I carried Emily up the stairs to our kitchen, and I could see my mom had been very busy anticipating our homecoming. The house was sparkling clean and the fridge was full of groceries, including a casserole for tonight, soup for tomorrow, and, of course, banana bread. I carried Emily down the hall into her room, where I saw mom’s touch again. Emily told Nanny at the hospital that she missed her stuffed animals. Mom had arranged all one hundred of them in neat rows on the bed, grouped by animal, with her favorite stuffed lambs at the front. Emily pulled the lambs forward to set them in a semicircle facing her and Lammy, who had come with her to the hospital. Lammy addressed the assembled multitude from the crook of Emily’s arm, explaining in a high-pitched voice littered with baaaahs how Emily and she had been to the hospital and it had been awful but now they were home, and they weren’t going away again.
While we had been wrapped up in what was happening at the hospital, Emily’s homecoming was front-page news in the Philipsburg weekly newspaper. There were cards from well-wishers in big bags on the kitchen table and, because so many people followed Kari’s blog, dozens of “Welcome home” messages and invitations on the voice mail. We started taking cards out of the bags to share with Emily, but she could handle only a few before she wanted to stop. I could see the wisdom of Kari’s insight that Emily might need to let the world in gradually.
The next day Emily was moody and uncharacteristically shy because she couldn’t walk and had to be in a wheelchair to go any real distances. This was embarrassing to her and she was self-conscious about the way she looked. She had not yet lost her hair from chemotherapy, but her face was swollen from the steroids and she was retaining so much water that her clothes didn’t fit her well. She had to sleep in one of Kari’s shirts. Everything about her body was uncomfortable.
We got her a child-sized walker and I put tennis balls on the feet to make it easier to push along the floor, but it was still a lot of effort to get her to take a few steps. Her legs were sore and her muscles were weak, so walking was not pleasant. I cheered her on, but cheering didn’t rouse her much. Then I made the mistake of bribing her, offering her a trip to the ice cream shop if she walked across the room. From then on, we had protracted negotiations each time I wanted her to get up to her feet. We had to get a new coloring book, or paints or markers. She won many of these negotiations and I remember saying, “You could be a lawyer with those negotiation skills!”
Once we adjusted to being back home, we made an appointment to meet Dr. Jim Powell, a pediatric oncologist who had worked at Hershey but now worked at Mount Nittany Medical Center. He managed the pediatric oncology patients who were being treated at Hershey but lived locally, so that they didn’t have to make that two-hour drive as often. He was a very nice man, a family man with an amazing wife, Miriam, and two adorable sons. We had an instant connection with him. Mount Nittany Medical Center is only a twenty-five-minute drive from home, and Dr. Powell agreed that we could schedule some of Emily’s clinic visits with him. We could call him when Emily had a fever and he could administer antibiotics. He knew Emily’s doctors at Hershey, and, with his guidance and care, he promised he’d arrange for Emily to be the first pediatric patient to receive chemo at Mount Nittany. What a relief to have a great doctor so close to home.
At our visit with Dr. Powell, he encouraged us to get Emily walking to strengthen her leg muscles, and I thought taking her to our family camp might help. Camp was a rocky mile-long drive down a dirt road through the woods to a clearing near a creek. During hunting season, the men of my father’s and grandfather’s generation brought their sons to camp every weekend, and those weekends were governed by well-established rules. As a young boy, I watched my older brother Jim go off with Dad when he turned five, and I could hardly wait to be old enough to join them. My grandfather’s generation were World War II veterans, and they liked a rugged atmosphere. They fed us buckwheat pancakes for breakfast and C rations for lunch and dinner. You had to be twelve years old before they let you handle a gun, so for those first seven years what you really were learning was how to be a man.
Every morning the men divided into two groups, with half the men (and boys) up in the hunting stands and the other half working as pushers. The pushers formed a line and walked through the forest, flushing the game in front of them as they advanced toward the hunting stands. As a young boy, I’d be alongside either my dad or his uncles (who were close in age to him) as we strode strongly forward, making as much noise as we could. That was so different from up in the hunting stands, when we had to be quiet.
The job of the young kids in the stands was to use the binoculars to spot deer or bears. Most of the
