Can we just skip July 10th?
This day is hard for me. I have bad memories of July 10th. Seven years ago on this day I took my then 3 yr-old son to the local children’s ER for a high fever, shortness of breath, and a rapid heart rate. I did not walk out of that hospital with him that night. He was admitted with viral pneumonia, sepsis, and an extremely low blood count. His hemoglobin level was 4.8. Normal for a child that age is 12. His white cell count was 2.3. Normal is at least 4. His platelet count was 25. Normal is over 150.
Before I go any further, you should know that at the time we lived in England. We’re not British. We’re American and my husband was in the Air Force. We were stationed at a dinky little base in the countryside called Croughton. It’s between Banbury and Oxford and around an hour west of London. ALL of our family was stateside and we had been in England less than a year.
That day, I took him in thinking he was just really sick with pneumonia. He’d been having cold after cold that he just couldn’t kick. In December not long after we got there we all came down with a horrific flu. I thought he was just catching all the British bugs that he’d never been exposed to before. He wasn’t the only one sicker than he’d ever been.
After hours of sitting in the ER, waiting on them to come just take a look at him, they finally gave him some albuterol, which didn’t do much except make his heart rate skyrocket. I finally pressed for a chest x-ray, feeling like more was wrong than the simple “bad cold” they wanted to tell me had yet again. I’m so glad I did. He had some shadowing on the scan, so they decided to admit him.
Now, any of you who know what it’s like to be hospitalized, know that they like to take blood. They’re like vampires, coming in every day to take another vial off you. Before we left the ER that night and moved up to the ward (they didn’t have “rooms” at this hospital unless you were rich, super contagious, or in the ICU), they took a vial of blood. Once that was done, they found a bed for him on their children’s ward and we moved up there. It was a large room filled with like eight other families, all of whom were watching everything going on. It was annoying. I did not want the world privy to his condition, but I didn’t have a choice.
Things got crazy once we moved up there. His blood panel came back with those frighteningly low numbers and there was a new development: his creatinine level was 3.98. Normal is around 0.5 or lower. This meant his kidneys were overwhelmed and he was fighting a massive bacterial infection throughout his entire body. The doctor looked him over really well and noticed some bruises on his legs. They weren’t big and they didn’t look unusual, but they were new. He asked me how long he’d had them and if he had any others and my heart sank to the bottom of my stomach. I knew where he was going with that.
My child had leukemia.
It about killed me to leave that night, but I had a toddler that needed to go home and get to bed. I called my mom after I put Callie down and cried. That was probably the hardest night of my life. My husband was at the hospital with Thane, and my mother and my best friend were both thousands of miles away across the ocean. I felt so alone. I had no idea how we were going to cope with what was to come, but our military family stepped in big time. Sam’s boss told him to take the time he needed until Thane was stable and some of the other spouses pitched in and made us food and offered to babysit. I don’t know what we would have done without them (Steph Johnson, you’re still my hero!).
What followed that day was a period of literally YEARS I would not wish on anyone. Medicines that made him so ill he couldn’t keep anything down. A fatigue that turned my active little boy into a lump on the couch. And a nauseating fear every time they drew his blood or ran cerebral spinal fluid that something was going to come back wonky.
In April of 2016, that very thing happened. He had a routine lumbar puncture as part of his maintenance therapy and it revealed leukocyte blasts in his spinal fluid. We had been cleared to leave and as I was walking out the door to get in the car, the doctor’s office called and said that Dr. Dole wanted to talk to us. I’ve been down this road before. I knew before he ever came in the room that it was bad. He told us the news and then scheduled stuff for later in the week to see just how bad it was. We went back two days later and they did a bone marrow biopsy and an MRI of his head. The blasts were over thirty percent of his marrow and clumps of leukemia cells lined his left optic nerve and the meninges at the base of his brain.
The next six months were spent mostly in the hospital for either some very heavy chemo, sepsis again and again, or his bone marrow transplant. He last left the hospital for an in-patient stay on October 17, 2016 and has been cancer-free ever since, thank the Lord.
I hate this day, but at the same time I don’t. It has made me appreciate life and those I love to a level I hadn’t before. It’s also helped me put the world and all it’s plights into perspective and I feel like I’m more grounded in reality because of it.
What’s the moral of this story? Don’t take your loved ones for granted. Or your own life. Live each day to the fullest and appreciate just being alive. You never know when God will call you home.