Bows and Marrows

My son asked me the other night if my “blood cell factory” was working again, and that reminded me of this blog post – one I meant to write long ago but didn’t. I just couldn’t.

Talking to children about illness, after all, is not something in which I am an expert. In fact, when the social worker gave me a book titled “When a Parent is Sick,” I instantly recoiled. We were not that family. And yet, devastatingly, we were.

The book was a knife to my stomach. It had ways to explain death and dying to children of every age. I nearly tossed it across the room. I was not going to tell my four-year-old that his mommy might die. That was simply not happening. But I didn’t want to lie to him either. He was old enough that he should know what’s going on. Besides, he is very clever and a master eavesdropper. Eventually he was going to pick up on what the grown-ups were saying.

So I sat him down to have “the cancer talk,” admittedly very angry at God that I had to have this talk at all. But we all have our roads to travel, and this was mine. I had found a video online from a children’s hospital that explained leukemia with all types of candies, and then I found another video that explained bone marrow (calling it a “blood cell factory”). My son looked from me to the videos, wide-eyed and nearly silent the entire time. Clearly he knew this was serious business, because for my son, being silent at any time is practically miraculous.

Finally I asked him if he had any questions.

“Do I have leukemia?” He asked. The mere thought of it tore my heart in half.

“No, baby, you don’t have leukemia. It’s very, very rare. You are not going to get leukemia.”

“Does Daddy have leukemia?”

“No, baby, Daddy doesn’t have it and he’s not going to get it.”

“Well then why did you get it?”

This was the part I was dreading. I could not explain to my son why I got leukemia because no one knew. I couldn’t explain to him how he could avoid it, or how I could avoid getting it again, because no one knew. It was infuriating. All I could tell him was that it was very rare. But how does a four-year-old understand “rare”? His mommy and daddy are his whole world. If Mommy can get it, then half the world can get it too.

But he seemed to accept my attempt at answers for the time being. We watched the videos again (upon request), and then he only had one more question:

“Mommy, when do you get your new bow and arrow?”

Well… I did my best. Clearly I couldn’t expect him to grasp it all. And I should have known that he would somehow turn it all into a weapons issue.

Come to think of it, I never did get any new weaponry along with my transplant. Perhaps now it’s time.

Random Hospital Hilarity

This blog would not be complete if I didn’t include at least one entry of random moments in the hospital that were simply too funny to keep to myself. I love people-watching to begin with, but people-watching at the hospital is pure gold. Sure, there are weird people everywhere, but people at the hospital are an entirely different level of weird. (You nurses especially know what I’m talking about.)

One glorious example happened when I was waiting to be picked up at the main entrance. First, there are No Smoking signs plastered all over the entrance, and the smoking area is across the parking lot. Second, people often violate this rule. Third, on this particular day, I was very cranky, and I have little tolerance for smoking at the best of times.

So… I was waiting for my ride and I smelled smoke. This made me irrationally upset and I immediately looked around for the culprit. I saw a woman smoking about three metres away from me, right underneath a No Smoking sign.

I went up to her, extremely annoyed at her disregard for the sign.

“Excuse me, lady,” I said, a tad too sharply. (Yes, I actually called her “lady.” Like I said, I was cranky.) “You cannot smoke here. There are tons of sick people waiting for rides and we are all inhaling your smoke. Besides that, you are standing right in front of a No Smoking sign.”

She half turned, but didn’t make eye contact, and said, “I’m blind. I can’t see the sign.”

Yes, this really happened. I had practically said, “Can’t you see the sign?” to a blind woman. I wanted to dissolve into the sidewalk. At least ten people had seen this go down, and I went from vigilante no-smoking enforcer to the woman taking a strip off a blind lady. It was mortifying. After I took a few seconds to recover, I helped her over to a different area where she could smoke (because God forbid she would actually put out her cigarette).

Not even five minutes later, a different woman came out of the entrance and asked me if I had a cigarette. I burst out laughing. I was at a hospital wearing a scarf on my head in forty-degree heat. I was clearly a cancer patient.

“Did you just ask me if I had a cigarette?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Yeah,” she snapped. (I guess I wasn’t the only cranky person that day.)

I laughed and gestured to my scarf. “Do I look like someone who should be smoking?”

She just stared at me blankly, still waiting for an answer. Clearly her observational skills needed some more development. So I directed her to go join the blind lady in the designated smoking area.

Not to be outdone by those two fabulous women was the young man in his twenties with whom I had the misfortune of riding the elevator. He was wearing a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, fully unzipped, with no shirt underneath. He had a sideways ball cap and matching sweatpants on, and a tube was popping out from the waistband of his sweatpants, running down his leg and straight into a bag of urine that was dangling from his ankle. In fact, his pant leg was hiked up so the bag was fully visible and hanging free. Yet he walked out of that elevator like he owned the place, pee bag or not.

He was going the same place I was, so I ended up following him outside where a group of friends was waiting for him. I have to wonder – if you are meeting some friends that are kind enough to visit you at the hospital, would you not go to a little trouble to hide your bag of pee? Quite the contrary, it seems. This young man immediately pointed out his urine to his friends (as if they could have missed it), and went on a very spicy rant about how the nurses kept telling him that he “didn’t know how to [insert gratuitous swearing] pee.”

This man was not letting the hospital wreck his swagger, I’ll give him that.

So there you have it. Nothing profound today, just random moments of hilarity from the hospital. If you are ever bored, or if you are a writer or actor searching for a new character, I would highly recommend the main entrance of any hospital. I am quite sure you will not be disappointed.