By Beth Jett and photojournalist Carrie Kohlmeier, FOX 21 News

SAGINAW - This week one year ago, a young Northland teenager who'd just won a 10-year battle with leukemia learned he had a brain tumor.

Several months after that, Fox 21 sat down with Alex Blom of Saginaw and his family to talk about his new battle and how they were coping.  It became a story of quiet strength and teaching moments for the medical staff who treated him.

"I'm doing pretty well," Alex said on a cold day in March.  "Hopefully, it's almost over."

That day, Alex offered warm words of advice as he battled a brain tumor.  The 14-year-old was right in the middle of a fight for life, and determined not to let it get to him.

"Try to think about other things and what's more important in life than just that," Alex said.

"He's one of the happiest kids I know," said Nanette Blom, Alex's mother.

She leaned over his shoulder as he sat at a computer.  "You've got 1,329 messages."

Alex was reading messages from friends and strangers around the world who signed the guestbook of his caringbridge website.

"Hi Alex," Alex read from one message. "Just wanted to say i'm happy to hear that you got good news on the MRI yesterday."

Alex was no stranger to cancer, and not a victim.

"I beat it, the first cancer, and this came back and then I got cancer again," Alex explained.  "And so that made me kinda angry."  It made his mother angry too.

"He had been through so much as a little kid," she said as she shook her head. 

She said at age 2 ½, doctors diagnosed her youngest child of three with the most common form of cancer children get, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic treated him, which included two rounds of cranial radiation, aimed at his brain.

"At age 13, [he] was pronounced cured of cancer," said Nanette. 

Then within the next few weeks, while on a family vacation, Alex started getting headaches. 

"Got really painful," Alex recalled.  "There was a time that I couldn't stand it anymore and started to throw up."

Doctors in Duluth immediately referred Alex to the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. He went under the care of Dr. Christopher Moertel, clinical director of the University's Pediatric Brain Tumor Program.

"He came in with definite symptoms that told us that he had a brain tumor," said Moertel.  "A very malignant, very bad acting tumor." 

Moertel said leukemia can come back in a different form and commonly does around the brain and spinal cord. 

But, he and his staff had a plan to treat Alex.  They used a fairly new procedure called Blood Brain Barrier Disruption.  In short, surgeons penetrate the protective fluid that surrounds the brain, then they send in cancer drugs to kill the tumor. 

However, cancer cells are smart.

"Even if the cancer drugs get in, they can pump them right back out and they can develop a number of mechanisms to develop resistance," Moertel said. 

For Alex, the treatment worked, with some complications.  Within seven months after finding the tumor, Alex underwent four brain surgeries, showing promising results against the tumor.

"We managed to keep it under control and then shrink it to a point where he was nearly disease free," said Moertel.

"He's a fighter," said Nanette.  "He's a soldier and he doesn't let a lot get him down.  Attitude is such a major thing when you're fighting cancer." 

Already, Alex was teaching people around him, including his older sister Erin, with his determination.

"I'd like to have more of the fighting qualities Alex does," said Erin Blom.

Fox 21 asked Alex, "What keeps you strong?" 

"Just the day that when I can get up and keep doing what I do and stuff," he answered.

Moertel monitored Alex, studied the MRIs taken, and drew comfort from him and his family. 

"If I was having a hard day somewhere else, I'd run up to Alex's room, just to hang out with the family," he said.

The MRIs showed the treatment working so well that around Feb. 4, Alex was nearly cancer free. But before the family had a chance to celebrate, doctors noticed something very terrible on another MRI.

"All of a sudden the tumor came back on the other side of his brain," said Moertel, looking at an MRI of Alex's brain.  "And it's acting just the way it did when it first developed, growing very quickly."

On May 8, Alex's fight came to an end peacefully at a hospice house in Duluth. But his spirit would live on through the lessons he taught his family and the medical staff.

"It was hard to comprehend that he was gone," Nanette said, tearfully.  "I'm probably never gonna get over losing him. It hurts."

"There's lots of people out there that take their lives for granted and it's just not fair," said Erin.

Meanwhile, Moertel is grateful to Alex because of the procedures he endured, allowing doctors to learn and become even better prepared to help other children stricken with re-occuring cancer.

"By participating in the Blood Brain Barrier Disruption Program, we've again learned about what we can do technically on one side, but what else we need to do to complement our therapy to have greater effect," he explained.  "Anybody can push a drug in a catheter. It's learning to manage the whole thing that is the great gift." 

Moertel said Alex's case is also more evidence of the dangerous after-affects of cranial radiation, which doctors now try to avoid when treating children. 

But he and Alex's mother agree, perhaps the most meaningful lesson Alex taught was how to handle challenges.

"He knew what he had was serious, but he was the eternal optimist," said Nanette.  "He taught all of us how to live with dignity and grace and live life to the fullest."

"To watch Alex in his quiet resolve, his quiet strength.  That's something a lot of us need to learn," said Moertel.  "That we can be strong and resolved and be quiet about it."

Alex put it this way:  "I'd say try to beat it and get it over with and get back to your normal life and don't let it screw you up.

On May 11, Nanette posted the heartbreaking news on Alex's Caringbridge Web site, signing it, "Cancer, you did not win."

"He never complained and that's a victory," she said.  "It never got his spirit and so it didn't win."

Nanette discovered one more thing she wanted to share with other parents:  unlike what is portrayed in television and movies, the medical staff never told her they could no longer treat her son.

They left it up to her and her family to decide how long to continue the treatment. 

She said it was an agonizing decision they made with respect to Alex's quality of life. They find comfort now in knowing he is no longer suffering.