I would have to stay alert to hear those whispers now that Emily’s life hung in the balance. When I am trying to make a big decision, the whispers are hard to hear. I feel them more strongly than other people I know, yet I doubt them just as much. I’d ignored them the night before, when Kari and I assured each other there was nothing wrong with Emily. Kari and I had tried convincing ourselves that Emily was fine. When her gums were bleeding, I’d told her to ease up on the toothbrush. We’d thought the nosebleed the week before was from roughhousing. And the knee pain was just growing pains. But these were all signs of leukemia. If I’d listened to the whispers sooner, would things have been different? I looked at Emily, asleep in the backseat. Her skin was so pale and there were dark circles under her eyes. I hadn’t wanted to see these things when I was arguing myself out of believing Emily was sick. This reflex to negate the news we did not want to hear did not serve Emily. I had to concentrate on hearing those whispers, and to consider them wisely, or we would lose Emily.
When I was trying to find a doctor to treat my Crohn’s disease, the specialist I found was at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The day I went there to have a section of my colon removed, my parents came with me. I was twenty-eight years old, and I had been sick for years. I am six feet five, but I weighed only 168 pounds. In the elevator, I saw a little boy who looked to be about seven or eight years old, in jeans and a T-shirt, bald as bald could be. He had a big grin on his face and was standing at the elevator buttons.
“Hey! How are you doing?” I asked him.
“I’m doing good,” he said.
“Are you running the elevator?” I asked.
“I am now,” he said. “What floor do you want?”
I asked for the basement and, as the door shut, I couldn’t take my eyes off the little boy. His skin was the pale yellow people sometimes get after many rounds of chemotherapy. Why was he in the elevator alone? I guess he sensed my curiosity.
“I’m going to die in six months,” he said. “They’re doing some tests on me. Maybe what they find might help somebody in the future,”
The elevator door opened, and he flashed us a smile.
“I hope your tests come out okay,” he said to us. I waved to him as we exited to find the lab.
If my mom hadn’t been standing by my side, I might think I had imagined that boy. He was so calm and cheerful in the face of death that he seemed like someone I had conjured to help me with my own fears.
My Crohn’s improved after the surgery, but I thought about him every time I stepped into an elevator. He seemed to be a sign of something that I couldn’t see clearly yet. From that day on, whenever I started feeling sorry for myself, or Kari and I faced a big challenge, I’d think of that little boy. “We don’t have problems,” I’d say. “We can take anything life throws at us. We don’t have a child with cancer. Parents who have a child with cancer, now they have real problems.”
Now here we were, years later, about to find out what that little boy in the elevator was meant to tell me.
When we pulled up to the hospital entrance, we were happy to see Aunt Laurie waiting outside on a bench, holding a stuffed animal for Emily. Laurie has thick, curly brown hair and a genial and welcoming smile, but that day we saw the concern on her face. Aunt Laurie is my mom’s baby sister, the youngest of nine, and only two years older than I am, so we’ve always been more like cousins than aunt and nephew. When her husband was killed in a car accident, their children were quite young. She knew she would have to support her family, and she took the bold step of applying to medical school. This year she was in her residency at Hershey. We were so relieved that she would be there for support.
She escorted us through the hospital lobby to the elevators that took us to the seventh floor. The double automatic doors into the pediatric oncology unit made a soft swooshing noise as they opened, the portal to unknown territory. We looked down a long, straight hallway with nine rooms on the left and six on the right, plus a nurses’ station. A nurse led us to the first room on the right, apologizing for giving us the smallest room, but, she said, it was the only room available. The room gave me a sense of dread, like something awful was about to happen there. I wondered about the children who had been in that room before Emily.
The nurse who came to check Emily’s vitals and take her medical history advised us that we’d have to wait until Tuesday to know what type of leukemia she had because most of the staff was off for the Memorial Day weekend. All they would do for the next three days was keep Emily comfortable with morphine and anti-nausea medicine.
After all the rushing we had just done to get her to Hershey, all our energy now had no place to go. How quickly the world you’ve built around you retreats when your child gets cancer. Our family shifted from our little
