Let me preface this by saying: everyone involved is now fine and healthy.
Please refer back to
this phrase in case you feel yourself freaking out at some point in this post. I freaked out just writing it, and needed this reminder.
Now then...
My eldest child
developed a strange and persistent lump of skin that didn't respond
to any sort of topical treatments. The lump was dubbed “It,” and It had
to go. So last summer during school break, we had It removed. As a
parent, it's disconcerting to hear your child's doctors essentially
throw up their hands and say “we don't know what this is, but It
should come off.” So, there was a minor bit of outpatient surgery that left
us with you-babble-while-anesthetized stories that
will serve us for years. Off went the excised part of my child for
a biopsy, and home came my child, bandaged, sutured, and drugged, and glad to be rid of It at last.
Until the phone
call.
Suddenly we're
getting a call from the lab, the technician reading off the very long
medical name for It, which sounded like blah blah blah
lymphoma blah blah blah,
followed by phrases like “pediatric oncologist” and “radiation
treatments” and “start immediately.”
It turns out that cancer
is a wonderfully clarifying disease. You
are either the type of person to fall apart, or the type of person to
get into ass-kicking mode. I'm pleased to say that I married the
latter.
My
wife drove from school to daily
radiation treatments, with the other children in tow. We'd meet up at
the end of the day: child-in-question exhausted from the radioactive
assault, other children exhausted from the daily trips through San
Francisco Bay Area rush hour traffic, my wife exhausted from driving
and worry, and me exhausted by
association. August, September, October... these months are blurs.
Somehow, my child managed to keep it together, managed to stay strong
enough through the treatments to stay awake at school, managed to
keep spirits up despite missing sport practices and not having the
energy to make it past 9:30 at night.
Somehow,
it all worked out, and everyone involved is now fine and healthy. The
lump was benign and rare, treatable with excellent recovery odds.
“If you must get cancer,” said the oncologist, “this is the one
you want.” Yay?
My
heart goes out to parents of patients dealing with worse incarnations
of this disease. We got off lucky. Oh sure, there's now
qualifications. A six-month oncology followup soon, and lifetime annual
checkups with a dermatologist. Watching the sun exposure, especially
on the site of the surgery and treatments. And parents remembering
what matters, and refocusing.
Eldest is on the cusp of adulthood: just celebrating a major birthday,
learning to drive, even thinking about life beyond high school.
Around midsummer last year, my wife and I were sufficiently
Freaked Out about any and all of these, because
“Motivated” is not a term we would have applied to this child. We
have not yet seen one leave the nest, and
I'm always afraid that we're somehow screwing it all up.
There are plenty of things to worry about when that first child is
ready to stretch their wings.
I hope, for all of your sakes, that you handle it better than we
were.
Post-op, these things don't seem to matter as much. There's
still the
usual background-level worry that every parent has for their
children, and we always reserve the right to Third Degree when the situation
arises: we were teenagers once, too. (“Who is going to be at this
party? Where is it? Who's driving? How are you getting home? Do you
have your phone? Call us any
time.”) But now we're
fretting less about grades, less about future plans... fretting less
about a lot of things, in fact. It's a good feeling, the non-fret.
I'm
generally anti-New-Year's-Resolution, but I did privately agree with
myself to try to be more
easygoing in general at work, at home... at life. Smile a bit more.
Agree a bit more. Stress a bit less. Stress a lot less, because my
capacity for stressing out has been both increased and drained by
last year's activities. Also: take regular vacation days, simplify
whenever possible, spend less money, read more library books. Maybe,
like most resolutions, these will fade away in the months to come.
This blog is littered with a thousand good intentions and
projects-started, after all. I'm no stranger to a lack of focus.
So
that's kind of where I am right now, and where we are, and a sort-of
explanation for why the extended silence here. After getting through
the holidays, and getting the official “OK” from the oncologist,
we have also been able to stop, and breathe, and look at each other
and realize: that completely sucked, and we don't ever want to do
that again. On a day devoted to love, we are taking it. Appreciating
what we have, what we did, and that where we go in life is not always
where we planned it. Thanks, cancer! You sucked, and don't darken our
doorstep ever again.
* * *
One administrative note: I'm turning off comments for this post, not because I don't like my three regular readers, but because we're still suffering a bit from empathy fatigue. We generally didn't say anything to anyone until after the treatments ended, and as such, extended friends and family didn't hear about it until we put a very condensed version of this story into our annual snarky-and-weird holiday newsletter. You could pretty much track the US Postal Service's efficiency by the phone calls we received as our cards made it across the country and the recipients went "OH MY GOSH CANCER" and then called to comfort us. Our response to all: "It's fine, we're all fine, treatments were done in October. Relax."
- Say this aloud: "It's fine, we're all fine, treatments were done in October. Relax."
- Consider donating to a reputable anti-cancer charity and help kick this stupid disease's ass.
- Hopefully nobody is on the fence about this, but please vaccinate yourself and your children. I can now officially say that I was the parent of a temporarily immunocompromised child, and we had to contend with endless hand-washing, carrying around alcohol gel, and worrying about colds rocketing around my child's school. Now measles -- freaking measles! -- is in the Bay Area. Please keep the population safe and get your kids their shots.
- If you have kids, hug them, and if you have a significant other who has shown amazing strength, courage, and keeping-it-together-in-the-face-of-insanity, please hug them more. And if you have neither, please hug a nurse, oncologist, or radiologist (with permission.) Double hugs for the pediatric variety. Hugs for everybody.
