The Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum is pals with a 10-year-old cancer survivor…

A few months ago, Jayson Tatum first made the acquaintance of Xavier Goncalves. Goncalves is fighting an uncommon kind of cancer. Tatum made the decision to pay Xavier, who is receiving treatment at Christopher’s Haven and is residing with his mother, Samantha Bowditch, a visit. After Sunday’s Game 7 victory, Tatum had Goncalves in the locker room as their connection flourished.GONCALVES FAMILY/COURTESY.

A basketball that had been in the TD Garden equipment room earlier in the day was turned into a memento on Sunday when Jayson Tatum used it to shoot 51 points in the Celtics’ Game 7 victory against the Philadelphia 76ers in their Eastern Conference semifinal. Tatum was given the ball by Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck later on, but the player realized it would mean more to someone else.

Ten-year-old Xavier Goncalves, who had three surgeries, 24 rounds of chemotherapy, and months of radiation therapy to remove a malignant tumor from his eye, was hanging out with Tatum during the post-game festivities.

Tatum has made friends with Goncalves for the past two months. Tatum has texted him back and forth, visited him at home, and extended invitations to games. It was therefore a simple decision to give Xavier the ball and include him in the celebrations in the locker room following Tatum’s best-ever performance.

Tatum observed, “I could tell he didn’t really know what to do.” “Man, you’re in the Garden with me,” I said. Anywhere is an option for you to go. Enter now.

A challenging diagnosis
Samantha Bowditch discovered her son Xavier’s drooping left eyelid towards the end of the previous summer. Most of the physicians who saw me indicated that the issue will go away on its own, but it didn’t. Samantha took Xavier to Boston Children’s Hospital in early November after noticing a little tumor in the corner of his eye. There, doctors diagnosed Xavier with rhabdomyosarcoma, a soft-tissue cancer that is common in young patients.

In actuality, the tumor beneath Xavier’s eyelid had spread into his nasal cavity from behind his eye. After the tumor was removed during his first operation, he had to travel 30 miles every week for treatment from his family’s Raynham home to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Then in February, he and his mother moved into an apartment at Christopher’s Haven, a house and community for young cancer patients and their families, and he began receiving radiation treatments every day at Massachusetts General Hospital. Since then, they have remained there.