Maybe Emily had spent all that emotion when she got so mad that we gave her a haircut that first weekend she was in the hospital. And it also might have been my campaign of saying as often as possible, “Hair doesn’t matter. It will always grow back.” She still had most of her hair the day she started kindergarten.
The day Emily first took the bus ride to kindergarten ranks up there with the day we got married and the day of Emily’s birth as one of those days I will never forget. She was so excited the night before, I didn’t think she’d go to sleep. We told her good students need a full eight hours so their minds absorb all the knowledge that the teacher is trying to offer. This got her into bed, but before we turned off the light, she told us she knew the first day would just be a lot of games so she didn’t really need eight hours. Well, she did, I said as I laid Lucy across Emily’s feet, the sure sign that it was time for her to go off to dreamland.
They were both still sound asleep when Kari got Lucy to wake Emily up that next morning. Kari stood Lucy so she was facing Emily from the foot of the bed, and Lucy barked and jumped back and forth, ready to play. But Emily was all business that morning. We’d packed Emily’s backpack the night before. Kari made her a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and oatmeal. We wanted to walk her to the bus, but she refused. She insisted on walking down our front steps herself and making her own way to the school bus, waving to us from the window as it pulled away.
We thought about her often throughout the day as we waited for the bus to bring her back and for Lucy to leap out of my arms to greet Emily, a little bundle of wiggles at her feet. Emily returned from school with a good report. Her teacher was the greatest and she already had made two friends.
With Emily at school and me and Kari back to work, we had a sense of life returning to normal, but that sense was fragile. Emily still had weekly daylong appointments at Hershey that might or might not end up with her being admitted for observation, and we never knew when Emily’s temperature would reach 100.5 degrees and we’d be on our way to the Mount Nittany ER and perhaps on from there to Hershey.
I used to keep a close eye on the Nittany Lions football schedule because Emily seemed to spike a fever almost every time Penn State, the university near the Mount Nittany Medical Center, had a home football game. I dreaded that journey to the ER on those days. The nurses could barely hear me describe what was wrong with Emily over the ruckus of the injured or intoxicated football fans, and we usually had to wait for hours for Emily to get treated.
We quickly got leaving for the ER down to a drill. As soon as Emily spiked a fever, I’d call Dad, and my parents would come to get Lucy, usually before we’d made our way out the door. Our duffel bags were always packed, resting in the garage near the SUV. Kari had a bag of crafts and books at the ready, too. And in Emily’s bag she had her prayer cloths. Emily clung to those. She’d lay prayer cloths over her head when she had a migraine, and sometimes when she just wanted to tune everything out. When the nurses tried to remove them, Emily would tell them, “No one touches my prayer cloths.”
We’d fight our way through the Saturday night chaos until we got her admitted to one of the triage rooms. The doctor would order antibiotics, which would take a few hours to administer. While Emily was on the IV antibiotics, they monitored how she responded. All the time the question hung in the air: Was she sick enough to transfer to Hershey or could they send her home? Usually, she was transferred by ambulance to Hershey to be admitted for a few days.
The waiting was unbearable for all of us, hours crammed into those small, curtained-off ER spaces. I remember once waking up on the floor next to Emily’s bed as a nurse stepped over me to check on her. I’d come into the room and found Kari asleep in the chair, Emily resting in the bed, and no place for me to lay my head. I was so tired I decided I’d just lie down on the floor. My back was stiff and cramping and I had a terrible headache the next morning.
A few times Emily was transported to Hershey in an ambulance. I remember one chaotic ambulance ride where we must have had a rookie crew of EMTs. Kari was inside with Emily and I was following behind in our car when I saw the driver swerving so badly that she ran a car in the adjacent lane off the road. I called Kari to see what was going on, but she didn’t have time to answer. She was dealing with a crisis of her own. As she sat there tending to Emily, she came to recognize that the EMT was blowing her nose and coughing a wet cough, and it was escalating quickly. Kari was spending all her attention trying to shield Emily from the germs.
Our weekly visits to Hershey’s outpatient oncology clinic began before sunrise,
