When they brought Emily back from surgery, she didn’t have wound vacs on either leg. The doctor was amazed.
“It’s always good to be proven wrong in this way,” he said. “Her legs were doing so much better compared to yesterday when I examined them. She made a lot of progress overnight. We’ll keep her a few more days to make sure there are no complications, but you might be able to be home by the weekend.”
He thought he was pleased! I could barely wait to tell my mom.
Chapter 6
BACK HOME
Tom and I thought our lives were busy and stressful before we found out that Emily had leukemia… now we realize we had no idea what busy and stressful meant! Our days are filling up with doctor appointments, home nursing visits, physical therapy appointments, occupational therapy appointments… we have an appointment every day next week. I have no idea how we are supposed to go to work. Tom started back to work today while I stayed home with Emily.
—Kari’s journal
June 24, 2010
It was June 23 before Emily was well enough that we could make the two-hour drive back to Philipsburg. Although I’d traveled US Route 322 between Hershey and home many times, this journey was much different. We had a new perspective. You know when you recognize that you are having a bad day and ask yourself, “Can this day get any worse?” We now had many examples that proved the answer to that question is yes.
The doctors said to us before we left that some children have a difficult induction phase. Emily’s had been one of the most difficult they’d seen, but we had gotten through it. We were praying for fewer complications as we started the consolidation phase. The next step was to wait for her bone marrow to make new, healthy cells. We would go back to the oncology clinic in about a week, when Emily would get another bone marrow aspiration to see if she was in remission.
There had been such joy in Emily’s hospital room as we bustled around packing up all the stuff we’d accumulated in the last two weeks. Some families liked to keep the rooms tidy. Compared to those people, we were a circus. Emily had at least a hundred get-well cards from friends and family that we had taped to the walls, and dozens of gifts. As we dismantled her room, we took all the cards off the walls and stacked the gifts in a big pile by the door. There were so many of them that we donated some to the oncology unit so that other kids could receive gifts. We had so much stuff that I had to borrow a cart from the hospital to get all of it to the car. It took several trips. I joked with Emily that I couldn’t wait to get home and back to my man cave so I could watch HBO because we’d been watching the Disney Channel for weeks.
As we were packing, Kari suddenly remembered the Father’s Day present she and Emily were working on right before Emily was diagnosed. Father’s Day has always been special to me because that was the day Emily took her first step as a one-year-old. With everything that was going on, I hadn’t even noticed that the Sunday before, June 20, had been that holiday.
Kari knew how much that day meant to me. Before Emily had been diagnosed, I’d known Emily and Kari were up to something, and I suspected it was about Father’s Day. They’d kept going off together for hours, and they wouldn’t tell me why or where they were going.
Sitting in the happy chaos of our dismantled hospital room, I found out what they’d been up to. Kari opened up her laptop to show me a video she’d made for Father’s Day: a series of five photos of Emily holding up big letters she had made that spelled out “DADDY.” It was the Emily of just a month ago, just a week or so before we found out she was sick. As I watched the photos slide by in a video, set to the song “Daddy-O” by Frances England, I cried. I was so grateful that Kari had captured these moments that we would always yearn for but could never come again. I took the video out to the nurses’ station and showed it to them as a way to say farewell to the staff that had been so good to us for so long.
When all was ready to go, Emily asked if she could ride through the hospital on top of the last pile on the cart. Of course she could. We came down the hallway pulling the departing princess, and she smiled as she waved to everyone she passed on our way to the parking garage.
You know how when you have a long drive that you’ve done a bunch of times, you pick landmarks to note your progress? For me, we hadn’t really left the grip of Hershey until we had crossed the Susquehanna River. The mood in the car always lightened when Emily pointed out the twenty-five-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty located in the Dauphin Narrows. When we reached the top of Seven Mountains, when it was literally all downhill from there, we were close to home.
I was thinking about my Father’s Day present as I looked at Emily in the rearview mirror. I wondered how she would look to the people who hadn’t seen her since she got sick.
I pulled off at the Philipsburg exit and drove past my brother Jim’s house, past my grandparents’ place, and into the driveway of our house, a few blocks from my brother Greg’s. I expected both of my brothers would be dropping
