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October 6, 2005
Being a Mother....
You never can fully rest with a child fighting cancer. You never can fully let that breath out because if you do it's guaranteed something else will come up. This is what happened when Dante finally went away to college. I foolishly believed once he got there i could let that "breath" out but I was wrong. He wasn't even there a week when he took ill had a bad bout of nausea and had to be rushed to the emergency room. I got the message from the doctor as i was literally coming into the door of my home and had to turn right back around and run to penn station and try and catch a train into Philadelphia.
I wound up getting to the 30th street station at 11PM that night...i got up to see dante not too long after...although it was real dicey that time of night around there not many people and a lot of highway type streets....i toyed with the idea of walking to the hospital from there but decided finally to get a cab...praying that i would not get stranded with no way back home...
I got to the hospital and they had him in ICU...he looked like he had lost about at least ten pounds...he's never really looked sad when i have seen him but it took me back to the summer of 2004 when he was in icu all summer...I looked at all the iv machines and the a-line machine and felt like i had been swept up into some horrible deja vu. He was really sleepy when i first got there and basically kept nodding off although he did wake up long enough to see i was there....
Since there were no extra "beds" in the ICU unit, they only could give me some blankets and i had to fashion a bed of sorts out of two chairs...which in hindsight i need not have bothered with....Dante's A-line monitor kept going off and the way the chair was positioned i would wake up staring at the numbers and feel my heart pounding in my chest - i felt like i was going to have a heart attack myself a few times waking up and seeing pressure readings of 255 over 130 - needless to say sleep was not really going to happen that night.
They put him on a liquid diet later the next day which he tolerated well and they decided to then later that day if he had no more nausea to discharge him. Which ultimately they did.
I dropped him by his dorm room and also went by 7 eleven with him to grab a quick bite and then i headed back out of philly and back into the city....i got back that night after nine and i turned around and went to work the very next day. No sleep till brooklyn...no sleep in brooklyn for that matter either.
Saturday was Innocuous by comparision. Nothing much was going on. Until i got a call late saturday evening that Dante had brought himself to the emergency room again because of nausea....at this point now im thinking how the hell am i even going to get up there...turns out my mother wanted to go so i got a ride with her...and this time they had him in a room on the unit.
He actually looked better this time than he had the last time...although again those iv machines....i guess i will never like those things given the circumstances...
I took my mother by his dorm...i had to go pick up his Thalidomide because the hospital's policy prohibits them from dispensing this medication to patients and so i had to go get his from his room so that he could continue to take it.
We stayed most of the day and headed home that evening...again i got home after nine and got up the very next day to head into work.
I say it that way because i got so little rest in the midst of all this that it was inevitable that i would come down with something as my immune system always takes a major hit when i don't get any rest...on top of which i really haven't been eating properly at all...I try but when you have no appetite...or you are rushing frantically trying to get to your sick child....eating seems superfluous....
Posted by digitalmuse at October 6, 2005 11:52 AM
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