These pictures are from a year ago, today. The day we found out.
I see it all over him.
Then … then, I just saw a common cold. We’d made cookies at my Grandparents and walked the Hall Bridge with my family, Forrest only wanted to be piggy-backed. I remember pushing him to walk on his own. That evening he woke up panicked, gasping for air. It was the 2nd episode and I remember a hushed conversation with my parents and sister in the basement as he lay on my childhood bed wheezing. We’d done Vicks Vapor Rub and fresh air and cough medicine. None of it seemed to help. It was late; we never went to the hospital. We just didn’t—a bi-product of growing up without health insurance. But I did (have insurance). We might as well. Maybe they could give him a nebulizer treatment I thought. Just to let him sleep this yucky cold off. Then he called out again. Desperate and crying. We went in. In the far recesses of my mind’s possibilities, the worst case scenario was pneumonia.
An hour later they were about to send us home. They heard nothing amiss in his lungs. The nebulizer treatment did wonders for his breathing and he seemed finally able to rest. Just to cross the t’s and dot the i’s, the ER doc ordered a last minute x-ray.
She didn’t come back for a long time.
A lot happened those next few hours, scrambled phone calls and wide-eyed declarations. Radiology reports from the next biggest hospital: Kalispell. Orders for stat CT scans. Adamant instructions then from Spokane Washington’s Children’s Hospital. Desperate attempts to reach Bo in Afghanistan. Forrest had a tumor. A huge one— filling almost his entire lung cavity. And it was suffocating him. The seething, pulsing, duplicating mass was wrapped around his esophagus and trachea, reaching down around his heart and had constricted his airway to the tiniest coffee straw pinhole. They couldn’t intubate, it was too far down. They definitely couldn’t sedate. If he stopped breathing, there would be virtually no recourse.
… They didn’t tell me that part until after.
After a huge dose of steroids, they rushed us into an ambulance bound for Spokane’s Sacred Heart PICU— 4 hours away. The snowstorm raging outside rendered the LifeFlight helicopter useless. We hit every single pothole in that 150 miles.
It’s weird how calm and automatic one can become. I honestly don’t even remember feeling scared. All I cared about was helping Forrest to not be scared. As we were rushed into the PICU in Spokane and met by a huge team, Forrest and I were just adamant that he get to use the toilet. Crazy, the things that stick out to you.
Hours later, after a flurry of tests and activity, and it was finally just Forrest and I in a calm, darkened room, the lead oncologist came in. Forrest dozed off and Dr. Ross told me it was T Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But it was what he said after that shook me to the core.
We estimate your son’s tumor grew in the last 6-8 weeks, he told me. In another day, maybe two, it would have closed his airway entirely. He would have passed in his sleep and you could have done nothing.
The cold saved his life.
I remember putting my face in my hands and weeping. It was the first time I had cried.
There is more to the story. Good and bad, but mostly good. But it’s late, and I feel emptied out. Tomorrow I’ll finish what I wanted to say. If you want to read snippets from the past year before then, start here.
<3