Whose Color Is He Flying?

Little more than two days out from his last chemo injection and Jayne is having the worst time so far.  Since day five or so of his injections, his stomach has really been a prime issue.  It won't let him sleep for too long without a myriad of anti-nausea drugs coursing through his tiny veins and he's begun to vomit a bit more frequently than our meager wardrobe can afford.  If he hasn't eaten at all, what comes up is a bright yellow viscous liquid that resembles something that Nickelodeon once dumped on peoples heads.  If he has, he gives us a full account of what exactly it was that had been unfortunate enough to be floating in his system.  Needless to say, the little guy is quite miserable and our hospital floor has started to resemble a movie theater floor, much to the consternation of the cleaning ladies.

Thankfully he's such a unique little baby that this hardly phases him for too long.  He's more upset at the subsequent cleaning required than the brief imitation of Linda Blair he had just attempted moments before. True, he does have his moments, with his roiling stomach at war with his immense desire to just lay his head down on one of our chests and go to sleep. The only thing we can do is bear with him and try whatever we can to make him comfortable and happy.

This is, after all, nearing the home stretch.  His body has performed admirably up to this point and, with a slight change to the dose of one of the harsher chemo treatments, it's understandable that he would finally start acting less like a terminator and more like Kyle Reese.  It doesn't stop him from being a bad ass in everyone's eyes but a not so gentle reminder that he is only a tiny human being enduring an extremely rigorous medical treatment to root out and even more sinister malady.  It's easy to forget that Jayne, the growing little boy who's bringing leukemia to it's knees, is just that: a little boy.  A little boy going through something very large and scary and unsettling.

His ANC has been going down steadily, correlating with his rise in nausea and crankiness, and the steady march towards going home before the last, long chemotherapy progresses yet another day.  As much as I look forward to the day when we won't have to caution our son from yanking on the tubes sticking out of his chest, when we won't have to chase him around with the IV stand like some medical attendant out of Beauty and the Beast, I must admit that the idea is a bit hard for me to wrap my brain around.  We've spent, seemingly, a very long time going through this ordeal that it's almost an insurmountable task ahead of us to adjust back to normal life.  How do you rebuild your life which you helped take apart, piece by piece, and then move a third of it, a quarter of it, 200 miles away and erect only a fraction of that which you took with you?  I've no doubt that it can be done, it's been done by so many families so many times that my concern seems laughable.  Just one more thing to add onto the ever growing Jenga tower that has become my small corner of the Wood family.  The only real comfort is that, though it may sway every know and then, I don't think for a second that it will topple and scatter to the winds.  But the most difficult aspect is not building the tower up and up, but putting the blocks back where they belong.