Today is the last day of comparative normalcy for the next six or so months. In the morning, Jayne starts his chemotherapy treatments. It's the first step, a necessary step which will bring us to the eventual closure of this chapter in all of our lives. Over the next six months, I will watch my son go through some fairly difficult and painful experiences, from nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, sores around the mouth, flu symptoms, fatigue, the list goes on and on. It's at this tipping point, before the iceberg has floated to the top of the ocean to display all that has been hidden beneath the veneer of time not yet passed, that I think about what it was like a week ago. When Jayne was just another baby boy learning how to roll over from his back to his stomach (he wasn't very good at it. Let's be frank, he was rubbish up to this point). He was, as so many want to try and reiterate, a very healthy happy baby.
Except that he wasn't.
That seems to be the most difficult struggle of all. Admitting that a child is sick when you don't have any outward indication of such a malady. It's the denial and anger phase, I believe, balled into one. "What, sick? Not my kid. How could my kid be sick, look at him!" Well, appearances aren't everything. The Titanic sank, the Challenger spacecraft was fundamentally flawed, and the Star War prequels were just awful, awful movies. It is at this point that every parent, or at least I see it this way, has a choice: You can deny the claims that your doctor and all of the staff, equipment, experience, education, and technology behind him are telling you about your child or you can look at the facade that genetics has put upon your child, that of a healthy, happy tiny person. To do the latter is not only delusional, it's detrimental to the entire healing process. Not healing in the guru burning herbs and listening to Ravi Shankar sense, but the actual, medical act of curing and healing whatever ailments afflict the aforementioned tiny child. Courage, as they say, is not the absence of fear. And in that sense, embracing the reality of the situation is the only way to begin helping your child. That is what I chose to do, I chose to embrace it, I chose to trust in the science and to be strong for my wife and my son.
It's really the only recourse, as I see it.
It was never an option to give in, not for a second. It was never an option to let despair take me, not even a bit. I had to be the father that Jayne deserves and so I through my weight behind him and I've been there ever since. I've been there for both of them in their times of need because while hope that everything will be fine and dandy by merely thinking it is a very attractive idea to many people for many different reasons, I needed to do, even if that doing appeared to be no more than just to be constant in my resolve and to catch others as they fall.
I know that Jayne is sick and I know that it could potentially be very serious. But I also know that he will make it through this with a couple of scars he can use later in life and a vast wealth of people who took time out of their lives to express their love and support for him. That will never leave him, even years down the road. Every single person invested in this venture will remember the time they stood with Jayne Wood as he fought for his life. This is slowly turning into the St. Crispin's speech, I realize as much, but I do think that it is true and I hold onto that truth, just as much as I hold on to that truth that I will see Jayne ride a bike for the first time, that I'll be able to teach him how properly fabricate a whole chicken in under a minute, that I'll see him be a father one day and that because of measures I took and measures he inspired others to take, maybe calamities such as these will be a thing unheard of when he holds little Max Jr for the first time.
So thank you all, each and everyone of you, for everything you have done for my little guy. And in the morning or in the afternoon, spare a thought, no more than that really, for the boy they call Jayne, the boy with the goods, and I will call that a win.
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