What Not to Say

I thought it might be helpful to put together a little guide for those of you who may come into contact with seriously ill or recovery friends or relatives. All of the things below have been said to me at one time or another. If you have said one of these things, don’t feel bad – it happens. I’m sure I’m guilty of a few of these myself. But now you can’t say you didn’t know better.

1. How was chemo? (Or even better: “How was the transplant?”)

It was awesome. Best time of my life. I didn’t have to cook, clean, take care of my kids, work out, have dates with my husband, go out with my friends, do my hair… it was like a vacation! Seriously, though, you already know it was awful, so don’t ask this question.

2. You look tired.

I’m sorry, you must have meant: “Can I get a you a coffee or tea?” Or, even better: “Can I clean your kitchen while you have a nap?”

3. If I got cancer, I would never have chemo. It’s so toxic.

Chemo is toxic?! So that’s why I lost twenty pounds and my hair fell out.

4. I know how you feel.

Unless you really do know how it feels to have a cancer diagnosis, steer clear of this one. Patients on steroids are known to be particularly grumpy, and, well, they’re on steroids. They might just kick your butt. So tread carefully.

5. Just try and be positive about it.

Cancer sucks. And of course we need to stay positive and be optimistic, but if your cancer-stricken friend is having a bad day and wants to rant and wail about how much it sucks, let her. Even better, rant and wail with her. Strange as it might sound, it actually really helps to have another person acknowledge how much cancer sucks. Yell it from the rooftops. Use some swear words. Smash some things. You’ll both feel better.

6. Don’t Push It

I’ve already been over this (see this entry). If we want to push it, we’ll push it. When we need to rest, we will. Trust us.

7. Do you have any plans for the summer?

A nurse at the local clinic (not a leukemia nurse) actually asked me this two weeks before I was scheduled for my bone marrow transplant. The idea of planning anything in the future once you’ve had a cancer diagnosis is paralyzing and incomprehensible. After I managed to stop laughing in a crazy-person sort of way, I told her that yes, I had big plans to survive.

8. Can I see your (bald) head?

Oh sure! Snap some pics and post them on Facebook and Instagram. I love being bald, that’s why I show it off all day long. Oh wait, I don’t.

9. It’s just terrible, everything you went through.

Saying this once is ok, saying it over and over again is not. We don’t need to be reminded how terrible our experience was. In fact, we don’t want to be reminded of it at all. A better option: tell us about your annoying boyfriend or your crazy aunt or your leaking roof. It may seem odd to vent to your sick friend, but sometimes it’s really nice to get the focus off the illness.

10. You’re lucky you’re so skinny.

That’s not what I would call it. Sure, being skinny has its perks, but I’d take back those twenty pounds in a heartbeat if it meant I didn’t have to live through cancer. To be safe, never ever call a cancer survivor “lucky.” Unless of course they win the lottery. Then it’s ok.

Where's My Pony?

I have learned a few things in these first few weeks of my happiness project. One, it is hard to be happy when your kids consistently wake you up at 5am. Two, I need goals in order to be happy. Three, nobody buys you a pony just because you had cancer.

Being a full-time mom is rewarding and productive, of course, and I don’t mean to take away from that. But it is also repetitive and crazy-making (all you loopy moms know what I mean). I need something outside of motherhood, something that is just mine, something to work towards that makes me feel like a productive member of society, rather than just a sick person cashing disability cheques.

In my experience, not many people talk about the aftermath of cancer. Six or seven months after treatment, if all is going well, most people outside your closest circle will sort of forget that you almost died. People treat you normally again, you have to get up in the middle of the night for your kids again, you can’t sleep in anymore, and no one cooks you dinner. You are “better.” You keep waiting for that cancer card to pay you back big time (it must be good for something, right?). But there’s no pony, there’s no kitten, there’s no all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii. There’s just regular life. You are surviving, living life, taking your medicine. And then, one day, you realize that you almost died.

Our society is mired in what an acquaintance of mine called the “tyranny of positivity.” We are entrenched in this mindset that if we allow negative thoughts to occur, we are inviting calamity, as if we have that much power. So we push sad and angry and scary thoughts to the side, convinced that by staying positive we can cure ourselves. Then, when the immediate crisis is over, when life gets back to normal and we no longer look like aliens, and people start treating us like regular human beings, everything that we’ve pushed aside and refused to think about comes crashing down.

