No need to fear.

That loud, extended howling you heard from west of here this past Monday was no wild animal. It was just Spencer Wilson, a wild 14-year-old kid from High Point who had just completed his 14th – and final – round of chemotherapy at Brenner Children’s Hospital in Winston-Salem.

After seven months of cancer, chemo, nausea, fatigue, mouth sores, shortness of breath, finger pricks, injections, blood transfusions and extended hospital stays, Spencer was ready to put a period – no, an exclamation point – at the end of the most challenging chapter of his young life. He did so with a celebratory wolf howl – numerous howls, actually – much to the amusement of his family and hospital personnel.

“I think we need to call animal control,” a nurse joked, but there was no controlling Spencer on this day.

“He was like a little kid on Christmas morning,” says Spencer’s mom, Jodie. “He just couldn’t contain his excitement. He said, ‘I’m never coming back – this is it!’ He just has this glow about him. He said, ‘Mom, I feel like it’s the first day of summer break.’ It’s like he’s got this new freedom.”

The truth is, Spencer will undergo a battery of scans in a few weeks to make sure his body is clean of the cancer that was diagnosed last August. Previous scans, however, showed the Ewing’s sarcoma in Spencer’s left leg had shrunk, suggesting the chemo treatments have been, well, a howling success.

“They’ve been really pleased with his courage and determination through all of this,” says Spencer’s dad, Billy. “His doctor said it’s the first time he could remember of a patient being on schedule for the whole process. In other words, Spencer never got sick enough to where he had to delay a treatment.”

The Wilsons were impressed with something else – the rapid, cancer-induced maturation of their son from an ordinary 13-year-old kid seven months ago to a young man who learned to put his faith in his God more than his doctors.

“I think he’s really seen how God has worked through him,” Billy says. “A lot of people have said, ‘Man, Spence, you’re so courageous and strong,’ but it’s not Spencer – it’s God working through Spencer and giving him strength, and he realizes that.”

Jodie says her son has developed a sense of compassion for others – borne of his many days at Brenner, where he saw children with pain much worse than his own – and an appreciation for people that he might’ve taken for granted before his cancer journey.

“It’s hard to put in words all the different things God has taught Spence,” she says, “but he definitely appreciates relationships now in a way that a 14-year-old normally doesn’t appreciate relationships.”

Jodie goes a step further in her assessment of the journey Spencer and the family have been on – she says she wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“These last seven months, God has taken our world apart, reorganized it and is putting it back together again,” she wrote in an online journal. “Our lives will never be the same. I would never trade these last seven months; we have experienced the sweetness of God in ways we never would have.”

As for Spencer, he’s ready to get back in shape and start playing basketball again. Ready for the cruise his family will take in June, courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Ready to hang out with his friends again – something he couldn’t do much of while he was in treatment. Ready to go back to school.

Ready to be a kid again.

And yet, ask Spencer how he’s changed the past seven months, and the kid doesn’t answer. The young man does.

“I think I’ve gotten a lot more mature through this, because I’ve suffered and had to rely on God,” he says. “I’ve grown a lot stronger in my faith.”

Of course, if you ask Spencer to howl for you – like he did the day his chemo ended – he’s back to being a kid again, howling for all he’s worth.

So the next time you hear those howls coming from the direction of Brenner – say, for example, when Spencer goes back for his scans and hopefully gets a clean bill of health – know that it’s just Spencer the kid celebrating. There’s no need to fear.

And as far as Spencer the young man is concerned, there never was.