Rising After the Storm

After a storm hits, it usually takes a whole nation and sometimes the world to help pick up the pieces up that had been destroyed. After friends and family were notified, they all volunteered to bring food, presents, whatever Erick wanted to snack on, love, and support. I honestly could not have asked for a better family/friend support. That love and support still continues on to this very moment.

It was eventually Friday when Erick was scheduled for his first surgery. The doctors had told us that Erick was going start to receiving treatment through a port that is placed on either his right or left chest that access one of his main blood streams, making it easier for chemotherapy and other medications to go into his body. That day was also going to be the first time Erick would get chemo. I had been crying the whole week, but nothing compared to that Friday morning. As my mother, Erick, Luis, and I were escorted to the second floor of the hospital, where most surgical procedures are done, my anxiety was going through the roof. Knowing Erick had just recently been diagnosed, I was just thinking about surgery and how there is a very small risk there of infections, and other major problems that could happen. What made me more nervous is actually realizing that this was the beginning of our new normal.

As we were waiting for Dr. P and the surgeon that was going to place the port, Erick grew anxious, and seeing him so vulnerable gave me a strong pain in my heart. Knowing your child is going through surgery and knowing that he is going through pain, is something a mother never wants their child to experience, and every bit of this experience was painful in one way or another for Erick. As we were signing consent forms , a child life specialist came to help ease Erick with his anxiety by bringing him tools that would help explain what the doctors were going to place on his chest, how they were going do it, and even helped decorate his oxygen mask with stickers.

Eventually it was time to begin, and through the IV, the sedation doctor explained that he was going to inject “giggle juice” that would help Erick become much more at ease and it would help them with placing the oxygen mask where the anesthesia would eventually overcome the sedation so the procedure would become much easier. The surgery for the port alone would take 45 minutes, but with extracting a piece of the bone marrow for further testing and the first dose of chemo through his spinal cord it would be around an hour to an hour and forty five minutes. So in other words, a very long time for anxious parents and grandmother.

After the procedure, I was called to go into the recovery room, and as soon as I saw Erick’s face it was a moment of relief. Everything had gone excellent, Erick was out and we waited until we were given the ok to go back to the room. As for the rest of that Friday, Erick was mostly sleeping. He had his first dose of chemo, which led to a very high fever that did not want to come down, to quickly realizing that this fever was the leukemia responding to the chemo, or as Dr. P said, “ it’s like we have attacked the dragon, and the dragon is fighting back. Eventually it did go down, and that is when Erick slowly started getting back to his normal self.

#whathappensafterdiagnosis #howtreatmentstarts