tually happened. And if God really
is the Almighty, how can Ben ex-
plain what happened to his father?
In September 2014, Dr. Michael Ross
was diagnosed with Stage IV of a rare kind
of colon cancer. “Michael’s case was so off-the-
books that we didn’t have a standard of care to
follow,” explains his oncologist, Dr. Ursina Teitelbaum
of Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center. Five-year
survival rates for colon cancer hover at around 6 percent. So
at about the same time that Ben started studying for his Bar Mitzvah,
his father started fighting for his life.

It’s a good life. Michael is a sports medicine physician and the
founder and director of the Rothman Institute’s Performance Lab.

He designed the lab to improve athletes’ performances by diagnosing
and treating their often-unseen physical obstacles. His wife is Dr.

Wendy Ross, an autism expert and the founder of Autism Inclusion
Resources. Wendy believes that, with the proper support, people
with autism can visit museums, attend sporting events and travel
on airplanes without becoming overwhelmed and agitated. For her
work, she was nominated as a 2014 CNN Hero.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the Rosses were public about
Michael’s diagnosis and treatment, chronicling it on Facebook and
in the media. Their goals were to increase awareness about colon
cancer and raise money for research for cures. The Rosses are can-
B 16
MARCH 31, 2016
do people who, when faced with cancer, were determined to kick
its tush.

But the disease was a formidable opponent. It eluded imaging,
playing a lethal form of peek-a-boo as it hid in the tunnels of
Michael’s intestines. “It’s hard to fight what you can’t see, let alone
excise,” Teitelbaum says. Following her advice and that of Dr.

Daniel Labow, chief of surgical oncology at Mount Sinai Hospital
in New York, Michael decided to have cutting-edge surgery and
hot chemo, a new and nasty-sounding treatment that pumps the
medication directly into his abdominal cavity. It worked. Michael’s
status is now NED: There is no evidence of disease in his body.

The cancer is gone.

So, it was time to party. Two weeks before Ben’s March 5 Bar
Mitzvah at Congregation Beth Am Israel, the Rosses sat at the
kitchen table in their Wynnewood home to discuss the father-son
celebration. As his mitzvah project, Ben created websites that raised
more than $7,000 for Teitelbaum and Labow’s discretionary funds.

The Rosses also raised money by selling blue T-shirts with yellow
semi-colons that reference Michael’s now partial (or semi) colon.

Michael thinks the T-shirts are not only empowering, but hysterical.

There’s a saying that God has a strange sense of humor, and if that’s
true, God would love the Rosses. “When life gives you cancer, you
make cancer jokes,” Michael says. He’s full of them, and Ben slings
zinger after zinger. Wendy mostly rolls her eyes and sighs, clearly
having given up on censoring her husband or son.

This is what everyone says about the Rosses: that their unflagging
optimism and infectious positivity is not only admirable, but down-
right heroic. Teitelbaum, a mother of three, says that Ben is a role
model for other kids whose parents are going through illnesses.

Labow even wrote Ben a letter bursting with praise.

Ben scoffs at the idea that he’s the poster boy for parents with
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