I need and want to do some writing, but I can't write about what's happening with Adrianne and Carla in Montana, and it seems wrong somehow to write about normal everyday things when something is happening to some of my closest friends--and therefore to me as well, in a less intensive way--that is going to, that has already, changed their lives forever. And not for the better. But maybe what we all need is a little dose of normal, so I will write a bit.
Eric is sleeping. I have a bad cold, which is no surprise given the combination of dry airplane air, dry hotel air, and stress I've experienced in the past week. David and Scott are on their way to the True Spirit Conference, somewhere in the greater Washington, D. C., area. Juno is about ten days into chemotherapy, taking one drug that is so toxic it can't be handled with bare hands ("but I'm supposed to make her eat it?" I find myself thinking as I snap on my rubber gloves) and another drug that makes her pee so often that we are having to get up in the night and let her out to avoid accidents in the house. We have transferred her care from the Animal Cancer Clinic in Rochester, two hours away, to the MSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital in East Lansing, and have chosen a chemotherapy protocol that is less intensive and less expensive ($800 versus $4000) than the full University of Wisconsin Protocol they wanted us to do at the ACC. Also less effective: 70% remission rate instead of 90%, 6 months average survival instead of 12-14. But it feels proportional, it feels less stressful for all of us. When the vet at MSU offered us this protocol, David and I both knew instantly it was the right choice for us, and for Juno. We hope for the six months; if she can have a spring and a summer, one more spring and one more summer, I will be glad. In the meantime, I am glad for every day. Yesterday the dogs were outside for a long time--they went so long without barking I got worried that a gate had been left open and they were roaming the neighborhood. But when I looked out, they were all lying together on the deck, basking in the sun and watching the birds and squirrels in the yard. Juno turned her head when she heard me at the back door, and she had a big grin on her face. "Lounging in the sun with my packmates," she seemed to be saying. "What could be better?"
Mr. Fuzzy Punkin awakes. I can hear him on the monitor going "La-la-la-la-la-la-la." I bet he needs a new outfit; he's been wearing a cloth diaper for almost four hours, but he was so sound asleep when we got back from errands I didn't want to disturb him by doing a whole diaper change.
On Wednesday, he went with us to take Juno to the vet in the morning, and the appointment lasted so deep into his usual nap time that he went to sleep in the car and stayed asleep through his chiropractic adjustment. It was very funny to see him getting his adjustment while completely limp.
He is now downstairs with me. Amazingly enough, he did not need a new outfit.
Yesterday at playgroup, Yvonne was showing off one of the center's new toys, a nylon playhouse that with a few quick velcro maneuvers becomes a car. The toddler-age babies, the target audience for the playhouse, were unimpressed. But Eric found it so exciting that he dropped the Fisher-Price toy phone that had been fascinating him for the previous 22 minutes and starting inch-worming his way across the floor to get to it. I was in his way, sitting on the floor with my legs out in front of me, and he just went right over me like I wasn't there: up my right leg, down, up my left leg, down, and on his way.
One of the other playgroup moms says "Eric will be crawling within a week," but I am becoming convinced that he will never crawl at all. His inch-worming system seems to work well enough, and he's begun to pull up, so I think he may go from inch-worming to cruising without crawling in between. Like so many things he does, inch-worming is dorky; it involves so much up-and-down butt action that he looks like a car with a square wheel. But it gets him where he wants to go.
Which lately is into all kinds of troublesome places. He is experimenting with prepositions: he enjoys going under things, behind things, between things, and into things, and he often becomes trapped under, behind, between, or in, so that he has to emit a high fussy whine and I have to rescue him, usually by moving the thing slightly so that he can work his way loose and get out on his own, thus increasing his sense of physical mastery and self-esteem.
The other amazing thing that happened at playgroup yesterday is that he pulled into a complete standing position for the first time ever. I got excited and tried to get all the other moms to admire him as he stood with his hands on the back of a toddler-sized chair. I don't think they quite got that he had never done that before; up to his knees was as far as he had gone.
David and Scott are at True Spirit, as I mentioned. I told David on the phone today, and I meant it, that it does me good to know he is there with friends, having a good time, but I'm also a little lonely here with just Eric. Because I'm sick, we spent most of the day quietly at home. I read two books and watched a movie in between playing with Eric and extricating him from various hidey holes.
My Quaker meeting had a special meeting for worship for me on Wednesday night. About a dozen people were there, maybe a few more, and it was a comfort. We talked some about Adrianne and Carla's situation, and then we went into worship and held Noah in the light, and held Carla in the light, and held Adrianne in the light. And then they held me in the light. Everyone offered additional support, but I think I'll mostly hold them in reserve for future trips to Missoula, except that my friend Merry offered to do some Reiki for me and I may take her up on it. Our meeting has Meeting for Healing--healing prayer--once a month. A member of our meeting is one of the leaders of a revival of healing prayer, which was a common practice among those wacky early Quakers. We often quote, for instance, George Fox's Journal, but ask the next Quaker you meet about his Book of Miracles--in which people are healed and one, at least, is brought back from the dead--and I bet they have either not heard of it or have heard of it and wish you hadn't, because it's almost as embarrassing as good old James Nayler riding through the streets on a donkey while his followers scattered rose petals in his path. Spirited bunch, those early Friends.
