Perfect Moments.

(My first foray into Perfect Moment Monday.)

First night of standard time. It’s dark outside. Our kitchen is warm with light and dinner cooking.

O and I are playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” When it comes to the part where we all fall down, I sit down on the floor, and he runs over to me, throws his arms around me, and we fall down together, giggling.

He stands, up, tugs at my hands, and says “UP!”

And we play it again.

___________________________

It’s 3am, and I hear him on the monitor. He’s in light pajamas, and I’ve turned the overnight heat down in the house. As soon as I hear him say “hot” (yeah, we’re working on cold) I wonder if he’s cold.

He finally calls out, questioningly – “Mommy?”

So I go into his room.

His hands and feet are cold. I put on a pair of socks and gather a couple of blankets. We rock, him cradled to my chest, listening to the soft classical music from his clock radio, his shampoo sweet against my cheek.

He resists when I put him back into his crib. “Hot.”

So I pick him back up, and he clings to me, his arms around me neck. We rock for another 5 minutes, and his breathing slows. I know he’s almost asleep, so I put him in his crib. He looks up at me, sleepily, and smiles.

Then rolls over under the blankets and closes his eyes.

I am so lucky to be his mom.

Good news for a change!

Because I am almost GIDDY with happiness right now?

I needed to share.

My friend S emailed us this morning and said that this week, at the almost halfway point through her 12 week chemo treatment period…

… her oncologist is seeing “significant response” to her treatment.

Her white blood count is normal.

Her underarm lymph nodes have shrunk from 3cm to the size of a pea.

The large tumor in her breast has shrunk “significantly” and the smaller one (which was 1cm) is no longer detectable by physical examination.

Her oncologist believes that the lesions on her liver and accompanying lymph nodes will have responded accordingly.

It’s the BEST. NEWS. EVER.

Since she’s seeing results from the current treatment, her oncologist wants her to stay the course and continue down the path they’re going. In a few weeks they might add another drug into her chemo cocktail which has been known to prolong the time between recurrence.

If I could do backflips, it’s what I’d be doing right now. Even as tired as I am.

BEST. NEWS. EVER.

(And. Please, PLEASE, keep her in your thoughts and prayers.)

Finally.

I KNEW something wasn’t right.

I just didn’t know what.

O hasn’t been himself for a while. At least a couple of weeks, I thought. Not sleeping. Not eating. Et cetera.

So when daycare called me yesterday to tell me that he was clingy and tired and fussy and had ANOTHER low grade fever… I decided to call his pediatrician.

And I felt really stupid about it. Because he’s had a low grade fever once a week or so. For what I thought was the past three weeks.

But aside from that? He hasn’t been acting SICK.

Just not HIMSELF.

And I didn’t want to be THAT mom – who brings her kid in with a cold and asks for antibiotics.

But it’s been long enough, and I didn’t think it could HURT.

So I called when he was taking his nap. And they told me to come in, just to be sure.

And he ate snacks and said “Hi!” multiple times to the Nurse Practicioner so that she would let him look at her computer.

And she didn’t hear anything in his lungs but sent us for an x-ray, just in case. Because they noted that he had a cough when he went to his 18 month well-baby appointment about a month ago. And it hadn’t really gone away since.

O ran around the waiting room for the x-ray like a kid possessed. He seemed completely over whatever it was that had bothered him that morning. And I felt so stupid for even being there – he was clearly fine.

Except he’s not.

He actually has pneumonia. In his upper right lobe.

From the quick googling I did, every sign seems to point to walking pneumonia, though it’s rare in toddlers. Maybe it’s viral.

But they gave us antibiotics for him.

And now we have a REASON for the night wakings. For the lack of eating. I KNEW something was off with him – I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

So now we know. And he’s on antibiotics. So hopefully, in a few days, he’ll be back to himself again.

Wordless Wednesday: WTF?

Click here for more WW images.

Except for the sleep stuff. *updated

I love my son.

More than anything.

