Where did it all begin, this time around? Where do I start this story, on this timeline? The Tuesday morning that, after a year or so of therapy where I worked hard to accept that the good things in my life are here to stay, and I don't need to live in constant fear that they will be taken from me at a moment's notice, when I stepped in the shower and thought "you know what? I think I will start to reframe my thinking. I can't sustain a life where I am constantly waiting for disaster to strike"? The Tuesday when I received a message from my daughter's teacher that my 6 year old's stiff knee was causing her so much pain that she couldn't walk off the school bus and suddenly everything was not ok?
When I rushed her to walk-in hours at her pediatrician for those aches and intermittent fevers that had kept her out of school the week prior?
Do I begin with those fevers, vomiting and subsequent ER trip where we were told, after a flu swab, that she was just "sick"?
Do I start with her long, deer-like running stride in the back yard that had me convinced she was destined to become a stellar athlete, just the month before, an image I can't shake?
With the photo I took of her laying in the grass, dreamily contemplating a flower on a sunny late-fall afternoon, a week before our lives changed?
Or with her father's death, five years ago, from testicular cancer?
Does this story start when I got the "faint line is still a line" on the pregnancy test in 2012? The joy and, yes, surprise, when I realized I was going to have a second baby that I wasn't sure I was ready for?
If you have ever watched the television show The Good Place, you're familiar with the episode where Michael describes how time works in the afterlife, and that when displayed visually, it looks like the name "Jeremy Bearimy" in cursive English. I can't point to where this story begins, as it has always been happening, or coming, and, at this point, feels like it never wasn't. It's our own Jeremy Bearimy, with the dot over the "i" being at once Tuesdays, and also July. And sometimes it's never.
My kid has cancer.
When I rushed her to walk-in hours at her pediatrician for those aches and intermittent fevers that had kept her out of school the week prior?
Do I begin with those fevers, vomiting and subsequent ER trip where we were told, after a flu swab, that she was just "sick"?
Do I start with her long, deer-like running stride in the back yard that had me convinced she was destined to become a stellar athlete, just the month before, an image I can't shake?
With the photo I took of her laying in the grass, dreamily contemplating a flower on a sunny late-fall afternoon, a week before our lives changed?
Or with her father's death, five years ago, from testicular cancer?
Does this story start when I got the "faint line is still a line" on the pregnancy test in 2012? The joy and, yes, surprise, when I realized I was going to have a second baby that I wasn't sure I was ready for?
If you have ever watched the television show The Good Place, you're familiar with the episode where Michael describes how time works in the afterlife, and that when displayed visually, it looks like the name "Jeremy Bearimy" in cursive English. I can't point to where this story begins, as it has always been happening, or coming, and, at this point, feels like it never wasn't. It's our own Jeremy Bearimy, with the dot over the "i" being at once Tuesdays, and also July. And sometimes it's never.
My kid has cancer.
After I pulled her off the bus, after I took her to the doctor, to get blood work done, after the doctor called us with the troublesome results of her labs and told us to get to the nearest children's hospital, after we spent hours in the emergency room, just waiting to be told what I already knew in my heart, after finally being assigned a room on the seventh floor, with the same view that her father's ICU room had, after falling asleep fully clothed from my contact lenses down to my shoes, I woke up in a chair. The room was dark, I didn't know where I was, or how long I had been asleep, but my brain was so quick to remind me "your kid has cancer." Just that one, echoing sentence as I got my bearings and remembered where I was. Cancer. She's six.
The next morning we met her doctor and he broke the news, again. It felt like maybe the 3rd or 4th time someone had told me Leukemia. B-Cell A-L-L. I'll never forget the nurse staying with me as I sobbed-- we would be in the hospital for a month. Treatment would be at least 2.5 years. Any parent would break down with this news, I am sure they were familiar with the scene. What they couldn't know, mostly because I couldn't speak though the sobs, was that I was crying not only from worry about her life. I know now and I knew then that we were in good hands. They couldn't possibly know that we had just, only a month earlier, passed the 5th anniversary of her father's death. And that our toddler at home was the exact same age as Vivian was when both of her parents disappeared from her life: her mother for days at a time to be with dad, and eventually, her father was gone forever. At 18 months, both of my daughters were forced to stop nursing, were suddenly left without their mother's care, for untold amounts of time. What a cruel way to start a life. And what a cruel way to revisit the anniversary of what had, up until that very moment, been my life's most defining trauma.
The smell of almond coffee flavoring fills the lobby of that hospital. For five years, when I smelled almonds, my stomach turned and I began to feel panic. Now, I lived in that smell. The hospital that I couldn't escape fast enough in 2014 was now my temporary home while I watched the treatments that couldn't save my husband attempt to save my daughter. Who, I kept reminding The Universe, is six. She's six and we have already done this once. Not only have we already done this once, but, in the grand scheme of things, we did this just the other day.
Universe, I think you got our file mixed up with someone else's. We would like a hearing to challenge this finding. We object. Can we speak with the manager? Is there not some way out of this? Can you take me instead? Or...or or or, now hear me out...we just stop giving people cancer, like, at all. No more little babies or school aged kids. No more awkward teens and no more dads. Nobody's grandma and nobody's mom. No aunts, no uncles. No dogs, no cats. My Guinea Pig had it, for goodness sake. I mean, give it a rest.
The smell of almond coffee flavoring fills the lobby of that hospital. For five years, when I smelled almonds, my stomach turned and I began to feel panic. Now, I lived in that smell. The hospital that I couldn't escape fast enough in 2014 was now my temporary home while I watched the treatments that couldn't save my husband attempt to save my daughter. Who, I kept reminding The Universe, is six. She's six and we have already done this once. Not only have we already done this once, but, in the grand scheme of things, we did this just the other day.
Universe, I think you got our file mixed up with someone else's. We would like a hearing to challenge this finding. We object. Can we speak with the manager? Is there not some way out of this? Can you take me instead? Or...or or or, now hear me out...we just stop giving people cancer, like, at all. No more little babies or school aged kids. No more awkward teens and no more dads. Nobody's grandma and nobody's mom. No aunts, no uncles. No dogs, no cats. My Guinea Pig had it, for goodness sake. I mean, give it a rest.
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