At camp, Emily and I sat for a while in the comfortable silence we’d built over the years. There was so much she had learned just by being there with me. I remembered how, the summer before, we had been walking when a family of turkeys, a mom, dad, and their chicks, walked some distance up ahead of us and Emily froze. Then it seemed like the turkeys disappeared. Emily looked upset and a bit confused, as if she had imagined them. I crouched down and told her softly to stay still and have patience, which is very hard for a child that age, but she held her ground. I’ll never forget the delight on her face when the ferns and brush started to move, and the turkey family skittered from the underbrush and dashed across the forest floor. No better way to learn the virtue of patience than through such an experience, which gave her such a wonderful reward.
That afternoon at camp I could hear the chickadees, bluebirds, and whip-poor-wills over the rush of the stream in front of us. I saw Emily’s eyes searching the wood until she caught sight of a fawn in a beam of sunlight, its graceful head responding to small sounds in the woods around.
“Do you want to take a couple of steps, Emily?”
“No, Daddy. I just want to sit here.”
“Just a couple of steps, huh? Might help to get your feet on rough ground to strengthen some of the muscles you don’t get to use much indoors.”
“No. I’ll just sit.”
I wanted so much for my girl. I wanted more than she could ever know and maybe ever imagine, but maybe that was too much. I should take her where she was, as Kari always advised, and be happy with what we had, with this moment right now in the forest, where we didn’t have to struggle at all.
When she was ready to go home, I pushed her in the wheelchair back to the SUV, picked her up, and strapped her into her booster seat, then stowed the walker and the wheelchair in the back. When we started back up the dirt road the afternoon was cool enough that we didn’t need the air conditioner.
I opened the windows to the SUV so we could fill our lungs with that forest smell, the trees and the vegetation turning into mulch on the forest floor. I looked at her in the rearview mirror and saw a little girl who was getting stronger every day. Her eyes were half-closed in blissful contentment, and I felt so grateful to be home.
Chapter 7
I LOVE LUCY
The good news of July was that Emily was in remission! The chemo had worked, and the consolidation treatment phase began. Even with daily chemotherapy pills, she felt pretty good and the nausea was at a minimum. Several times a week a physical therapist came to work with her on walking. She wasn’t putting her heels all the way down to the floor, so the physical therapist put squeakers on her heels. Whenever her heel hit the ground it let out a little eep so that she knew she’d made it all the way to the floor on that step. She liked the sound so much that she started stomping around the house, which made me and Kari laugh.
We’d take her out for a walk, but she’d want to come home right away. She was trying hard, but her legs still hurt too much for her to go very far. I’d try to get her laughing with some goofy stunt, but some days the most I could get from her was my bare-minimum one smile a day.
As Emily’s legs got stronger with her eep therapy, she stopped using her walker and said she wanted to go swimming. I knew how much Emily missed swimming in the hot days of summer. She’d gained more than ten pounds from the steroids, and her body was bulky and uncomfortable. Now that she was off steroids, the weight started to fall off. She was less moody, more herself at home, but swimming would still offer her the mobility she was missing on her feet. It was hard to tell Emily that she couldn’t go swimming because her PICC line couldn’t get wet. She would have to wait until the doctors swapped out the temporary PICC line for a Mediport.
The surgeon made a one-inch incision in the middle of her chest and inserted the port under her skin. Each time Emily needed chemotherapy a nurse would insert a needle through her skin and into the middle of the implanted port, which was called “accessing the port,” and it would deliver the medicine through a catheter, and into her bloodstream. A few days after the port was placed and the insertion wound was healed, Emily was cleared to swim at last, but we had to wait until dusk because chemo made her sensitive skin burn more easily.
At sunset, we drove to Greg’s house, where I lowered Emily gently into his pool in her floaty. She held on to me for a while before she kicked away from me, giggling at the joy of moving around in the water. It was a happy time for us, and for that hour of swimming we forgot about needles and chemo and leg infections. We swam and laughed, both of us happy that Emily could do something normal once more.
After that she swam almost every day, which was great therapy because the more she swam, the stronger her legs became. Emily was so proud of how
