An 11-year battle

Merrick family fighting cancer starts super-food business

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Four-year-old Nash Luker sat at his kitchen table, playing with a couple of toy steam engines. Asked what he likes about them during an interview with the Herald, he said, “The pistons, because they keep the wheels moving.”

One year ago, Nash first saw his photo featured on Speedway gas station posters across the tri-state area as an ambassador for the Children’s Miracle Network. Three and a half years before that, he had been born with an oblong tumor on his right side and diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, or RMS, a form of childhood cancer.

Nash’s story starts with his father, Seth, who has been actively fighting colon cancer for 11 years.


“I could show you a history of Seth, and you would see a person who — at one point in my life, I really couldn’t fend for myself,” Seth said, recalling when he was first diagnosed. At the time he worked in music management, and toured with the bands he sponsored. He lived on the road, ate whatever fast food was available and ingested harmful substances with little regard for his health.

“I was making such bad choices,” he said. “I didn’t have the information, and I didn’t know how to believe in myself.” He knew his perspective had to change if he ever wanted to get better.

“The doctors didn’t give him a great chance of survival, and he told me, ‘If you want to leave, you can,’” said Seth’s wife, Allison, whom he was dating at the time, after they met at a bar in Nashville. “I told him, ‘No way,’ and asked him to marry me.”

Seth and Allison moved to Bellmore and started to search for ways to improve his health and alleviate the harmful effects of his cancer. In the early 2000s, a spike in the popularity of healthy eating and organic ingredients was known as the “superfood revolution.”

Seth began to travel with bottles of goji berry pills, yerba mate powder, cocoa beans and other supplements. “I believed I could create something that tasted really good that had all of these in it,” he said. “You take chocolate and banana and you could add a lot of stuff to it without hindering that taste.”

He was inspired to fight his cancer in a new way. He created a shake blend called Rockin’ Wellness, and wrote about his business venture, and his illness, in a blog. According to Seth, this was the first time in a while that he had felt real confidence in himself.

Standing in a hurricane

In 2012, Nash was born with the lump on his right side. “We got 30 seconds of peace together, and then they whisked him away,” Allison said, recalling the MRIs, surgery and 42 weeks of chemotherapy their son endured at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park after his diagnosis.

At the same time, Hurricane Sandy slammed Long Island, and the Lukers lost their home in Bellmore. Seth said that at times, Allison seemed to lose almost all hope, but he refused to let that happen. “Usually it’s when you’re in the midst of a hurricane that you have to be the most calm and still,” he said.

During Nash’s chemotherapy, the couple stayed at the Ronald McDonald House next door to the hospital. Toward the end of his treatment, Seth started to feed Nash his Rockin’ Wellness shakes. He would mix them with peas, quinoa and other organic, healthy foods.

“I’d come to the hospital with something that was orange or lime-green,” he recounted, “and the doctors would be like, ‘What’s in his bottle today?’”

Within weeks, the doctors started to see vast improvement in Nash. He stopped reacting negatively to his chemotherapy, gained weight and appeared healthier. His doctors asked the Lukers what they were doing.

“We told them we were feeding him right,” Allison said.

Miracle poster boy

The Children’s Miracle Network contacted the Lukers when Nash was 3 because they wanted to share his story. They had him photographed for a poster to be featured at Speedway stations. The two companies collaborate on fundraisers like the Speedway Miracle Tournament, an annual golf outing that will celebrate its 25th anniversary in June.

Nash’s poster encouraged the public to get involved, and help the Children’s Miracle Network save lives like they helped save his, the Lukers said. That same year, Nash appeared on Nash FM, a metropolitan area country station, for a radiothon to raise funds for cancer research.

Seth continues to fight his cancer, and encourages those engaged in similar battles to find the will to overcome and eat the right food. “You don’t know what adjustments and paths you’ll have to take along the way, and trust me, I’ve had to make some really wide left turns,” he said, recalling the fear he and Allison faced while treating Nash. “Every time I looked into his eyes, I saw a little boy that was full of life. I could think nothing else but that everything was OK.”