Anyway, I have gone to Meeting for Healing a few times, but the truth is I find it so intense it's hard to stay. The way it works is that the person clerking takes names, and then one by one the meeting holds each person in the light. The focused energy is extraordinary, and is sometimes almost too intense for me. Merry often touches people during healing prayer, and she did it to me on Wednesday night, put one hand on my leg and one on my shoulder, and this energy just flowed through me. It was good. Apparently that's Reiki, and she has offered to do some more for me, and I may very well take her up on it, even though it's yet another flaky thing to add to my repertoire of flaky things. One of Adrianne and Carla's friends told us the other night about a sister of hers who saw immense improvement in her allergies after having her chakras cleansed, and the friend said that she feels a little sheepish about it except that it worked so well. That's how I feel about some things.
Although I was in Montana for bad reasons, I enjoyed spending time with Noah. He's fabulous. He likes to run, and play hide-and-seek in hotel hallways (lucky for us since we were spending a lot of time in hotel hallways), and he talks talks talks. One night, he and I took a long walk in the atrium at the hotel, which had several levels connected by short stairways. It turns out going up and down stairs is big fun; Noah led me up. Then down. Then up! Then down. And he kept saying things that sounded exactly like "Bear" and "Goats," and I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. But then we ran into his grandmother coming out of the hotel restaurant, and she told me that she had brought him down to the atrium earlier, and there had been an exhibit there with a stuffed bear and some stuffed goats. Apparently Noah remembered and was telling me about it.
Noah is still nursing. Carla said, "I never in a million years thought I'd still be nursing a child who could ask for it." He calls it "Nonie," nobody knows why. "Mommy! Nonie!" he says, and then, when he's done on one side, "Other side!" It was nice to see Carla nurse him, and it didn't make me sad so much as wistful. Bottle-fed babies usually wean to a cup at about one year, and after that there's nothing Eric and I will have that is comparable to nursing. When he was newborn, we tried to replace some aspects of nursing, by giving Eric a lot of skin-to-skin contact, for instance, and now one of our rules is that he can't hold his own bottle but has to be in someone's lap to eat. But once he weans to a cup, what will we have that will get him into my lap and snuggled up to me for a few minutes six times a day? Sigh.
There's no other news. I need to talk to David about when I can go to Montana again, but first I need to sit down with a calendar and coordinate my teaching schedule with Juno's chemotherapy schedule. Some weeks she gets just her IV drug, some weeks she gets just four days of the highly toxic pills, some weeks she gets both, and some weeks she gets to rest, and the protocol is set so I can know what weeks she'll need extra care and therefore shouldn't plan to leave her alone with just David and/or Scott. My supervisor called today about another matter, and I told her that I had been out of town last week and might have to go again, and why, and she encouraged me to let her know if the department can do anything to help. If I know in advance that I am going to miss a day, I can work with the substitute to be sure some actual educating takes place. I missed both days last week; on one day, they had an instruction session in the library, so that was fine, but on the other day I'm pretty sure they learned nothing. I don't know why, since we all teach the same material from the same books in the same weeks, substitutes can never seem to provide any actual instruction, but in my experience it's best to go back into the classroom with the assumption that no information was communicated.
I should go off to bed. For some reason, I often have trouble going to sleep at my usual time when I'm home alone. I'm always tempted to stay up late reading or watching R-rated movies on broadcast television to see how they dub the dirty words. But it's extra-foolish to do that now, because I'm not really home alone--I'm home with Eric, and no matter what time I go to bed, he'll be getting up at 8 and expecting me to get up with him. And tomorrow I should get him up early so he'll nap before swim lessons. Last time we went, I hadn't done that, and he enjoyed being in the water but was less bold that usual--he wanted to be in full contact with me all the time. By the second half of the class, he had settled into the cradle of my arms and was just hanging out while I walked him through the water and sang to him. Actually, it was pretty sweet. He's not a very cuddly baby right now--too busy--and it was nice to have him be quiet and awake in my arms. But I think it's better if he's awake enough to splash and kick.
p.s. Did I mention that squirrels chewed through the ethernet cable that connects my computer downstairs to the network upstairs? The worst part of that is that it knocks me off the cable modem; I'm back on dial-up until David gets back and can correct the problem with a new ethernet cable and a can of Squirrel-Away. It's so slow I keep thinking my computer has crashed when I'm trying to download my e-mail.
Posted by Su Penn at February 15, 2004 12:50 PM | TrackBack