Day 7
The body is an amazing thing.
It wants to be healthy.
It wants to live and it wants to thrive.
October 19th, 2000
My body is doing some really interesting things…
my period has stopped and ALL of my hair has fallen out.
Not just my head hair, but my nose hairs, my eyebrows and yes, even my vay-down-there hair.
I’m like a cue-tip.
I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to hope everything comes back.
You know what’s surreal?
I know in my heart I’m going have children.
That this situation is temporary.
I’m finding a complete trust in my Lord and …
probably the happiest I’ve ever been.
By the second round of chemo cocktail I had Destiny Child’s SURVIVOR running through my head on endless loops.
Kim and I would hum it when we could see the other starting to cave. Chemo is a mental game. You have to focus on your chemicals killing the cancer and not killing you. It’s a twenty-four hour game and it’s pretty exhausting.
As I was ending my second round, Kim was getting ready for her surgery. She had a sarcoma in her femur and the good doctors at USC were going to basically fillet her thigh muscle, cut out her femur and put a new titanium one in.
No problem, right?
Kim getting ready for her surgery meant that she was off chemo for four weeks and that meant I was on my own. My counts didn’t last past my first blood check.
Vickie came back shaking her head and said, “You got to go to the hospital.”
That meant more transfusions and at least a week in the hospital.
It also meant I could be spending Halloween in the hospital.
Back to the transplant ward I went.
The first week past and my counts were still low.
I was also building an anti-body that was fighting the blood and platelet transfusions. Finding blood that my body would accept was now going from not just my blood type but to a four point matching system. I need four points and the blood banks couldn’t find it.
Mark wouldn’t leave my side, except to go to school and work, and when he had to, my dad would be there with me.
They were like a tag team.
My dad would leave around seven or eight.
Mark had snuck a board the width of the chair into my room and hidden it in my closet. At night he would stick the board between two chairs and sleep holding my hand.
One night we were watching the Saturday Night Live Presidential Special. The lights were off and only the TV lit my room. He looked over at me and said, “this is exactly what we’d be doing if we were at home.”
“Yeah, but you’d be in bed with me.”
“Scooch over,” he said and climbed into my hospital bed with me.
The nurse tried to shoo him out, when she came in to check my vitals, but he wouldn’t leave me…
He wouldn’t leave me.
