Cancer Teen Getting Better, But Angry About Chemo

June 23, 2009 -- Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with cancer who fled Minnesota last month to avoid chemotherapy, is now responding to treatment and his tumor is shrinking.

Still, he said he is angry that a judge ruled he must continue getting the treatment.

He said the chemotherapy gives him headaches and makes him dizzy, according to The Associated Press. The reason he's gotten better, he said, is the alternative treatments he has tried.

His mother Colleen, who accompanied her son on his week-long run from the law, admitted that something is working but she won't give the credit to chemotherapy, either.

She said it was the boy's decision to flee the family's Minnesota farm last month when a judge ordered him back into chemotherapy.

Hauser has not been charged with disappearing with her son, saying she had no choice but to go with him.

"Danny was going to run away, then what do I have?" Hauser said. "I mean he was going to run, and that just broke my heart. I can't have a kid, one of my children, run away from something they should face head on."

Doctors had told Daniel that the cancerous tumor growing in his chest that is likely to kill him if he did not receive additional chemotherapy, but his family has long said it prefers natural healing methods.

The family is Roman Catholic and believes in the do no harm philosophy of a Missouri-based religious group called the Nemenhah Band,which believes in natural healing.

Hauser said in previous interviews that Daniel's initial round of chemotherapy had horrifying and painful side effects.

"He literally couldn't drink," Colleen Hauser said. "You literally couldn't even see his teeth; it was engulfed in his gums. "