Hope and Hubris

Hubris: 

1.       Excessive pride or arrogance

2.       Excessive ambition that usually least to the downfall of a hero in classical tragedy

 

Hope:

1.       To have a wish to get or do something or for something to happen or be true, especially that seems possible or likely.

2.       A feeling that something desirable is likely to happen.

 

Cancer World Mom’s are so hubristic and so hopeful that we make each other gag sometimes.   They are filling our children full of poison and weird stuff and we just ask for more.  WE KNOW they will get better. WE know they will not die. We know they will not have immune systems that allow diseases not seen since the 14^th century to enter their bodies.  Our kids will not suffer all of THOSE side effects and lose their balance and lose their fine motor skills and their gray matter and their executive functioning and their fertility and their skin and their hair and their thyroid and their  sight and their kidneys and…….

We know they will get better, because we are their MOMS and we can weave through this maze of drugs and side effects and procedures and tapers and IV medications and our sheer will of being MOMS will make only good things happen.

The fact is most of the children, if not all, have a MOM with an iron will.  A mom that knows she can do better then the next mom.  A mom that is working so hard to hold on to the hope and to believe they have made it out of the tunnel and are going home.  We are going to be able to continue life, with a child intact.  A child that can look back and say:  I HAD CANCER and I beat it.  

 

When something does not go as planned, as expected or as promised, we are furious.   When the child ends up in the hospital with a fever or procedure is not scheduled correctly or the transplant has to be done again because both donors are still hanging around, we are just devastated.  We know somehow it is our fault.  We have somehow failed to do what needed to be done.  

The hardest thing of all is accepting that we really don’t make stuff happen, good or bad.  We aren’t in charge of the weird bacterium that floats around and causes an infection.  We are not in control of how an incision heals.  We don’t make the ANC go up or down.   We really are at the whim of cancer and it’s affect on our children. 

Hope and our Hubris  is how we survive