PAIN OF FEAR

It starts out as a routine procedure and grows steadily into a major crisis. You look for one thing and something else unexpectedly appears. You are always on alert but never prepared. You only know disappointment and when someth9ng does go right, you wait for the other shoe to drop as it always has in the past.

As I sit in my daughter Ellen’s room in the ICU at St. Charles Hospital, I try to steady myself for what will be the inevitable I know is coming from the pathologist’s office on what was found in terms of cancer that might still be in her body.

Many years ago I had a child that was a lot like his sister. He was the third of my four children and developed a series of illnesses that finally took him at the age of 20-months. From the day after Thanksgiving until the day he died in late January we watched the horror show that left us empty and bereft with silent pains that we suffer every day, knowing that my child is lying in the ground in a cemetery too soon.

Back then as I do now every day was a trip to North Shore University Hospital for the two months that ensued trying to save him. The doctors would tell us they just needed to do this and then that and as they accomplished one thing another would occur.

Nothing in life is a warranty on happiness when you have children. All my kids had their days of pain, but the pain is felt most acutely in the parent’s hearts and psyche as we witness the distress and wish with all our hearts that it would be not one our child who suffers but us. I would lay me down now for a resolution that would solve her life-long problems and condition.

I know her life expectancy is not that of an ordinary healthy adult that we must prepare ourselves to say goodbye. But loving a child like Ellen with all her imperfections, my advocacy on her behalf all of her 47 plus years, the unrequited love she gave me and I her, I just can’t let go.