The aftermath.

I almost ceased existing. I almost left my children motherless. I almost became ashes in the ground. But I didn’t. And so I should be happy, right? I should be immensely grateful and I should be full of bliss that I can spend every day with my kids. Knowing that stress fuels disease, I should be totally Zen, full of calm and peaceful energy. Right?

But surviving cancer doesn’t automatically turn you into a better, more enlightened person (I really hoped it would). I am besieged by flashbacks. I am on edge a lot. I get frustrated with my kids. I can’t watch hospital shows. I feel sick when a child loses a parent in a movie. I cry. I thought that I had weathered my cancer journey quite handily, so I am a little unnerved to have it come back with such a vengeance. This does not fit in with my happiness project at all.

So I have to ask, where’s my pony? What do I get for all of this suffering?

Well, I guess I get another chance to get it right. I am not automatically more Zen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t strive to be. I didn’t die of a sudden aneurysm or a car crash – I kissed death and lived to tell the tale. So I get to try again. Some people say that cancer’s a gift, and just so we’re clear, I want to punch those people in the throat. But if you survive cancer, it does give you a second chance, a chance to start over, correct mistakes, and to be better.

But to be perfectly honest, on some days I’d rather just have the pony.

Paying Attention

This is the first month of my happiness project, and I decided to follow Gretchen Rubin’s lead by choosing energy as a theme, hoping that the results will bleed into the rest of the year.

I already have the exercise aspect handled, so I won’t go into that (though if you are doing this project too and don’t exercise, I would highly recommend tackling that first). I am approaching energy in several ways, including going to bed earlier, cutting out caffeine and alcohol (for the most part – I can’t quite give up that Saturday night glass of wine), drinking more water, going vegetarian, and making my super-green-super-clean-super-healthy smoothies every morning. I must admit I have a bit of an obsession with my green smoothies. While I was going through chemo I never felt like eating breakfast, so I would sip on a smoothie packed with berries, spinach and kale (the berries overwhelm the kale flavour, I swear). Then for a while, out of laziness, I abandoned the smoothies, but I always felt strangely guilty about it. My blender sat empty and accusingly on the counter. I felt as if, somehow, the consumption of blended green goodness was my vanguard against a relapse.

Of course, while I know that green smoothies will likely not be the thing that makes or breaks my health, they do deliver a pretty strong punch of nutrients and healthy energy, and they give me an extra serving of greens that I would otherwise not have (because really, who wants spinach or kale for breakfast?). And a body recovering from chemo needs all the nutrients it can get. So I’m back on the smoothie train.

Another thing I am especially focused on to clear my brain and improve my energy is clutter. I find mess and clutter to be extremely draining, and I cannot relax in a messy house.

The problem with this is that I am terrible about putting things away. I take a week to unpack a suitcase, choosing instead to live out of it until it sort of unpacks itself. I do the same thing with clean laundry. I leave clothes and papers and books lying around everywhere. But I hate it when things are lying around everywhere. Clutter makes me crazy, though I have this irritating tendency to create it. I am certainly not the only one at fault – my children are mess makers, as children usually are, and my husband has a knack for scattering mail and bills and magazines on any available flat surface. But as the adult who spends the most time at home, I am by default the main “house keeper,” and so the clutter control falls to me.

But what to do? I am not by nature a tidy person, but I love it when things are tidy. My solution is usually to cram anything into a drawer, any drawer, so that I at least don’t have to look at it. This results, obviously, in crammed and messy drawers that make me nearly cry with despair every time I open them.

And then, in the shower one morning, I grasped the very obvious solution. Mindfulness. I simply must pay more attention. You see, I am a fairly absent-minded person. In fact, while I was doing my PhD, my husband used to claim that I was the perfect “absent minded professor.” I realize now that I am messy because I ignore things, I don’t pay attention, and I don’t put things where they belong. So, instead of walking past that pile of clothes six times in one day, I shall take the five minutes and put it away. Instead of lamenting that my kids’ gloves and boots are all over the hall, I will quietly (and cheerfully, of course) put them away. Or better yet, I will enlist them in the task. Gretchen Rubin refers to this, in part, as her one-minute rule. If something will take less than one minute to complete, she’ll do it right away. To this I’ve added my two-minute rule. If I have a two-minute pause where I’m doing nothing, I quickly gather up things and put them where they belong. I don’t have big chunks of time throughout the day, but I have certainly have two minute windows. My house is not pristine after these efforts, but I can attest that it is certainly less messy.

