That's Why I Don't Kiss 'Em On The Mouth

Jayne is back to doing his best Andy Dufresne act.  Armed only with his spoon called tenacity, he's more than ready to go back to climbing through the sewer pipe that is chemotherapy.  Morgan Freeman, surprisingly, will not be making an appearance, but he is going to read the audio book.  He is one chip in the concrete closer to busting out of this joint. 

When we got out of the clinic and into the hospital proper, we found that our new room might have actually appeared in an episode of "Orange is the New Black".  It was actually a transplant room, so every occupant would be wheelchair bound.  The bathroom was the size of some apartments I've been in.  But due to the gargantuan nature of the lavatory, there was very little room for much more, like a couch.  So, faced with the very real possibility of living in the hospital sleeping on the floor in our own blanket nests where we would keep the bits and bobbles we found along the way, our nurse decided that registration had made... an error.  While Jayne started his first round of chemo (thankfully it started well before the "Now we'll never get any sleep" threshold), the staff got another room, one appropriately furnished, ready for us.  In the time it took me to lug everything up from the van and Jayne to finish his injections and flushes, we were in our new room.  That's when we remembered that the floor was actually softer than the couch but by that time, we didn't want to be "those people" and let it be.

The little guy charmed his nurses and techs, as usual, and there was a bit of a furor over the return of the boy they call Jayne to the seventh floor.  We got several care packages, one from Child Life which included a new bouncer, a DVD player, a few new toys, and a very soft pirate blanket.  The other gift we got was from Child's Play which, if you aren't familiar with it, is a children's charity run and supported by gamers of all shapes and sizes.  Even though he was a bit young for it, the toddler game pad was a very cool gift, something I'm sure he will enjoy when we have to come back in the coming years for his unending follow-ups.

We also got a chance to talk to the AML doctor yesterday, focusing mainly on how he was progressing and what we could look forward to for this round.  One of the topics that came up, though, centered around the "after", that mythical period in time where Jayne will be, hopefully, cancer free and back on track to making our lives miserable joyous.  After chemo number four, we will have to come back to the clinic in Phoenix once a month for the first year.  If he's still reading clear then, it will slow down to once every three months, then six months, then, finally, once a year.  We can't really say just how long we are going to have to keep coming back, there is always a possibility that, like diarrhea, it could strike when we least suspect it.  I think that's the most difficult concept with cancer that people have coming to terms with.  It isn't like getting a disease or a virus; cancer is not an invading force, it is an insurgent effort, with the leukemia thinking it has cell's rights despite the fact that is, in fact, part of a larger organism that ultimately sets the guidelines and makes everything work together.  That doesn't mean that he will be permanently sequestered to hospital rooms for the rest of his young life.  If everything goes well, he won't have to see the inside of another hospital room until the day his first born arrives (which isn't even a certainty there).  There isn't much more that we can do in that regard other than just being his parents and raising him as best we can to be a decent person who won't use the fact that he had cancer as a baby to guilt others into doing what he wants.  

I cannot guarantee the last.