Living on a prayer

I’m NPO again this morning. We are all fairly confident that the steroids are working so we can stop the bleeding in order to do do the procedure that will let me breath so I can return to the treatment that might kill the cancer so I can go home to the house that Jack built.

I’m glad I have this confidence, because Night Ninja Nancy has taken the initiative to move my water and kind bar out of reach. I woke up in the morning with no memory of this happening. It’s not like I was going to eat them! I was just looking!

We start with the benadryl, wise as we are now. We take the steroids and give them time to settle in. We pull out the fourth package of platelets this week and run a really slow drip.

Labs comes in to take my sample. “good luck,” I say, before I start my shpiel, and this is half sarcastic and half not because I don’t want the pain of a poorly executed poke.

“No problem. We’ll just make a small prick on your fingertip.”

“You can do that?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re just taking a few measurements, not like those other draws.”

“Why haven’t we been doing this all along?”

“That is a lot of blood.”

“Oh… We forgot to mention that my platelets are low. Really low. Yeah, I guess that’s why we haven’t been doing this all along.”

Several good friends and 3 pieces of swanky Halloween decor later, we get the results. My dear friends, my platelet counts is 11 thousand, lower than yesterday afternoon.

It is now 3 PM and I can eat.

In the middle of chicken strips, canned Mandarin oranges, and honey mustard-covered whatever- overcooked-vegetable-I-ordered-this-time, my son’s principal arrives.

This is going either really well or really poorly, but she’s carrying a paper bag, so I’m not panicking yet.

She brings out a fleece blanket that my sons’ 7th grade class made. Then she shows me the video of them praying the rosary while they tie the knots.

I cry. I have barely cried this whole time because I’ve been so busy telling this hilarious, life or death, multi faceted story or spending my free moments reformatting grammar tests, that I have not grieved at all.

But this blanket is more valuable to me than anyone understands because my boys do not talk to me about their lives. I have taken to asking the other parents of kids in their class to spy on them for me, because they sure as hell won’t talk about the cancer.

And their classmates all know about the cancer but they’re in 7th grade. They don’t know what to say. My boys don’t know how to answer. But they can do this for me and that is enough.

I’m waiting for one of these secret agent spy moms to arrive when MRI shows up to take me down. These people are harder to get an appointment with than a pediatric dental office that takes Medicaid. I don’t even get send her a text when they’re pulling my bedding off.

If you’re familiar with 7th grade craft projects or MRI machines, you know where this is going.

In their unfailing wisdom as teenagers, the class did not take off the safety pins on the blanket. I arrive at the machine, and the tech asks, “what are these?”

… “ferrous materials…” I answer, recalling the big warning sign on the door that says “No ferrous (metal) beyond this point.

We start pulling them out. Even from 4 feet away, you can feel the tug of the machine lifting them out of your fingers. The other warning sign says “Machines Always On.”

“Did we get them all?” she asks

I don’t actually know how many there are. “If the blanket starts flying away, we’ll know we didn’t.”

MRI Tech Barbara does not appreciate my jokes like my new besty Neal.

After 30 minutes of lying very still and being unable to appreciate the Guns n Roses station I requested because the machine was too loud, my session is finished and I get back upstairs. My friend went back home. Shift change is finished.

And it is past room service hours.

So my nurse and Latisha pull miracles out of their rainbow tooshes and get me a hot dinner.

This morning, the manager dropped off a piece of paper to vote for the most helpful nurses on staff. Night Ninja Nancy took my water. She does not get a circle. Latisha got me scrubs and a grilled cheese sandwich. She gets a circle.