Benjamin's 3rd course of chemo finished Sunday afternoon and now we're just waiting for his counts to first hit bottom and then eventually go up again. We've been really lucky so far in that Benjamin has tolerated the treatments amazingly well so far (as I knock frantically on wood). He was very restless last night and was scratching and rubbing all over his scalp and especially around his ears, where he had broken out in hives. They ended up having to give him Benadryl, but they have no idea what brought this on. The Broviac scar on his neck is also being treated with Polysporin because it hasn't been healing as it should. And this time he's drinking but not eating. But compared to the troubles some of the other patients have, this is a walk in the park.
In here it can be hard to keep stuff in perspective, since everything seems so unreal anyways. Walking into the kitchen and interrupting a family choosing floral arrangements for the funeral of their (still breathing) child, you think that you must be dreaming because it can't be real. But that's reality for you: in the world of make-believe no-one gets cancer and everybody lives happily ever after, but in reality cancer exists and it does not play favorites. So reality puts people into unreal situations, and it's the luck of the draw as to who gets picked.
I read today on a news website (CBC? CTV? I can't remember) that there is a theory that cancer is genetic. That's not to say that you are born with a cancer gene, but rather that certain combinations of genes lead to a higher risk of cancer. So mom and dad are fine, but how their genes are combined in the child is dynamite. So according to this theory, Benjamin will be justified when he yells that age-old teen-age refrain at us when he's sixteen: "I hate you; my life stinks and it's all you're fault".
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me where the cancer came from. It's the end result that counts. The grandfather of the child two paragraphs up summed it up last night when I asked how it was going: "He had no chance". To what, live, love, jump, swim, ride a unicycle? You can end that sentence a million ways and they would all be true. But Benjamin has a chance, a very good one. And thanks to modern medicine, so do most of the kids on this floor. No matter how badly I feel for that family (and my heart aches for them), I can't help but be thankful that it's not us and pray that it never will be. That's the luck of the draw.
In here it can be hard to keep stuff in perspective, since everything seems so unreal anyways. Walking into the kitchen and interrupting a family choosing floral arrangements for the funeral of their (still breathing) child, you think that you must be dreaming because it can't be real. But that's reality for you: in the world of make-believe no-one gets cancer and everybody lives happily ever after, but in reality cancer exists and it does not play favorites. So reality puts people into unreal situations, and it's the luck of the draw as to who gets picked.
I read today on a news website (CBC? CTV? I can't remember) that there is a theory that cancer is genetic. That's not to say that you are born with a cancer gene, but rather that certain combinations of genes lead to a higher risk of cancer. So mom and dad are fine, but how their genes are combined in the child is dynamite. So according to this theory, Benjamin will be justified when he yells that age-old teen-age refrain at us when he's sixteen: "I hate you; my life stinks and it's all you're fault".
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me where the cancer came from. It's the end result that counts. The grandfather of the child two paragraphs up summed it up last night when I asked how it was going: "He had no chance". To what, live, love, jump, swim, ride a unicycle? You can end that sentence a million ways and they would all be true. But Benjamin has a chance, a very good one. And thanks to modern medicine, so do most of the kids on this floor. No matter how badly I feel for that family (and my heart aches for them), I can't help but be thankful that it's not us and pray that it never will be. That's the luck of the draw.
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