Callouses

I have been trying to write about this for a month, but I keep laming out.

My cousin Missy's daughter, Tori, has leukemia. I haven't written about it before because I didn't really know what to say. She was diagnosed on this past Christmas Day. A couple of days before Christmas she developed a fever and general illness. She got dehydrated enough that she had to go into the hospital and that's when they found out. It's Acute Mylogenous Leukemia (AML), which is quite serious. She's been in the hospital ever since, except for one week-long furlough home. She's been going through rounds of chemo interspersed with recovery and treatment for a variety of secondary infections. She keeps developing a mystery meningitis that's been difficult to treat, among other things. She was told by her doctors when she went into treatment that even though this form of leukemia only has a 20-30% long-term survival rate, they thought she'd get through it ok.

I just have to say that the chemo she's been going through is fucking medieval. In a hundred years from now we'll look back on these treatments like we currently look back on bleedings to treat "ill humours". They essentially have to nearly kill her over and over in order to get her to the point that they can try and fix her. She's on a ton of pain meds, and antibiotics, and miscellaneous what-have-you. And, of course, she's lost all of her hair. It all friggin' sucks. She's 15, by the way.

They've been trying to find a bone marrow donor for her for months. They finally found a match, though she's been through another round of chemo and then radiation before that can happen, hopefully next week. She and Missy have been hanging in there through all of it. Missy pretty much lives in Tori's hospital room. They have special, long-term accommodations across the street from the hospital, but she doesn't use them. She just sleeps in T's room. I think that's pretty much what I'd do if I found myself in the same situation.

Missy's always been a bit of a black sheep in our family. She was the first of all of us (me, my sister, and my other cousins) to have a baby. She was young, around 20, and unmarried. Oh! the clucking and tsk-ing that went on in the Complain-o family when that happened. I gather she's always been a big disappointment to many in our family. She has a hard time keeping a job for very long, and she's hit up a number of us for money more than once. When we were growing up, I was closer to her than any of my other cousins, though we only see each other every couple of years at family gatherings in the last couple of decades.

I tell you all this to put this next part into context. I was talking to another member of my family, whom I'll refer to as "B". I was talking to B about Tori's health and how hard it's been on her and Missy. How they've both persevered and hung on all through all the crap one goes through with cancer treatment. I know that Missy and Tori had been having tough times dealing with each other before T was diagnosed. Typical mother/teenage-daughter conflicts, I think.

One of the things that's become clear to me during all this is how religious/spiritual many of my family members consider themselves to be. Missy posts regular updates to a website maintained by a charity for families with kids in the hospital for long-term treatments. It's a good way for all of us to keep in the loop without having to bug them by calling them on the phone daily. There's also a guestbook feature where friends and family can post notes. Almost all of Missy's posts and posts in the guestbook include calls for prayer and talk about counting your blessings. There's also a lot of talk about how God doesn't give us more than we can handle and Tori has been so brave and strong in this regard, and God works in mysterious ways, and other such platitudes. My conversation with B meandered in this direction when B said something that just stopped me cold. B said that really, Tori getting cancer was a blessing in disguise because she was going down the wrong road and would probably have been pregnant within a year, or a drug dealer. Now, this experience has drawn her closer to Missy, and Missy's had to step up and act more responsibly and in the end they'll both be better for it.

What?! I couldn't even begin to respond. I just let B ramble on. Normally, I like B. B's always seemed sensible and down-to-earth to me in the past but, what the fuck?! I've said before that my family is a bunch of crazy fuckers, which it is, and I think this causes those of us who are relatively sane to develop callouses in weird psychic places in order to survive. That's what I think has happened to B. That's the story I'm going with anyhow. I mean, seriously, cancer is a blessing because it might keep her from making some mistakes? The hell that kid (and her mom) has gone through. Do we hate teen mothers that much, or drug dealers even? And the truth is, I'm afraid Tori is going to die. Not afraid in an abstract, cancer-is-scary, kind of way, but in a concrete, it-very-well-may-happen kind of way. What then? How does B fit that into the cancer-as-a-blessing philosophy?

I know that hope is important, and maybe B is only expressing this in terms where actual dying isn't a possibility. That whole, "Tori is strong enough to fight her way through anything and will be better for it" kind of thing. I get that. Still. ..

If only!

We just got back last night from our latest trip up to Seattle. We were there to attend my sister's commencement. She graduated from Bastyr University with a B.S. in Herbal Science. Which, good for her! I had been planning on going up by myself, that way I could just drive up, attend, drive back, but my mother laid the guilt voodoo on me about how my sister would only graduate from college once, so "the whole family" should be there, celebrate, blah, blah. I caved. I should have trusted my instincts and stuck to my original plan because, first of all, who has commencement at 1pm on a Monday afternoon?! And also, guess what? A 3-hour commencement ceremony is pretty much the last place you should take a 2-year old. What?! Really?! Yeah. It was nice and all, but not enough singing and clapping and talking trains to keep Linus' attention. Seriously, it just. wouldn't. end.

