Twelve Years Ago Today

Twelve years ago today my youngest son got his last dose of chemotherapy.  He had cytoxan running into his central line when the North World Trade Center Tower collapsed.  It was a terrifying day for the country, and a certain amount of chaos followed for all of us.  My sister-in-law was stranded at a meeting in Los Angeles and had to rent a car and drive across the country back to her home in Baltimore, so that she could be with her family as everyone coped with the attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and by intention, the rest of us.

Our family felt another kind of chaos.  It was the end of a year of chemotherapy, which came on the heals of surgery and radiation for my youngest son.  The goal was to eradicate a malignant brain tumor that was diagnoses when he was just five years old--so over 20% of his life at that point had been spent in the high acuity care of an oncology team.  There is a strange thing that happens to you when you feel you are literally fighting to save a loved one's life that ous task, such as getting chemotherapy and blood trasnfusions becomes a habit.  Habits are hard to break, and so it was at the end of treatment--we knew intellectually that the fix was in.  We would just have to wait to see if the treatment would work.  We all missed the active phase.  We found waiting to see what would happen very hard. 
Which is sort of what the rest of America was doing the fall of 2001--waiting to see what would happen next. For very bad reasons we had very good company in our wait and see vigil.