But I HATE his sleeping habits.

I often wonder if my nap ignorance when he was an infant is the cause of his sleep issues.

Because I’ve said it before. He really uses ANY excuse not to sleep.

And his sleep deprivation begets LESS sleep.

I wish I knew how to reverse it. Because for the past two weeks, he has been up EVERY NIGHT. For at least a half hour, more often an hour.

I wait him out, more often than not – give him 30-45 minutes to see if he’ll put himself back to sleep before I get up and try and fix it for him.

The one thing that has always stuck with me about sleep training was this – in order to solve sleep issues, you have to find the root cause of the sleep issues.

For example. If your kid is hungry, you can’t just expect him to sleep through the night without changing the way you feed him.

So J and I have been trying to find the root cause of the trouble.

And damned if we can’t figure it out.

There’s the cold, yes. He’s had a runny nose now for the past two weeks. And now a cough from the congestion.

Then there’s the lack of eating. With the exception of Sunday night, where he ate a hot dog AND a huge bowl of pasta about 15 minutes after a snack of salsa and chips and then humus and crackers (kid LOVES dip. Seriously, who knew?), he’s eaten about a third of what he usually eats. Every day.

In fact, yesterday he came home with almost all of his food we packed for him at daycare. And then didn’t eat dinner either.

So J and I thought maybe that his mouth was hurting from all the teeth he’s getting. His top molars, though they’ve poked through the gums, are still mostly gum. And whenever we look, we can tell that the gums around each molar are red and swollen.

But tyl.enol doesn’t do much, not that we’ve noticed, anyway. And we can’t give him motrin unless he actually EATS, because it makes him throw up.

So the poor kid has a LOT going on right now.

And truthfully, I’m more worried about HIM than I am pissed off about the sleep deprivation for myself.

There’s something just a little WRONG with him, something I can’t quite figure out. And he’s not vocal enough yet to tell me.

The only thing we figure we can do is ride it out.

Offer him a LOT of different foods in the hopes that he will find something he’s happy to eat.

Put him to bed earlier so he can catch up a little on his missing sleep.

And hope that this is a phase and will pass. Because, you know, they usually do.

I just never expected that more than a year and a half after bringing him home, we’d be as sleep deprived as we all are.

______________________________

*Thanks all for the suggestions and comments thus far. I also thought about his ears, but O has working tubes in both of his ears, and if/when he has an infection (he’s had two since the tubes last February), he gets a lot of drainage. So far his ears look fine.

Knock on wood, of course. I won’t be surprised if by the end of the week he DOES get an ear infection as well…

Wordless Wednesday: The Corn Maze

Click here for more WW images.

She kicks ass.

I got to see S yesterday.

J had made a moroccan lentil soup (yes, J made it. My husband is a fantastic cook, among other things. Another post for another day!) the other night, and we froze it.

So yesterday I took some time and drove it down to her house. One of her friends had set up a cooler near the back of the house so that we could leave food for her, so I assumed I would just leave the food and head back.

But she saw my car, and she came out, calling my name, and asking “what the hell are you DOING here?”

And we hugged, and then chatted.

She wants to FIGHT it. The doctor who told her that there was nothing they could do right now, that they would save the chemo and surgery for later, when her insides were peppered with tumors? She told me she wanted to PUNCH the woman. Because all she heard was “studies” and “statistics.”

The doctor didn’t once consider her as a person, she said. And she doesn’t want to walk down a path of protocols for this type of person. She wants a doctor who believes in her. That she can BEAT it.

So she’s going for more opinions. The way it seems right now is that she’s choosing between being really aggressive and potentially beating it, versus accepting that her cancer is chronic and likely terminal.

She keeps thinking that SOMEONE needs to beat the odds. People do it every day. Why NOT her?

And she said, “I have no room in my life for chronic cancer. I have a family to raise.”

I came away heartened. And so very inspired by her.

And I TOLD her that I believe in her. And I will continue believing in her.

