Reflection on Mixed Blessings

I was on a flight returning home last week and I met a woman who was a nurse on the pediatric oncology floor on this day in 2001.  My youngest son was an inpatient that day eighteen years ago, and as two airplanes ran into the World Trade Center, he was getting his final dose of chemotherapy.  It had been a very long year and a half for all of us, and instead of a triumphant end to it all, we were plunged into what amounted to a period of national mourning.
I had been in a period of suspended animation for months as a result of having a young child with a life threatening illness.  The time between diagnosis and the completion of treatment had done nothing to heal my wounds, and so oddly and suddenly, every one else was right there with me emotionally.   I was trying to navigate what it meant to be done with chemotherapy, which was much more about learning to wait and see than it was to celebrate the end of cytotoxic chemicals coursing through my son's body.  As a health care provider I knew that the fix was in, that over the next months and year we would see whether the treatment had worked and he would live, or that it hadn't and that he faced certain death at a young age.  It was a terrible kind of limbo, but almost everyone around me felt an unsettling uncertainty as well.  The effects of both those events linger on today.