There was a moment early on where I got all excited about it. My mother was reading the program before everything started when she exclaimed, "Oh, look! The keynote speaker is Patch Adams!" "Really?!" I replied. "Cool!" Because, see, I thought she was talking about J.P. Patches. Seriously. For those of you who don't know, J.P. Patches is a Seattle icon. He's a clown who had a local children's show from the about the late 1950s, until the early 80s. Sort of a Captain Kangaroo (only better!) for Seattle kids. Ask anyone of my generation who grew up in the Seattle area and they will invariably LOVE J.P. Patches. I only caught the tail-end of the J.P. Patches era when my family moved to Seattle, so I don't even have the depth of love that many of my peers do, but still, I was stoked!

So, imagine my disappointment when I figured out a couple of minutes later that I wasn't going to be listening to J.P. Patches at all, but instead to Hunter "Patch" Adams, M.D. Talk about a let down. My mother couldn't understand my disappointment. Hmmm. Let's see. Beloved iconic clown of my youth vs. "clown" doctor made famous in (what I imagine to be, as I will NEVER watch it) a suck movie staring Robin Williams (exactly the kind of movie, by the way, that my mother LOVES, which is how I know I should avoid it at all costs. My mother's two favorite movies ever, and I'm not kidding? Jumping Jack Flash and Sister Act. I rest my case.). His speech was everything I thought it would be - self-righteous and long-winded. He started off with a whole anti-capitalist thing, which I can totally get behind, and went on to talk about how schools don't teach people to love and that's the most important thing for healers, and really everybody, and on and on. Fine. He even goaded everyone into standing up and hugging the people on either side of them. Anyone who knows me knows this is the part where I really started to look unamused. That kind of shit makes me crazy. I'm not against hugging. I hug people all the time. But I'm not going to hug complete strangers in some bullshit attempt to make a point about how if we all just loved each other we'd all be happy and healthy, or some such crap. Fortunately, I was out in the lobby, with all the other parents and toddlers, watching it all on closed-circuit TV. Gah!

Then, he talked about how he's never accepted any money for any work he's ever done as a doctor. He talked about this more than once, in fact, about how he doesn't accept money, or have any savings, or insurance, or a 401k, and all said in a way to make you feel creepy about getting paid for what you do. What. ever. I'm sorry, but my sister is a single mother with student loans to pay off. She damn well better charge for her services, 'cause I can't afford to support her, and she's been leaching off my parents long enough.

Bah! Enough about it.

When we got home last night, Linus had a melt-down. Like, the second he got out of the car in our driveway. A full-on, sobbing, meltdown. I think he'd just been holding it together through all of the travel, and events, and new places, and new people, and more travel of the previous 3 days, that when he saw familiar territory, he just let it all out. He wanted me to carry him around while he sobbed and pointed at different things. When I'd take him over to those things, he'd scream, "NO!" and point at something else, blubbering all the while. Poor kid. It really was a lot. I felt like melting down and I had the benefit of experience and alcohol to get me through it all. It seems like we've been traveling, or people have been visiting us, every weekend for about a month and a half now. We were supposed to go up to my cousin's again next weekend, but not any more. Orion's going to go up and build them a deck, but the baby and I are going to stay. home.

Oh, that sounds good! We'll lay around in our pjs all weekend eating waffles. I'll show him clips from the J.P. Patches Show and we'll talk about the commencement speech that could've been.

Oh, sheet.

This time the gap in posting is not my fault. I tried to log onto Blogger several times a day, every day last week and couldn't get in. Don't ask me.

I think Linus has reached that 72 word threshold. Apparently, toddlers slowly acquire one word at a time until they reach a 72 words (or maybe 83, or 67. I'm making these numbers up, alright?! It's something in that neighborhood.), which is some kind of magic threshold, and then they start acquiring dozens of words every minute! Or, something vaguely similar to that. Anyway, his vocabulary is suddenly expanding rapidly. He only has to hear a word once and it's his. Which, is awesome, but also means that I gotta watch my mouth. He knocked over his water the other day and I said,

"Oh, shit."

To which he responded,

"Oh, sheet."

Now he says it all the time. He gets the context right. If something unexpected happens he exclaims,

"Oh, sheet!"

But, he will also just wander around muttering to himself,

"Oh, sheet. Oh, sheet. Oh, sheet."

like he's got a lot on his To Do list and not enough time.

On a totally different subject - my body is trying to trick me into getting pregnant! I find myself lately getting this surge in my sex drive just as I'm ovulating. I'll be at my office winding things down at the end of the day and I'll find myself thinking, Man! I hope the baby's napping and Orion's ready when I get home because I could really get on the train to Minneapolis*! -looks at calendar- Wait a minute! I'm ovulating!

Now that's fine. It's not that I won't have sex if I'm ovulating or something, but it's more insidious than that. We'll be in bed or some place and I'll be thinking, Hmmm, sex! But then I'll realize that we're, say, out of condoms. Rats! Weeeeell, maybe we could do without just this one time. -glances at calendar- Wait a minute! I'm ovulating! DAMN YOU EVOLUTION!!

Oh, sheet indeed!

(*don't ask me, talk to Orion about that euphemism for sex. I can't remember all the details now, but it was something like, many years ago we were making out but then I decided I didn't want to go any further, much to Orion's disappointment, and he says, "Don't get on the train if you don't want to go to Minneapolis!" Hah! We've been using it ever since.)