March 14, 2012

March 12, 2012

Looking back...
The fundraiser put together by friends Thursday night went great! George and I had a great time visiting with everyone. We feel so fortunate to have such wonderful people in our lives.
The three of us had a good weekend too. Clayton got to visit with his Uncle Mickey who was down from NYC and we got to hang out at home and relax a little. Relax, being a relative term because I, of course, had to have a project and so I decided to makeover the front flowerbeds that had some enormously overgrown hedges. I'm fairly certain the neighbors thought I was nuts when they saw I convinced my husband to pull each and every bush out with his truck. What can I say? It was therapeutic and oddly satisfying. But I digress...
All of this time, George and I had no doubt that Monday we would be starting round 5 of chemo. This past Wednesday Clayton's labs had revealed platelets of 66 and we were convinced that by Monday we would've been in good standing for chemo...wrong! After our favorite nurse (Amanda) came to do labs on Sunday, we found out his platelets had only come up to 67. We were floored!
Next we had a Monday visit to the Hope (in hospital oncology clinic). So after talking with doctors and sorting things out, we arranged to come back on Wednesday to do a bone marrow aspiration to ensure that the only reason Clayton's counts are slow to recover is the chemo. Don't let this scare you, this is a common precaution when there are delays beyond a week.
It was a neat visit to the hope Monday because Starla was there too. Most of you probably know who she is- the little girl near Clayton's age with AML. We always see her sign on her door in the hospital and hear how she's doing, but we don't see her much and we've only seen her parents a few times. We were all in the Hope on Monday though. If you didn't know better, you might have thought that the two toddlers running around were normal healthy kids. It would have been hard to imagine that Clayton in his Sketcher lights ups playing with his airplanes and Starla with her precious turquoise knit hat hanging out at the nurses station were anything, but normal. If you didn't know better, it would have been impossible to believe that cancer was casting a shadow over either of their lives. It was funny, because when we were leaving, Starla's parents made a point to turn around, wave and grace us with their enormous smiles. In that moment, you knew that they knew we were here almost as often as them, and that they had heard about us just as we had heard about them, and that they too knew the misery of having a child with cancer. We still have never spoken, but their eyes and their smiles in that moment said so much. It was their way of saying that this sucks, but it'll be OK and we are right there with you; we feel your pain and understand your triumphs in our worlds plagued by cancer. I'm sure we'll see each other again soon, but until then, that one gesture was immensely comforting.

1 comment:

  1. Truly touching. And totally get the satisfaction of ripping up forboding plants... :)

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