When we got home, Aunt Kathy greeted us at the door, but we could see right away that something was wrong. When Aunt Kathy told Emily it was time for bed, she’d asked why Lucy was lying over her legs. It was so unlike the energetic dog to be so still and quiet.
“Why doesn’t she want to run and play, Emily?” Aunt Kathy asked.
“Because Lucy knows when I’m sick,” Emily explained. “You know, Aunt Kathy, my blasts are growing again in my knees. In my blood and in my bones. The blasts are growing again.”
Chapter 10
IT’S BACK
The blasts were back? How could this happen? Emily was full of energy and school was going well. Sometimes she came home tired, but after some downtime, she was ready to read or play. We’d just had a fantastic week in Vancouver, watching Emily run over the bridges and through the parks, chasing after the dogs in the hotel. How could the blasts be back? Dr. Powell recommended that we bring her in for a checkup and blood work just to be safe.
The next morning, as we were driving to the lab to get her blood drawn, I asked Emily how she knew the blasts were back.
“I felt the cancer pain in my knees again,” Emily said. “I knew for sure it was back when Lucy didn’t want to play and just laid beside me. Lucy let me know.”
Lucy had a keen intuition. As a guy who likes to focus on the positive, I searched my memory for signs that Emily had beaten leukemia, that she had mustered her strength, and we had done everything the doctors told us to do. But as we drove to the appointment, I remembered those times in Vancouver when she’d complained she didn’t want to walk because her knees hurt. I thought about how I’d had to persuade her to walk over that suspension bridge. The doctors had told me to stop carrying her and challenge her to get more activity to keep her strength up. Tom, I thought to myself, remember, you must pay attention to the whispers.
Normally it takes only a few hours to get the lab results back, but Dr. Powell didn’t call that night, or leave a message, and it worried me and Kari. Maybe he had an emergency, Kari said. I agreed. He’s the only pediatric oncologist at Mount Nittany Medical Center and when a family needs him, he is there for them.
What we didn’t know was that he was checking and double-checking the results of the test. He’d examined a slide of Emily’s blood but had seen just a few suspicious-looking cells. He knew the blood smear didn’t tell the whole story, though, so he shared his results with a few of his colleagues. There had been several late-night chats between him and other doctors because he wanted to be sure before he alarmed us with bad news.
The next afternoon, I was at an executive board meeting for our union when I felt my phone vibrate and saw that it was Dr. Powell. I ducked out of the meeting to take his call.
“We do see a few blast cells,” Dr. Powell said. “Over the past twenty-four hours I’ve had several other doctors review her blood smear under the microscope to make sure.”
How will I tell Kari this? I thought.
“You need to go to Hershey right away,” Dr. Powell said.
At home we explained to Emily that we had to go back to Hershey, and we couldn’t promise she’d be back home for Halloween. She was not happy about this. Kari and she had just picked out her Halloween costume, a butterfly. They’d bought little butterfly clips to pin into her hair, which was growing back thick and wavy. I’d heard them planning how they were going to paint Emily’s face so that she looked like a beautiful butterfly. Emily was sad all of that had to wait.
After Emily went to bed, Kari and I sat at the kitchen table. We were devastated to hear this news and terrified by what this could mean for Emily.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Kari said.
“Hold on a second, Kari,” I said. “We don’t know for sure how serious this is yet. Dr. Powell said he only saw a few blasts in the blood smear.”
“Ever since Emily was diagnosed, I thought she was going to be fine,” Kari said. “I believed the doctors when they said she was going to be in the ninety percent of kids who beat leukemia. Why is this happening?”
“There were no warning signs,” I said. “It wasn’t like when she was first diagnosed when she had bruises and bleeding gums. We need to plan for the worst and pray for the best news.”
Kari brought up the calendar on her phone and pointed to August 1, 2012, exactly twenty-six months from the day Emily was diagnosed.
“This was the day we could check leukemia off the list, and we could move on. We could put leukemia in the past. Now that she’s relapsed, that day doesn’t mean anything. We don’t know how this will end, or when.”
“Maybe the doctors at Hershey will contradict Dr. Powell,” I said.
“The doctors kept telling us that we were doing everything right,” Kari said. “We never missed an appointment or chemotherapy.”
“This isn’t our fault,” I said, pulling Kari in
