Gavin, almost 2

Before Gavin was born, Craig and I agonized over what to name the baby we’d nicknamed Bean. We toyed with the idea of giving him a Latin name, as he’d been conceived in South America, but Diego Pardey just didn’t have the right ring. So it had to be something British, and not terribly common, and pronounced the same way in both Canadian and Australian. (Oh how my husband “Creg” has suffered.) I chose Gavin because it ticked all the boxes and I liked the meaning: white hawk. Craig agreed it was a great name, and since we were quite certain he was a boy, we didn’t even bother to discuss girls’ names.

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.

– D.H. Lawrence

For those wondering about the long silence, don’t worry, everything is fine. Well, as fine as things can be in the current situation. Still trying to learn the lesson of living in the moment, impossible to be successful at it every day but there are days that feel good, and despite spending the entire day in the hospital, today has been a pretty good day.

My blog title today is in reference to the biggest cliché of living with cancer. I have now heard upwards of a hundred times, “You just have to take it one day at a time.” Of course, just because it’s completely clichéd doesn’t mean it’s not true. And trust me, it is true. There is no way to know what things will be like from one day to the next, making it pointless to project to tomorrow or next week. We have to live entirely in the moment, enjoying each good day as much as we can and struggling through the bad days, hour by hour.

Currently perched on a stool in my kitchen with a glass of red, while Craig convinces Beanie that it’s bedtime. Surreal, lovely, slightly stressful, but good to be home!

After a quiet weekend at the hospital doing our usual activities - visiting the “money box” on the main floor, throwing coins in the fountain, going to look at the toy train run around the food court, and of course, riding up and down in elevators - we were all anxious to get going but had to be sure that Gavin was afebrile (non-feverish) for 48 hours. We hit the mark on Sunday night and were given the all-clear to leave on Monday.

This evening we finished round one of chemotherapy. Well, mostly. He’ll still require a weekly dose of one drug over the next couple of weeks, but for now we’re playing the counting game. That is, watching his blood counts go down, down, down over the next week before they begin to recover again. He’ll be getting daily doses of a drug called G-CSF which will help his counts come back up. Of course, once they’re back up to normal, that’s when we start all over again.

I found out I was pregnant with Gavin on Boxing Day, 2007. Craig and I had just returned from a two-month jaunt around South America, which culminated in two weeks spent on the Galapagos Islands. Unbeknownst to me, baby Bean was baking in the oven while I drank wine, went scuba-diving with hammerhead sharks and jumped off the top of the boat a couple of times.

I retrospectively freaked out about this behaviour once I found out, sure that I had damaged my little baby forever with a few glasses of cheap Ecuadorian swill. For the rest of my pregnancy I did not consume one drop of alcohol, forbade smoking in my presence and did not dye my hair, take Advil, or use any moisturizers that weren’t entirely concocted of olive oil and shea butter. I took a truckload of supplements and attended my prenatal yoga classes religiously while carting around a copy of Ina May Gaskin’s

Today I have laser-death eyes. Tragically, everyone who works in the IGT department of the hospital died as a result. It wasn’t their fault, they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I got pushed to my limit today and almost starting throwing punches, but I restrained myself… barely.

We knew that we were headed into surgery today, just not when. The unpredictability of hospital life is one of the things that is driving me mental. I met the docs on rounds at 7:30, and we agreed that Gavin was going to go into surgery at around 10:00. Okay, fine. Any questions? Nope. So you can imagine my surprise when ten minutes later our nurse comes in to take me down to the OR. Craig had just left to try to put in a couple of hours at work and then had to turn right around and come back to the hospital.

Sigh. Life, will you just… I mean, come on!

The past few days have brought fresh challenges and new difficulties. We finally met with oncology and so we now know exactly what it is that we are facing and what the plan of attack is. Unfortunately, we were slightly misinformed as to the nature of Gavin’s particular tumour type, so the prognosis isn’t great. We are still hopeful, but his treatment will be extreme. We are looking at six months of chemo ahead of us, most of it in hospital with little opportunity to go home. Six months. I can’t think six months ahead, it’s impossible. I’m thinking only to tonight and tomorrow.

Concerns around Gavin’s recovery continue to plague us, but here are some good to excellent things that have been happening:

We finally heard back from pathology/oncology, and although Gavin’s tumour is malignant as expected, it’s not the really terrible kind that the doctors had feared. The one he has is considered quite treatable, and the prognosis is pretty good. It’s not the worst kind, hurrah!

A few days ago, Gavin smiled again for the first time, initially reserving his smiles for Daddy only, who has always been able to make him laugh. I’m getting some smiles out of him now too.

We’ve been living at the hospital for 19 days now.

The day starts early, we’re usually up at around 6:00 or 6:30 in order to catch the doctors on morning rounds, but as we’re still in the “constant obs” room, this means there’s nowhere for us to sleep next to Gavin. I’ve learned to trust in the nurses to watch him in the night, and I only pop my head in once or twice after he’s gone to sleep to make sure he’s okay. Neither Craig nor I can bring ourselves to sleep in “THE CHAIR” next to his bed as that instrument of torture did us in within the first couple of days.