Cancer sucks.
It is hard and it is ruthless and brutal and devastating and incredibly unfair.
Worse than cancer - little kids dying from cancer.
Being at a Children's Hospital with a fantastic cancer program is incredibly reassuring and as I was speaking to someone about today; a little community. We are all members of this elite community - it feels so different for kids to have cancer than adults and that may be just because it is my child that has cancer so I have to feel differently about it. I don't know.
I do know that I need this community and I need the reassurance and I need to know them. I need to see the kids that get better and finish their treatment and go on to bigger and better things. I need them to have their lines removed and watch their hair grow back and learn their names and their stories and enjoy them being able to be kids while they are in this place. I need all of this because it has to happen - it has to help block the utter and complete terror and fear and the unimaginable pain. I need to know they get better and live. It is too heartbreaking when they don't. We didn't even know them - the family or even the little boy and his family. We met them briefly, mostly in passing and now we know of their lives and their pain and the sudden shocking realization that he wouldn't survive. I can't even begin to imagine the feeling of having no hope. Seriously. No hope. How must that feel? I pray to God that I never have to find out - that I never have to experience the terror and the weight of hopelessness. There is nothing left to do. How dark adn bleak and immensely frightening - not words to express the depth of the darkness or the anguish his mother must feel.
So, I need to be around the kids and the parents and laugh and giggle and we need to be able to trade stories about treatments and lines and side effects and transplants and tumors and blood cancers and compare and note counts. I need to be able to speak to someone that understands the language intimately and that, ultimately, has the exact same hope that we do. I love that I have other mothers and their children to help us navigate through this crazy community. I need to have them and cry with them and laugh with them and sit quietly with them - we need each other and we need the hope that each other family can provide. It is strange to be bonded with strangers. I am so grateful for our cancer friends and I know some of them will be forever friends and some will be for right now friends and it is all important and necessary and worthwhile.
We need each other to help keep out the darkness and be lights for one another. For my other lights, big and small, I know I will be eternally thankful.
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