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. ..