Solid Tumors vs. The bone marrow kind

See, one is easy to see, one is fuzzy. We live in the fuzzy world.

As we travel through this process we begin to notice differences and to differentiate about childhood cancer.

It all begins out as BAD, VERY VERY BAD.

Then you begin to realize that there is BAD, BAD,BAD cancer. The kind that makes you go max out your credit cards and go on endless vacations and hope the end comes on a nice sandy beach in some sort of poetic way.
Some brain tumors, metastisized anything, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, that sort of thing.

Then there is the BAD BAD BUT THERE IS HOPE kinds of cancer. They are generally solid tumors like Wilms tumors, Brain Tumors, or Neuro blastomas. A blastoma is a tumor of a group of nerve cells. They like to hang out in the stomach area and spread from there. They seems to be pretty do-able most of the time but then sometimes they hide out for a very long time and wait to make themselves known and then they are nasty but still can be fixed.

The thing about the cancers listed above is that they are solid. You can get a picture of them. You can focus on them. You can positively visualize that they are becoming smaller and are leaving. The treatment for them is usually less than a year. People spend lots of intense time and then they are done.

Mary-Elizabeth has a more ethereal kind of cancer. No one knows where it is. It is somewhere in her bone marrow but since bone marrow is in all the bones, it is hard to isolate. She has BAD BUT NOT THE WORST KIND OF LEUKEMIA. Some are much worse. Some immediately require transplants. She has the worst of the best kind. But it is all bad and takes a very long time to treat. They have to keep at it because some of the cells go dormant and then hide out. As I think about it, since the chemo kills everything, maybe all of her cell are getting killed and replaced by new cells all the time.

These cells that are bad hide in lots of places, her brain, her lymph system, and if she were a boy in her testicles. It is all so scary. How do we every know? How do we visualize? How do we every trust again?

Maybe we have to go through all this treatment so we get to the point that we would rather trust than continue chemo and blood draws and emergency trips to the hospital for sprained ankles and scraped feet.