I also did a trip to Ikea and stocked up on baskets and various boxes to organize our avalanche of belongings. It is mid-January and I still haven’t actually organized any closets, but it’s coming, I’m sure of it. Maybe I’ll tackle a closet right after I write this. Maybe.

Finally, I’ve taken Rubin’s advice to “act the way I want to feel.” That is, when I’m feeling tired in the early afternoon but still need to entertain my kids, instead of lying amidst the Duplo mumbling “I’m so tired,” I’ll do something especially energetic, like taking them outside or building a fort of blankets. This seems counter-intuitive, but it really does work. The activity requires me to wake up, I have more fun, and in the end I’m less tired than if I had lain on the couch inventing games that don’t require movement.

So, with all of these changes, am I remarkably more energetic? Well, I am doing more, so I’m having more fun, but I am expending more energy. I haven’t quite found the right balance. I was complaining to a friend recently that I had been super tired this week, right after telling her that I had just added two more runs per week and had run 11 kilometres that day. She looked at me quizzically: “You don’t have a very good gauge of when to stop, do you?”

I don’t. I never have. But I’m working on it.

My Happiness Project

Me: I don’t think my pre-New Year’s resolution is working.

Hubby: What? To be more pleasant?

Me: Yeah.

Hubby: No. It’s not working.

Happiness has been on my mind a lot lately. Apparently, it has not been on my face.

Christmas, my most favourite time of the year, is now over, leaving scraps of wrapping, fallen ornaments, and bits of Lego all over my house. I’ll clean it up eventually. But for now, it’s resolution time, and that means looking back over the ruins of 2012.

Only, I don’t particularly want to look back. The only things back there for me are heartbreak, nausea, vomiting, and more heartbreak. Of course, there were lots of lovely people doing lovely things, but mostly, when I look back at 2012, I feel like throwing up. I remember feeling like I was dying (because I was). I remember wondering how my children would go on without me. I remember hospital food, and IV drips, and lots of pain. I don’t want to remember any of that. So, there will be no reflecting on 2012. There will only be moving forward.

Which brings me to resolutions. Seeing as 2012 was by far the worst year of my life, I am hoping to make 2013 the best. And that means finally doing what I love (rather than what’s “legitimate” or “respectable”). It means being gentler, more patient, and ideally, funnier (because who doesn’t want to be funnier?). Most importantly, it means being happier.

Among the many books that I have devoured recently, I just read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. While Rubin did not wait for a life crisis to inspire her to be happier, it seems that I did. I look back over the last few years and see a stressed out young mother doing a PhD who drank way too much coffee and had way too little fun. I see a woman who hardly smiled, rarely laughed, and was far too impatient with her young son. I’m sure that’s not what everyone saw – I kept my friends, so I can’t have been too miserable, but I do know that I wasn’t terribly happy. And then I self-destructed.

Disappointingly, I’m still not that happy. I mean, I’m happy to be alive and my marriage is good and I’m grateful for all the things that I have, so in the long-view I’m certainly happy, but on a day-to-day basis I don’t score too well. I don’t skip and sing around the house. I waste too much time on Facebook. I’m very easily irritated. I readily admit that I can be snappish. I love my children but they also drive me absolutely out of my mind. I don’t do most of the activities that I find really fun. I’ve also been noticing lately that I get accused of being grumpy even when I’m not, which makes me think that I’m not exuding the cheerful personality that I would like to have. My doctor pointed out that at least some of this irritability can be attributed to some (permanent) side effects of radiation, which made me even crankier because it means I have very little control over the situation. Was I destined to be grumpy forever?

I decided that this just wasn’t acceptable. I want to be happier and I want to be happier now. So 2013 is the year to do it. Up until now, I’ve just been trying to survive. Happiness or self-fulfillment had no place in my day-to-day try-not-to-die regimen.

