The past few days have been quite eventful indeed. Not only has wee baby Jayne been crawling around the entire hospital room roaring like a dinosaur and smashing cookies into his play mat, but he's also had three dressing changes in five days, two of which were "emergency", he pulled out his IV tubes (not the actual broviacs, so it wasn't as bad as it sounds) twice yesterday, even managing to get the aforementioned cooked jammed into one, and has been generally terrorizing his mother at night when he should be sleeping. On the positive side, his ANC has been climbing rather quickly over these hectic days, culminating in the news we got today that he hit 260 this morning. This was rather exciting since the last time we were discharged from the hospital, we had been given the pity vote to let him leave when he topped 200, since we had been in the room for so long, waiting for his ANC to recover. This time around was fairly long as well, if the tick marks on the wall and the chained skeleton in the corner are any indication, but getting out six days earlier than before is still a marked improvement.
And now, as we begin to go through the logistics of packing our base camp up and moving out for a while, we come to the halfway point of his chemotherapy. It seems such an indeterminable amount of time that he has been battling cancer that it is almost incredible to think that there is a halfway point. Yet, here we are, staring down the mad junk yard dog which has wreaked havoc in families past that is childhood cancer and, it would seem, that Jayne is actually making that dog cow and roll over for him. Now, we aren't halfway through this entire experience, not by a long shot, seeing as how we'll be coming to clinics until he is getting ready for first grade, if not longer than that, but it nice to think that we won't have to be tethered to the IV stand, to the hospital, to this accursed desert village for very much longer.
When be started this whole ordeal in the beginning of February, the road ahead looked so impossibly daunting, so terribly devastating, so thoroughly apocalyptic that neither of us was quite sure what to make of it. We had no idea what to expect from the process or from the hospital. We didn't know what this would do to Jayne's development, to our marriage, or to our lives from then on. It was a giant black hole which sucked up any sort of foresight and presented such long, yet unfathomably, odds that even Vegas wouldn't touch us with a ten foot Mafia-run pole. We've come beyond the event horizon of Jayne's journey through cancer treatment and now we sit on the edge of an entirely new dimension, one where our son has cancer but he is slowly, but surely, beating it back. He's crawling around, developing his social skills, roaring like a dinosaur, trying out the different flavors of raspberry there are to be explored.
That isn't to say that none of us has come out unscathed by this whole experience, what with me having to work a bit more, leaving Shay here to tend to the small monster that they switched for our son in the hospital where he was born, but we're working through it. It isn't something that we could have anticipated when Shay and I first found out that we were going to have a baby, it wasn't spelled out on our wedding cake that we would have to watch our son simultaneously weaken and forge himself through the fires of leukemia. Now that we are here, I don't think that either of us would have balked at the opportunity because our little family is pretty much the best thing we have going for us and that will continue to be the case as it grows up and out, ever so slightly. One of the coolest things, I always said, was that I could marry my best friend and then, as a result, create another best friend out of that. I wouldn't trade anything at all for what I have now, cancer and all, because that's just how life goes sometimes. We didn't have any control over the way that our DNA was spliced within the fertilized zygote that, 9 months later, gave this little ball of awesome to Shay and I. Really, the only control we have is in our reaction to this entire situation and how we choose to view it.
Along the way, and quite likely throughout the entire process, there has been quite a bit of outpouring of support for the three of us. Our loved ones, our friends, our distant acquaintances, and complete strangers have shown us just how giving people can be when presented with the opportunity. There has been an incredible amount of work put into supporting us while we support Jayne in his fight, from baked goods to organizing fundraisers for us. Every little bit has been greatly appreciated. We've also received a fantastic amount of support from the hospital itself. The PCT's, the nurses, the doctors, even the cleaning staff have lent as much support as they could to help us through this. Some of them did this in very personal ways, those of whom had day to day contact with our little unit. The nurses and techs have all been helpful and loving in every way they can. After all, it's hard to meet Jayne and not instantly fall in love with him. The doctors have been tireless in their treatment of the leukemia and everything else that has popped up, from the sporadic fevers to the potential contamination of his line (yet again, he rolled around in his poop; I didn't think he had had that much contact with our dog before going to the hospital). PCH has been instrumental in Jayne's recovery. Their research, methods, and precautions are the reason that he is doing so well and I'm very grateful to every single person in this building for what they've done for my son and what they will continue to do for future sons and daughters of all ages who come through their doors.
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