And I will tell her continuously that she can do this. Because she feeds off hope, and she DESERVES to hope. She’s got too much to live for.

And if anyone can beat this, my friend S can.

Guilty.

I’ve barely been able to breathe since I read the update email about my friend S.

I’m terrified for her.

I can’t believe that we’re not too young to be touched by this sort of thing.

I’m so, so sad for her husband and little girls.

I selfishly don’t want to lose someone I love.

But mostly, I feel guilty.

Because she’s SO important to me.

But in the past year or so, we’ve drifted apart. For no reason, really. We used to live in the same house with them, used to have dinners and parties and watch football and baseball and go camping together.

But now we’re both working moms, and we live an hour apart. And it’s so hard to keep up, and make plans. And now that we need to keep some semblance of a schedule with O’s naps, and she has two kids in the same situation, we can only snatch time in a couple of hour blocks here and there.

And over the past month – before her husband called to tell us the news – I have thought about her SO MANY TIMES. But have never called because, you know, it’s always the wrong time. On my way home from work right smack in the middle of dinnertime. And it didn’t REALLY matter, because we would see them Columbus Day weekend, when we make our annual trip with them and another couple to New Hampshire.

Always, ALWAYS, my friends have been important enough to me that I spend TIME on keeping in touch. And I can make every excuse in the world on how hard it is to keep this up with a child, yada yada.

Truthfully, I always thought that we had TIME to catch up. That it wasn’t awful that we went a couple of months without talking; we could pick right up where we left off.

Because we still had years together. Where we’d go on camping trips when our kids were old enough to ride their bikes down to the pond to fish. And we could sit by the fire with our beer and have great conversation.

But she’s on borrowed time. I have no idea how much time we have together. And I’m sure all her other friends and family are thinking the same thing, too.

So why does it take news like THIS for me to remind myself that my friends are this important?

Terminal fucking cancer. And I want to show her somehow just how much she means to me. Is it for ME, or for her? I don’t know.

All I know is that I feel helpless, and I want to DO something. Anything. To help.

So next weekend I’m running the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure with my good friend D (who has graciously agreed to run a freaking 5k with me when she’s in town for a visit. Seriously, how awesome is SHE?). I’ve pledged to raise money for research (and if you interested in donating email me at serenitynowinfertile at gmail dot com and I can direct you to my site).

We made them one of our favorite soup recipes yesterday and froze it, and I’ll drive it down to their house today.

Feels like such stupid piddly little things, but it’s not nothing, I suppose.

I think it’s going to take me longer to get over the guilt of not being a better friend before now, that’s all.

Impotent.

I was going to tell you about our vacation last week. How well O did with his grandparents. How rested and awesome I feel.

But I just got an email this morning with an update.

My girlfriend S is dying.

Her cancer has spread. Not just the breast. It’s moved to her liver. And changed – not the same cancer as the tumor in her breast.

The doctors have told her that it’s “chronic” now and likely incurable. That no matter what course of treatment she does, the cancer will be there, in her body.

The goal now is to prolong her life as much as possible with other courses of treatment. Hormone therapy to shrink the tumors and keep them from recurring.

To keep the cancer at bay as long as possible.

They’re not talking about survival rates anymore. Now it’s survival TIME.

I don’t know what to do. How to process. How to help her. What to say. What to think. What to do.

Aw shit.

I have a good friend S. She’s awesome. She needed IVF to conceive her second daughter, and though she didn’t always say the right thing when we were struggling, she kept calling me. And checking in. And telling me that I was going to be a parent someday.

He husband called tonight. And told us that last week she found a lump in her breast.

And that they just found out that it is cancer.

And she will not only have a lumpectomy, but perhaps a mastectomy.

And she starts chemotherapy this month.

I’m absolutely gutted. For them, for her two young daughters, for the babies she wanted to have.

And now won’t, since chemo will fry what’s left of her eggs.

And I’m scared for them. For the journey she’s about to embark upon.

Please keep them in your thoughts.