But I just read a different book (Wild by Cheryl Strayed) in which the author’s mother dies when the author is 22, which scatters her remaining family and puts her into a downward spiral of mourning, drugs and promiscuity for years. I pictured my darling daughter trying to cope without me, having her wedding and babies without me there, and I decided that I must do every possible thing within my power to stay alive for her and my son. I will go vegan and organic, I will drink green smoothies for breakfast, swallow boatloads of supplements and suck back horrible tasting Vitamin C gels. I will eliminate stressful endeavors (very hard for a type-A personality). I will meditate. I will run (but not too much). And I will do my best to be happy. Because happier people are healthier, and they definitely make better parents.

Following Rubin’s lead, I’ve decided to break the upcoming year into twelve resolution themes, one per month, such as energy, marriage, and parenting. Within those themes will be specific tasks and goals that I will try to accomplish to make me more energetic, more loving, and, well, happier. The idea is that by having these ongoing resolutions throughout the year, I will be more focused on choosing happiness whenever possible. The plan will remind me to choose fun activities as often as I can, to say no to things that are draining, to keep my house tidy (clutter makes me very grumpy), to clean out my closets, and to generally smile more.

We always say: “Life is too short...” Well, life really is too short to be grumpy or unhappy or bored. So for the next few months I will be blogging about finding happiness after cancer. Maybe some of you will feel inclined to join me.

Don't Push It

I begin this blog entry with a sigh. I understand everyone’s concern. Yes, I almost died, therefore I should take it easy. Rest is important. I get it. But to be honest, if I hear “don’t push it” one more time, I might just freak out.

See, when I say that I am running five kilometres only five months post-transplant, most non-runners are amazed and, often, aghast. Five whole kilometres?! How can this be? To many non-runners, this is an unfathomable distance to run. Many people train for months to accomplish a 5k running race. So for them, it’s a big deal and a hugely strenuous effort. It makes sense, then, for them to think that I am pushing it.

My running friends, however, who have logged hundreds of kilometres with me, will understand why five kilometres is really just baby steps. Five kilometres is me not pushing it. I used to pound back half-marathons every single weekend without a second thought. I would click off five-minute kilometres as my easy, resting pace. Now, when it takes me over seven minutes to run one single kilometre, I am horrified. (Yes, running pals, it’s true. Seven minutes.) So for me, I am barely going faster than walking pace. I hardly feel like I’m running. I don’t even break a sweat. And then someone tells me “well…don’t push it.”

The same could be said for weight training. I recently joined a gym again, upon the realization that all the good intentions in the world would never materialize into me lifting weights at home. For four months I had been telling my husband that I would strength train at home, transforming my stick arms into bulging biceps and my spindly legs into trunks of steel. And for four months I never did. So I joined a gym with childcare and now I go twice and week and pump iron. I use the term loosely and with much glee. This skinny body “pumping iron” is hilarious. I couldn’t push it even if I wanted to. I do the machine circuits, lifting a fraction of what I once could do. I try to do push-ups and collapse onto my face. Baby steps.

On my first day at the gym, I was warming up on the elliptical beside a woman who struck fear into my heart. As I stood on my elliptical, not pushing it, she looked like she was attacking her machine. I was waiting for her to mutter, “Die, Elliptical, DIE!!” I didn’t dare giggle.

On my second day at the gym, I went to a “Bodypump” class, which is essentially a guided weight-lifting session with wild music and lots of excessive cheering. I had no idea what I was doing. When I got in, all the women were grabbing barbells and sliding weights onto them. I have never used a barbell in my life. So I did what any observant person would do – I copied and dutifully slid on some weights, then used the clampy thing to hold them on. I looked around me and tried to gauge how much weight I should put on the bar. That woman looked retirement age, so I could probably lift more than her (I couldn’t). That other woman looked really skinny, so she couldn’t be much stronger than me (she was). I grabbed all the other equipment that the other women were grabbing, plus a few extra things just in case and then music began.

Lord have mercy. I clearly put too much weight on my bar. The retired woman was kicking my rear end. I tried to find a good time to pause and take off some of the plates without looking like an idiot, but there was no pause. So I suffered through. Then the music stopped and the clanking of weight plates was everywhere. What was happening? I looked around in a panic – were they making their bars lighter or heavier? Lighter, thank goodness. But how much lighter? Since I had no idea what was coming, I had no idea what to do. So I guessed, again, and got it wrong, again.

Clearly I don’t know my own strength.

But then I told someone else this story, thinking it was pretty funny, and instead of encouraging me or being impressed that I even tried a weight-lifting class, that person said, you guessed it, “well…just don’t push it.”

