Whoosh

Today was fine. Long and boring and exhausting the way that standing around an airport doing absolutely nothing all day can be exhausting. And that’s what we did: nothing really, except roll spirals of Play-Doh and paint with watercolors (I on paper, Austin on his legs).

But he was a trooper. Not a single peep out of him when the IV was placed in his hand. I’m pretty amazed by how he handles these physical invasions, minor though they may be. He doesn’t even squeak when he gets his weekly blood draw, and the IV, which I was nervous for, was quick and easy. Funny how his brother screams every time I get near him with nail clippers. Oh well, to each his own.

The blood took seven-and-a-half hours and will hopefully last us six weeks. It blows me away to think we used to have to be there almost every day, sitting through transfusion after transfusion. When you’re so deep in the trenches of cancer warfare, it doesn’t seem as if you’ll ever emerge, as if you’ll ever again live like a normal human being. And then, sometimes without warning, you come out the other side and return to the land of the living, and it’s almost as if it never happened. That way of life that you were forced to adopt as your own suddenly feels completely foreign.

Life once was normal and then, whoosh, it was anything but. And then whoosh, by an incredible stroke of luck or strength or something, life is suddenly normal again.

We’ll take it.