We read Emily the comments on the blog every day and also set aside time for her to open the get-well cards that filled our mailbox. All over town, people we barely knew were keeping us in their thoughts, which we saw on the blog but also in other ways. Robin, Kari’s dad, who Emily called “Pappy Rob,” worked at a bank. He’s a modest man who keeps to himself, and he’s a man of very strong faith. I knew he was praying several times a day for Emily, but it was not something he’d talk to his coworkers about. And, although he didn’t explain why he’d left the day she was diagnosed, when he got back to work he found an envelope with twenty dollars in it and a note that said Good luck to your granddaughter.
That twenty dollars meant so much. I knew deep in my bones that our small town and our families would always lift us up, and I had a feeling that the Lord would provide. That first twenty dollars coming so quickly showed I wasn’t wrong to think that. As the audience for the blog grew, people in town or at church handed my parents gift cards for gas stations and restaurants.
Although most of Emily’s treatment would be on an outpatient basis, we still had to make weekly trips to Hershey for her chemotherapy. For the first trip back to Hershey, Kari was going to work that day, so Pappy Rob volunteered to come along. Pappy Rob was scheduled to come to the house at 7:00 a.m. so we would have plenty of time to get Emily to Hershey by 11:00 a.m.
That night, around 2:00 a.m., Emily woke up screaming and I ran to her room.
“My legs,” she shrieked. “There’s something wrong with my legs!”
“Is it your knees?” I asked.
“No!” she pointed to a spot in her thigh. “It’s there. It’s right there.”
I tried to pick her up, but she yelled at me not to. Kari heard Emily’s cries and came in with some morphine to help with the pain. I paged Dr. Osman Khan, who had become one of our favorite doctors at Hershey. We always slept better when he was the doctor on call at night, and he always responded quickly when we called.
“Emily’s screaming, in the most pain she’s ever had. It’s a ten out of ten on the pain scale and if I touch her, she screams louder. Do we need to bring her in?”
“Put her in the car and drive straight here.” Dr. Khan said. “Give her three times the normal dose of morphine. She can handle that much.”
I called Pappy Rob, with Emily screaming in the background, to tell him that if he wanted to come along, we needed to leave right away. He said he’d come immediately. As I was getting ready to go, Kari stopped me in the kitchen.
“I know what you are thinking,” she said. “I know because she’s in so much pain you’re going to want to take her to the nearest hospital. Promise me you will not check her into Mount Nittany Medical Center. Whatever is wrong with her, she needs to be at Hershey.”
We pass Mount Nittany Medical Center on our way to Hershey, and although it’s a great facility, it doesn’t have a pediatric oncology unit. Emily would just end up in an ambulance ride or Life Flight to Hershey if we stopped there.
“Okay, I’ll make sure,” I said.
“Tom,” she said sternly. “I want to hear you say it. I want you to look me in the eye and promise that you will drive straight to Hershey.”
“I promise,” I said.
Pappy Rob arrived and I went to pick up Emily to put her into the car.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” she screamed.
“Look, Em,” I said. “I have to get you into the car!”
We put pillows under her legs so she would be cushioned against the bumps in the road, and Pappy Rob sat in the backseat right next to her. The morphine didn’t help the pain, though. She was screaming as we merged onto the highway near State College, right next to Mount Nittany Medical Center. Why should I make her endure the two hours it would take us to get her to Hershey when she was in this much pain? My poor girl. But I had made that promise to Kari and I wouldn’t break it, despite what I felt.
“Daddy, I have to pee,” Emily said softly. Then, more desperately, “I have to pee really bad!”
I couldn’t take her into a gas station in the shape she was in. I couldn’t take her into Mount Nittany because that would surely create a cascade of actions that would get her admitted there. I pulled over to the emergency room entrance and jogged inside, where I asked one of the nurses if he could give me a bedpan. He kind of cocked his head like a dog does when he hears a sound he doesn’t understand. I told him he had to trust me on this. He came back with the bedpan and soon we were on our way. When we were nearly to Hershey, I called the oncology clinic to arrange for someone to help us get Emily out of the car. They said they would have someone meet us with a wheelchair.
When I saw the nurse standing with the wheelchair, I realized that bending Emily’s legs to sit, touching them that much, would be torture. I put my hand on Emily’s leg to move her and she started screaming.
“I’ll get a bed instead,” the nurse said, running back into the clinic.
In the examination room, I saw that her left thigh was swollen to twice the size of the right one. On that left thigh was a raised red mark about the size of a quarter. That hadn’t been there when we left home two hours before.
I showed the nurse what I had discovered.
“I’ll get the doctors right away,” the nurse