But what I’ve realized is this: survivors push it. That’s how we survive. We push through chemo, we push the odds, we push our doctors, we push for treatment, we push against treatment. We don’t sit around waiting for death. We run from it. For five whole kilometres.

When I had pneumonia, I didn’t push anything. I sat on the couch or in the hospital and watched TV. I did nothing. And, within days, I became depressed and felt like a sick loser.

And that happened because running is not just exercise. It’s not just about getting your heart rate up and breathing hard. Running is transformative, it banishes depression, it makes you think that anything is possible, it makes you feel part of the living again. And that’s why I push it.

Let’s be honest. Runners, myself included, don’t always want to run. We don’t love it all the time. It’s cold outside. It’s snowing. I have an aversion to wind whipping in my face just like most of you. Most of the time I’d rather just have a hot bath and a nap. But where would that get me? Yes, I need rest, but I also need exercise, even more than the average person does: survivors who exercise (vigorously) have a much lower risk of relapse.

So I will push it, thank you very much. And I will keep running for my life.

Sick Loser

Some days it’s hard not to feel like a sick loser.

I like to think that I’ve been fairly plucky and optimistic throughout this cancer calamity, but then I got pneumonia and found myself back in a hospital bed, getting IV antibiotics.

And I felt like a sick loser.

Now, this is certainly no judgment on other sick people, though I’m sure they feel the same way at times. Nor is this a call for Facebook platitudes that say: “You are SUCH a winner!” Please refrain. I know that I am not actually a loser. But when you find yourself back in that hospital bed with the IV swoosh-swooshing and the hum of nurses giving chemo or blood transfusions to other unfortunate patients, you cannot help feeling, once again, ejected from normal life.

Like many other Type A overachiever personalities, I had big plans for myself before cancer. Plans to do Big Things and accomplish Important Stuff. But the problem is, I was only in the middle of doing Important Stuff when cancer struck. I hadn’t actually done anything notable yet. In my mind, anyway.

Sure, I’ve had two babies and so far they are turning out ok, so that’s certainly significant, but when your circle of acquaintances is chock full of highly educated, super overachievers too, then watching re-runs of Love It or List It for months on end is guaranteed to make you feel a little short of amazing.

What I mean is, I’m not a doctor fixing cleft palates, or a lawyer fighting for human rights, or a refugee camp worker giving rations to pregnant women. I’m not in the poor neighbourhoods of Ecuador interviewing girls on the street (which is what I would have been doing right now, if cancer hadn’t struck).

Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do something Great. With huge restrictions on my traveling, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to finish my research, or if I even want to. I don’t know what I want to do when my health becomes predictable enough to actually work again. It’s really hard to see past cancer when you’ve been sick for nearly a year. I don’t even remember what my normal self feels like.

And that is certainly part of the problem. I have never shied away from hard work. When my high school drama teacher asked me to do a scene for an assignment, I did an entire one-act play. When I had a choose a country for my master’s fieldwork, I picked Colombia. When I needed to decide on a long-term career, I picked a PhD. Hard work is what I do.

Until I became a sick loser.

Now by the end of the day I can barely muster up the energy to cook dinner or sweep my floors. Change the world? I don't even change the toilet paper rolls. Everything I can think of doing is just too hard.

Finish my PhD? Way too much work.

Become a yoga teacher? Too much time.

Publish a novel? Too daunting.

Start my own business? Too complicated.

Become a professional trail runner? Too much training.

Become a professional clown? Too much makeup.

Become an actor? Too many auditions, too much work, too much everything.

Now I am not a lazy person, but cancer seems to have sucked all the drive out of me. Anything with the potential to make an impact in this world takes a lot of effort, effort that I do not have. And yes, of course I am recovering and of course I need to give myself time. But I have no idea how much time I have left.

So am I destined to be a sick loser forever? I sure hope not. But for now, being anything else seems like too much work.

Parenting Through

As I sit here reflecting (in the thirty minutes that I’ve luxuriously set aside for writing today), I have been trying to imagine what my recovery would be like if I wasn’t a mom. Do not misunderstand me – my children have been an enormous reason for my quick recovery and my ongoing will to survive – but I have a sense that the average cancer patient with young children goes "back to work” a lot sooner than the ones without children.

