It’s a big month in our household. Our little Allison Mae is turning two years old, which is crazy. She’s talking, potty-training and climbing all over everything.
Allison’s birthday will always be linked — in my mind, at least — with the end of Josiah’s treatment. Just weeks before she was born, he underwent the last round of chemo of his custom treatment plan.
Josiah’s chemo was months of an ever-worsening roller coaster. At the beginning, he bounced right back (amazing for a 7-month old), but as time went on, he took longer to recover. We had more days and nights living in fear of a fever. Day and nights of cleaning his toys over and over. Bottles of hand sanitizer were used. By his last few rounds, he was getting blood every time, to help his body cope with the fact that the chemicals were doing more and more damage to his bone marrow each time.
The cycle was hard on Merri and I, too. We spent many days and nights at the hospital. I would stay at St. Jude as late as I could stand too (Josiah got chemo at night, so I wanted to be there when he was hooked up), drive home barely awake, to go to work just hours later. Being away from the hospital when Josiah was on treatment was brutally hard for me.
Two years later, his tumor remains to be stable. I’ve heard the word “dormant” a few times, even. He’s not cancer-free. He never will be. That son of a bitch will always be pressing against his healthy brain, threatening to cause problems with pressure, fluid and more.
I always feel a tinge of something (guilt?) when another one of Josiah’s “little friends” gets bad news, knowing we’ve been off the front lines for so long. Of course, I don’t want to be back in the fight with Josiah’s cancer, but sometimes I wonder why we’ve caught a breather when other families aren’t so fortunate.
The universe’s super dickish move, of course, is that we can be back in the ring at any time. All it takes is one symptom or one bad MRI and we’d be back on that hospital couch.
I suppose that’s why I can’t honestly enjoy this milestone. It’s great that Josiah’s doing so well, but I can’t shake the thought that this respite could be temporary.