I had planned a fairly light post about the casualness that a cancer kid and a cancer dad talk about things like vomit. That was when the day was going well and Nathan was playing on his hospital bed, laughing, and trying to eat something after just having thrown-up for the second or third time of the day. All was good (a cancer family has a different scale than most). I think I'll still go ahead with the lighter side. I wrote a fair amount about the other stuff on Nathan's journal. I don't really care to write about it again, but if you want the complete picture of the day, you should read the account over there too. Neuro-toxicity sucks.
Anyway...here is a fairly typical dad/son conversation during a round of chemo.
Setting: Mexican restaurant drivethrough. I've just been handed a bag with breakfast burrittos and am waiting for the person to run my credit card. Nathan throws up in one of the ever-present pink "throw up bins".
Nathan: Daddy. I threw up.
Me: Okay. I'll dump it after I pay and we can get out of the drive through. You still want your burritto?
Nathan: Yes.
Nathan opens the potato and bacon burrito to go at it with a fork.
Nathan: It has bacon! Its soft! I like the bacon. Are these mashed potatos or breakfast potatos?
Me: Breakfast potatos.
Nathan: Did I throw up once or twice last night?
Me: I think just once.
Nathan: It looked like ground beef and melted cheese.
Me: Yes. It did.
And with that, conversation dwindled off a bit as dad and son enjoyed their breakfast burrittos in the car on the way to the hospital for another day of chemo.
3 comments:
As I mentioned before, if your lighter-side post can reasonably be titled "Vomit and neuro-Toxocity" then I have to agree that your scale of good days does not resemble mine.
And I really couldn't imagine responding to "I vomited" with "still want your burrito?"
I used to not understand why people like you all were called heroes. I used to think, what is heroic about suffering? Sure, it is sad that people suffer, but why heroic? I used to think the word didn't fit.
Now I get it. Not just from this post, but it just struck me after reading this one. Here in the midst of these circumstances that I look at and think, "Wow, that would kill me, I couldn't live through that," you manage to not only survive, but to create something beautiful. You and your boy sharing time together. Shrugging off the world's weak attempts to bring you down with something as trivial as vomit, and instead bringing another loving moment of togetherness into being. My God, I admire you guys.
Love,
JimII
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