She will never be the same.

It is 11:30, M-E has been asleep for more than 12 hours. The post camp crash. I have been hanging close. I have been trying to get a few things done but seem very distracted today.

As I was mindlessly playing solitaire on the computer, I realized that my baby has been gone for more than a year. The sweet, lovely, happy, growing healthy, curious, wise, kind, generous, child is no longer in this house. Her body has been over taken by Likemia and will never come back.

We can do lots of things. We can try to exorcise Lakemia, we can try and beat it with a stick. We can go on pretending things will be okay but when it is all said and done, we will have a different child in this house. Mary-Elizabeth Sierra Lanham has been forever tranformed. She is never coming back no matter how hard we try to re-capture her spirit, it will be forever transformed. There is no going back. No return to innocence, no escape from our new reality. I have been mentioning the profound changes but for some reason today I realized it those changes are never going away. Even when we have time away and plans for big trips, and hope for the future, there will always be this experience.

In some ways I feel I have lost a child. I have her body, I have her stubborn spirit but my child is gone. It is not that I don't love this child that is still asleep in my bed, for I do. I would walk through fire for her. I would do battle for her, I would give her body parts without hesitation.

I am just so so sad as I sit here. I had great hopes that camp would have made a huge change. I wanted her to bound off the bus with a smile and new confidence. I wanted to see the child I sent to camp in 2004, tired, smelly and ready for lunch. I wanted the time away to have created new memories and to wipe away this last year. It did not happen. I was expecting too much.

She did bound, she is tired, she is more confident, but she is also still a kid with cancer. She is covered with hives, anxious and has a million doses of chemo to go. She is sure I am going to drag her to the hospital. She was sure I would make her come home if she told me she sprained her ankle and I might have, who knows.

There is no magic, there is no going back, the Mary-Elizabeth before Frederica is gone, forever. She will be missed.

Now I am not saying that we will not survive, I am just saying that we truly live in a different world. We have been to the desert and upon our return we are not the same.