Well My Days Of Not Taking You Seriously Are Certainly Coming To A Middle

Well, it's certainly been a while but today, at around 2 in the morning, was Jayne's last chemo treatment for his third round of chemotherapy.  It was preceded by some rather intense vomiting and some general crankiness before we finally gave in and ordered him some benadryl.  After being properly dosed up, he was more than willing to lay down and let his mom feed him.  He even managed to sleep through most of the night.  And so now, with three of the four treatments completed, we wait for his ridiculously high
ANC (over 2000!) to drop down to zero before it makes the arduous journey back up to acceptable levels. This should take no longer than it did with the last treatment, so we anticipate being out of the hospital for our short, and final, reprieve around the 24th of this month.  After that will come the last and most intense course that Jayne will have had to go through.  14 days of chemo to blast the remaining cancer cells, if there are any, out of his system, time to allow his ANC to come up, a bone marrow aspiration as a final check to see if he is, in fact, cancer free, and then his broviac tube will come out.  Even by a conservative estimate, that means we will be able to escape from Phoenix by the middle of July.

It's hard to believe just how long these past few months have stretched out, both because of our confinement to our antiseptic holding cell and because of the leaps and bounds that Jayne's development has taken.  He has taken to crawling like a fish to flopping on the deck of a boat.  It's no longer an ordeal for him to pull himself up and scoot along the wall, the couch, the bed to get at whatever we have missed in keep something else out of his reach.  He's becoming much more vocal, singing along with Frozen or constantly making raspberries at the nurses or his parents.  He's fairly confident in his ability to convey "bye bye".  Not that he actually says it, not on purpose at least, but he has gotten the wave down.

Oh, and his first tooth is coming in.

It's sometimes unfathomable just how much has happened to our little guy in this short amount of time.  He looks like a little boy, not just an infant.  His personality is starting to shine through and he's starting to have very real reaction to his mother and I.  Our little baby, who this time last year was nothing more than a black and white picture on our fridge, is turning into a wee lad.  And he's done all of this while kicking the crap out of leukemia.  Most kids his age don't have to worry about grabbing the cords inserted into his veins and ripping them out.  Most kids don't have to worry about being tethered like some inmate breaking rocks. Despite these limitations, which are merely the tip of the iceberg, he has been a bright ray of sunshine, winning over the hearts of every single person who he has come into contact and being an inspiration to every single one of us.  If this baby can get through such adversity with a smile on his face, surely we can muster the same determination within ourselves to overcome whatever comes our way.

My son is, in my eyes, Superman.  While the radiation of the yellow sun, like the medicine and science doing most of the legwork in his fight with cancer, did make Superman super human, it did not make him a superhero.  Even if he isn't stepping into the ring with each and ever cancer cell and knocking them out one by one, he still has the heart of a fighter, of a hero.  His fight is with the things that surround him, not that microscopic civil war within his blood stream.  All of the tests, all of the poking, all of the medicine, the strangers, the unfamiliar places, the uncomfortable machines, the tubes, and the utter lack of ability to fully understand what is happening to him and why are all things that would have left most people stooped and trodden upon, feeling lost and depressed.  But he has taken everything in stride, putting one hand in front of knee at a time, and just smiling when another thing pops up.  He's an extraordinary little guy and he always will be.

So, thank you all, once again, for supporting my Kal El.  It isn't easy for anyone to watch a baby go through what he's been through and we are very grateful for everything that everyone has done to help the three of us get through this and, more importantly, land on our feet when the hospital makes us hand in our decoder rings.  It's always nice to know that wherever we look, we have people supporting us in whatever way they can, whether they are family and friends or the doctors and nurses working tirelessly to get Jayne back up to a hundred percent.