Thoughts on Transplants

Terrified
Excited
Dread
Concern
Exhaustion
Thrilled
Disbelief
Did I mention... Dread

I so don't want to be here.  I so never wanted to travel this path.   Every parent has a dread, a fear, an uncontroled worry.  When MEB was little, mine was Spinal Menningitis.  I was sure every fever was going to be permenant brain damage and death.  My sister-in-law was afraid of choking and cherrios.

This sort of fear transfers to something else in Cancer World.  We all fear relapse.  It is something you worry about all the time and it never leaves your mind yet we are all sure that we have said the special prayers and done the right dance and purchased the right organic vegetables and relapse will never get your child.

Then we all have lots of individual fears.  Feeding tubes, pain killers, germs, fungus, colds, chicken pox, plague, witches, the usual.

Mine was transplant.  I was so relieved when Mary-Elizabeth went into remission, did not relapse, and made it through treatment.  It was not smooth sailing, it was a rough couple of years full of weird side effects and long term side effects and hives and shortened tendons and loss of gray and white matter but there was no transplant. 

 It was such a relief that we never faced that battle. I saw those room, the weiry parents and exhausted kids.  While our children were sick, somehow they were sicker, so much sicker.  It made me so sad.  I would see the dark rooms, the nurses gowning up and numbers of people in and out.  Then the kids would disapear.  I would wake up and there would be a room, previously closed for days, wide open and empty, the child and the activity would be gone. It was so so scary.

We are so so ready for this and yet so not ready.  I guess we don't have a choice so we will go and do this.

Right now we are working on surviving the 5 days of chemo.

Mary-Elizabeth is awake and talking.