One Year Ago...

One year ago today, I did the scariest thing I have ever done, and I drove my little 7-month-old baby to Primary Children's Medical Center, all by myself, alone. I did not know what was wrong or why Brynlee's legs had suddenly become paralyzed, but I knew that Brynlee would not be coming home with me that night, and I knew that our lives were going to be greatly impacted by whatever was ahead of us.

 

Little did I know that a day later we would find out that our baby had cancer. Not only cancer, but stage IV metastasized cancer. Over the next three weeks while Brynlee was in the hospital we rode a wave of emotions and came to realize just the extent of the disease and how our lives were going to be drastically different then what we had thought. We truly came to realize that it would get worse before it could get better.

 

We went from this:

 

To this:

 

To this:

 

Back to this:

 

To one of the hardest days:

 

To finally a little bit of improvement:

 

To Smiles:

 

And finally to Home where she did not stop smiling for two days:

 

I cried a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed when I took out the little pony in her hair that the nurses had put in and what seemed like a huge clump of her hair came out in my hands. Little did I know at the time that I would love that little bald head. I loved how soft it felt. I loved snuggling up to it.

 

But hair grows back, just like they told me it would (by the way, I hated when people would tell me it would grow back because I knew that it would, duh! It's kind of a symbolic thing.).  

 

And a year later, I had hoped that things would be different. I had hoped that we would have been able to use words like "remission" and "no evidence of disease" and "cancer free" and have a huge party, but I will have to settle for the word "stable" and the status of "off active treatment."

 

I had hoped that Brynlee would be walking and terrorizing our home, but I will have to settle for a modified army crawl and hope for a bright future where she will make progress and grow and prove her critics wrong.

 

One year later almost to the exact hour, I found myself driving yet again to Primary Children's Medical Center, alone. But this time, I was not scared. This time I knew that my now 19-month-old little girl would be coming home with me today. This time I knew why I was going, and I was pretty sure what the doctor would tell us. It was almost fitting today to see the first neurologist we saw in the ER one year ago today passing by us while I was headed out of the hospital. She probably doesn't remember us, and I know that I have said that I don't like most of the neurologists that I have met, but this neurologist was very nice to us, and she had the unfortunate task of telling me that my daughter had cancer.

One year later for our family some of our wounds are fresh and not healed and might never be, some scars will always be there and always be a reminder, but some wounds are healed with no evidence that a wound ever existed.