Gonna Fly Now

I’m going to start at the beginning. We found out I was pregnant with Jack on July 5th, which just happens to be the anniversary of when Danny proposed. I remember thinking, how one of my favorite days of the year just got even better. Flash forward eight months to the day Jack was born. Going to the hospital for a scheduled C-section is a very funny thing. You see, Cooper was a surprising day 10 pound sumo wrestler who required a semi-emergency section, and Jack was measuring to be huge like his big bro. So on the morning of March 8th, Dan and I walked into the hospital and got to hang out in the pre-op room on the Labor and Delivery floor with some fun nurses and Dan’s great buddy, Dave, who happened to be my anesthesiologist. I remember at one point I looked at Dave and Danny and warned them about goofing off while I was on the table, even though I knew that would be exactly what they’d be doing. So when we got to the operating room, I was by no means surprised that we were crying with laughter throughout the surgery, as strange as that concept is in retrospect. It wasn’t until I semi- jokingly got scolded by the doctor that I was a “moving target” that I realized what we were doing. So when our family boasts that Jack was born surrounded by love and laughter, it’s exactly what happened. Since that day, Jack has continued to make the world a little happier and has shown us the importance of love. 

Throughout Jack’s treatment I’ve tried my best to keep everyone informed about what’s been going on with his journey. However, this last round threw us for such a loop that my mind was on a perpetual cycle from constantly racing to being completely numb and back again. This round was brutal...terrible… so many other words that are not enough to describe how scary it was to live through it. The chemo itself wasn’t the bad part — it was its effects. While I won’t go into the specifics, there were many moments where we thought we’d actually lose Jack. Even when he miraculously recovered from the week from hell, thanks to modern medicine and stomping the heavens with prayers in my humble opinion, Dan and I looked at each other and admitted that for the first time during this whole thing, Jack looked like a sick cancer kid. He was no longer the chubby little baby smiling his way through treatment, he was frail, pale, and pitiful looking. 

It took a few days after his levels started to rise that Jack started to look and act like himself again. He started eating, laughing, smiling, and looking to get out of the hospital room as much as possible. Soon enough he did get out, the same way it started on his very first day of chemo - with Rocky playing in the background. The day Jack got discharged from the hospital still gives me the chills. Watching my boy who had lost the strength to stand walk out of the hospital without a single care was the proudest moment of my life. I was proud of Jack, of course, but I was proud of all of us. We all got through this...together. We still have a lot to do when it comes to Jack’s care. He has multiple things this coming week alone. Then if things go as planned, we’ll have loads of monitoring and testing to check that he’s in remission. So let’s keep stomping the heavens for Jack, and for all his buddies that are still fighting. It’s gotten us this far, that’s for certain. 

Since that day we’ve been adjusting to life back to normal. Our first night home was like musical beds, ending with Jack in our room with me while Dan was in with Coop. But we’re getting better at that routine every night (even though as I type this Dan has fallen asleep with Cooper). Other tasks have been easier, like working to fatten Jack up while getting everyone else back to eating healthy. Do you know how exciting it was to finally make a grocery list after living on hospital food and take out for 5 months? It’s freaking amazing! I get to actually cook for my family and we get to eat, together, at a table! We are Not sitting on the couch that is also our bed, and not eating garbage fast food while driving in the car. I swear I feel like a kid at Christmas. And laundry. Holy cannoli we have so much laundry! But it’s in my house...on my schedule...and with zero worry that someone is going to steal our stuff. I am so happy to be able to do these normal things in our house because it’s been too damn long since we’ve been able to do them. 

There’s also been frustrations with being home. Mostly having to do with Jack’s communication. Our buddy doesn’t talk much. Perhaps it’s because everyone else talks constantly, or maybe it’s because he didn’t have to when he could just point to everything in the tiny hospital room and we instantly knew what he wanted. But now that we are home, it’s a struggle to know what Jack wants. He’ll point from one room to another and whine that he wants something. We’ll do our best to guess what he wants or needs. When we are wrong, you can feel his sadness and frustration. When we understand him right away, which thankfully is happening more each day, his entire face lights up. The thing that matters is that we are home, together, doing our best to figure life out. And I’m so grateful that we have this opportunity. 

It’s crazy to think I’d be grateful for frustrating parts of parenting... for the small battles that would have made me so anxious a year ago. But honestly if there’s anything I’ve learned from this whole situation it’s that we need to be thankful for everything in life. We need to be thankful for the bad days, because they make us appreciate the good days. We need to be thankful for the mundane tasks we do in life, because we are here to do them. But mostly we need to be thankful for each other. We need to be thankful for every single person in our lives, because we never know how much they’ll step up for us when times are tough. And as tough as those times get, they’ll never be as tough as our Jack.