I will give you an example of what I mean. For the first two months after my bone marrow transplant, I slept until at least eight o’clock every morning. I had a nap every day, then I walked, wrote, read books, watched movies… sometimes I even managed some yoga or strength work. For the most part, I was a total sloth, and I needed to be. When the chemo and radiation are strong to almost kill you, well, they really do almost kill you. I spent as much time as I could with the kids, but after a while their noise and enthusiasm exhausted me and back to bed I went. I could afford to rest this much only because we had a full-time nanny and my parents were in town helping out (bless their exhausted hearts).

Those of you who are cancer survivors may be familiar with this phrase: “For the next year, recovery is your full-time job.”

Well… I hate to break it my doc, but starting two and half months post-transplant, when my nanny went back to school and my mom flew home, parenting became my full-time job. The doctors are very firm about not “working,” but they say nothing about parenting. And in my opinion, chasing after two energetic munchkins for ten hours every day is a lot more demanding than sitting at a desk for eight hours (and I’m not just ranting, I’ve done both. This is a very scientific comparison.)

So, even with part-time nanny help that breaks the bank, I am now up at six thirty every day. I make breakfast, pack lunches, sweep floors, put away toys, read books, end squabbles, drive to preschool, take the kids on nature walks, go to museums, go to the library, do laundry, make dinner and much, much more. I even made detailed spider and mummy cookies for my son's preschool Halloween party, and upon arrival realized that I had made the most elaborate cookies of the bunch. Now, I realize this is par for the course for any stay-at-home mom, but it isn’t for a recovering bone marrow recipient. There is not much room for “recovery” in this routine.

And let's add this little vignette: my son goes to a cooperative preschool, which means that each parent has a “duty day” every month. On this day, the parent is at the preschool for the whole three hours helping out. The duty parent must also bring the snack, serve it and clean it up, and then clean up the whole preschool (vacuum, sweep, bathrooms, etc.) at the end of the day. So there I was last week, exhausted from another night of insomnia, playing with a room full of four-year-olds, and then strapping my daughter to my back so that I could do all the cleaning afterward. I don’t even clean my own house right now, but there I was sweeping up sparkly sand with a twenty-five pound toddler on my back. One of the other moms, a kind soul who vaguely knows what I’ve been through, stayed with me and helped sweep. I must have looked as exhausted as I felt, despite trying to keep a brave and happy face.

I say this all not to complain – Lord knows there are people that have it tougher than I do. I do not, for example, have to cross the raging Mekong river on a precarious tightrope to catch dinner for my family (we’ve been watching a lot of BBC’s Human Planet around here). I simply share my stories to illustrate how different “recovery” looks when you have young children. I am sure there are thousands of women out there who have done the same. We are all “back at work” much earlier than the doctors prescribe, but it is rarely recognized as such.

Perhaps what I am not seeing is the recovery borne out of necessity. Perhaps if I were still allowed to sit around and watch movies all day, I would feel sort of listless and maybe even a little depressed at my lack of usefulness. Instead, there is little time for whining or even much self-reflection in my day. I am needed. I am wanted. I am busy. I often forget that I am in recovery and then become frustrated when I am so tired by the afternoon. In the brief respites I do have, I’m either napping or looking up recipes that might appeal to my ever-pickier four-year-old. By the time the kids are in bed, I flop on the couch like a fish that gave up fighting the net. Thank God I have an amazing husband who does all the clean up in the evenings. Otherwise we would all be neck-deep in dirty dishes, crumbs and leftovers, and, most likely, mice. No thanks.

Of course, while there are many days when I am proud of my ability to “parent through,” I do worry that the lack of adequate rest will affect my recovery. Like any cancer survivor, I am plagued daily with a fear that those nasty rogue cells will come back. I then fantasize a recovery without children, where I could get the rest I need – sleeping in, leisurely runs every day, hours to write, daily yoga, endless movies and novels…. It seems like heaven. Until I realize that in this scenario my children would never be there. You just can’t have it both ways.

The fact is, my kids give me the most powerful reason to live. And even though my son literally never stops talking, and my tiny daughter thinks it’s hilarious to smack me in the face, and even though the two of them can make a mess faster than you can say Tasmanian devil, I still would not trade places with a childless survivor for a second.

Well, maybe for second. Ok, maybe just for one day. But then I want them back.