Ten years ago on a cold dark night...
We began down the road of childhood cancer with our youngest son Ethan. He had a medulloblastoma, a malignant brain tumor in the cerabellum. He had surgery, a year of chemotherapy and 6 weeks of radiation--an ordeal for us all, individually and as a family.
There are so many difficult things about the beginning of this road, but the hardest part of all is that the challenges don't end. Cancer is the gift that keeps on giving, especially when you get it as a child.
One of the real rays of hope in the area of "things that don't have to be problems but are" is the passage of a modest national health reform law in the United States, which will allow children like Ethan to have possibilities for health care coverage. As a result, choices about employment become open to them that weren't an option before.
For more about what our family's experience was like, here is what I told the President's Cancer Panel in 2003:
http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/advisory/pcp/pcp0903/Summary.pdf
Ten years ago Ethan woke up with double vision, and our lives changed forever. I continue to be eternally grateful and inconsolably sad about my child being a childhood cancer survivor. The experience has made me kinder, wiser, more capable, more empathetic, more fragile, more forgiving (I still have a ways to go on this one), and so much more. It has brought some of my favorite people into my life. I have leaned on people and been leaned on in ways that I did not think possible nor do I really understand. And I would trade it all and more to have it never have happened. Thank you to all who make the lives of cancer families more bearable.
...She walks these hills in her long black veil.
Ten years ago or yesterday...the memories are as vivid.
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