Early Day

Tuesday is Early Day. Braedan gets let out of school a full hour earlier on Tuesdays than any other day of the week, as that time is designated for teacher collaboration and professional development. This small fact was the driving force behind everything I did today and even back into last night.

The surgery went well; they were able to replace the PICC line safely and without complication. It lasted just more than an hour and then Austin was back in my arms, safe and sound and extremely grouchy. He spent the rest of the evening in a tizzy, devouring the one string cheese I’d brought from home and then refusing all other nourishment, crying off and on for no clear reason. The only thing to soothe him was my voice singing lullabyes in his ear, which is sort of ironic if you’ve ever heard me sing!

The night was long since he didn’t start chemo until well after midnight. This didn’t impact him much except for hourly diaper checks and the noise of his IV machine beeping each time one particular drug had finished and another one was due, but it impacted me quite a bit.

I had made clear to many people the night before that I planned to pick Braedan up from school at 2:05. Could I have arranged for him to go home with someone else? Certainly. That wouldn’t have taken more than a quick phone call or text message. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’d told him we would be there. And I’d already told him we would be home the night before, so there are only so many promises you can make and break to your six-year-old child before you start to damage his psyche. He needed to trust me and I needed to be there.

So, throughout the night I kept waking from my fitful sleep to see if Austin had started his scheduled blood transfusion, which I feared might hold us up. And each time, I fell back asleep anxiously readjusting the hours in my mind that we had left until we’d be released.

Then morning came and the three-hour transfusion still hadn’t started for a while host of reasons — all perfectly good ones but none that had been shared with me when I’d asked multiple people about the schedule the day before. One medication had to be administered a set number of hours after the last chemo drug but also after the set number of hours of post-hydration, none of which could be administered at the same time as his blood transfusion, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And then suddenly, they decided he needed an abdominal ultrasound to take a “quick look” at his kidney to make sure the blood in his urine was indeed the fault of the chemo and not some other more alarming change in that most sacred organ.

“Fine,” I said. “But I have to be home to pick up my son.” Yes, yes, yes, everyone assured me I would be. Our nurse made phone calls, demanded schedule changes, assigned someone the special duty of walking us down to the basement for the ultrasound so we didn’t have to wait for “transport” to escort us (slowly). Said nurse promptly got bad-mouthed by the woman in the basement whose schedule was changed to accommodate us.

Rush here, rush there. The ultrasound was good, better than good even. I haven’t seen the full report but the doctor used phrases like “normal kidney tissue” and “an improvement over the last images,” so that was music to my ears. But my ears didn’t matter; my eyes were on the clock. Finally, we were back in our room, with that bag of dark red fluid dripping into Austin’s brand new PICC line. The bags were packed and the car was loaded and we were almost, almost there.

The transfusion finished at 1:30, just in the nick of time, and as our nurse unhooked Austin to send us on our merry way, he coughed. A big nasty, slightly wet cough. “Is that new?” she asked. “Yeah, just in the past few days,” I said, immediately wondering why I hadn’t just lied. She wanted to listen and then have a doctor listen just in case, just in case, just to be sure that they hadn’t pumped his poor puffy body so full of fluids that some had seeped into his lungs.

This nurse is one of our favorites: we adore her and she adores us and she’d already gotten chewed out for trying to ensure I would pick my big boy up on time. So I stood silently by, in my coat with my hands on the stroller, and watched as she and the doctor had to unbundle Austin and listen, just one more time, just one more time, to his breathing.

But … all was well. We zoomed out the door and made it home in time to drop off the car, find our spring coats and walk down the street to be standing casually in the sun as Braedan dashed out the door. The rest of the afternoon was spent maneuvering around the mounds of slush on the school playground and then digging the boys’ bikes out of the garage. Once I located both helmets, they carefully steered a clear path through the snow to go riding down the street.

We made it. On Early Day and all.