Dear June,
It was a long long day at the hospital. The good news? We are done with our first round of Chemo (one month down – thirty-five to go!) and Noah for once doesn’t seem to have that God awful spinal headache! The bad news? I do. My head has been killing me… all day. I secretly suspect that its a nefarious plot by the hospital administrators to raise funds by selling over-priced tylenol at the gift shop….I mean come on! $1.95 for two tylenol? I just can’t begin to describe how unbelievably exhausted I am. Second day in a row I can barely drag myself up the stairs to bed….at 6:55 no less. I have a lot on my mind lately….Zombies.
I joined this support group online for mothers of children with cancer. There is a lot of good there.. but there is a lot of bad too. Yesterday someone started one of those “do you live under power lines, did you feed your child hot dogs, did you take medication while you were pregnant” kind of threads. I didn’t bite…I “refused” to participate….I posted that I didn’t want to waste a moment of my precious life or his speculating about those kinds of things because I thought they were harmful, pointless, and counter-productive. Nice speech right?
Have you ever been home alone at night….watching some innocuous mind-numbing television show, when all of a sudden a commercial for “The Ring 3” or “Zombie Apocalypse” flashes on the screen? Seriously. WTF? You fumble for the remote and almost knock yourself out cold trying to change the station but its honestly already too late…even after the channel has been changed and you’re safely watching infomercials – you can’t pretend that you didn’t see anything….that it never really happened….that it doesn’t really bother you….the damage has been done….and in spite of your very best efforts at denial, you’ll be thinking about Zombies all night.
Well it was a bit like that. Even though I looked away – it was too late. The question had been asked. Was it even remotely possible? Was it something I did or didn’t do? Did I let him eat too much junk food? Did I use the wrong chemical to clean the bathroom? Was it the cigarette I smoked when I was three months pregnant? Was it something in the water? Something in the air? Something? Anything? I’m no stranger to “issues” with guilt…but this is different. This is insidious and real and dark….You see its so hard not to feel somehow to blame when your child is sick with something that could kill him…because at the end of the day….I know that IT’S MY JOB TO KEEP HIM SAFE….and somehow I failed. And no one is going to convince me otherwise. Not today.
-Cathy