**  THANK YOU all so much.  I have the best online friends and support group from this site.  I can’t tell you how much each comment and email did to boost me out of my funk.  Ya’ll are amazing.

After taking Peyton’s temperature eleventy-million times on Friday, she finally hit the hospital stay lottery number of 101.  Once upon a time, a fever of 101 meant that we’d be going inpatient to stay for at least 72 hours while waiting on blood cultures to be ran.  Now it means a trip to the ER for blood to be drawn, a dose of antibiotics and heading home if her CBC is still good.

The call to the doctor confirmed that we would have to be hospital bound, preparing a suitcase just in case, but with the chance of getting to just go home.  AMAZING!  I can’t tell you how many times we’ve stayed for our 3 days with no fever, no symptoms and nothing to do but watch Disney and order room service.

It should have been a simple trip to the ER, but this week has been doomed to be a nonstop suffer-fest for Peyton.  Getting her port accessed is nothing for this child, she barely flinches and it’s such a normal event that she doesn’t even really dread it anymore.  I couldn’t count the number of times she’s had a needle stuck in her chest.  It’s no big deal.

However, I have a feeling that’s all been changed.

Friday night’s nurse managed to screw it up for all of us.  Peyton, me, the nurses at the clinic that have to access her port on a regular basis…we all get to take a swing at her for what she did to my girl.

First attempt: I watch her like a hawk as she fumbles around with all of her equipment, then she goes in for the stab and Peyton screams.  This is not normal.  Nurse proceeds to wiggle the needle around….Peyton screams some more.  She realizes that she missed the port completely and has just been wiggling the needle around in Peyton’s chest.  I have to suppress urge to claw out her eyeballs.

I get Peyton calmed down and prepared for a second attempt.  She is scared now, convinced the nurse will hurt her again.  Yeah.  I feel it too.

Second attempt: The nurse goes in for another poke and I feel Peyton go stiff as a board just before she starts screaming again.  Nurse says something like, “wow, is she always like this?” I say something like, “No, just when you do it wrong.”  Get ugly look from nurse. Really don’t care.  An attempt to flush saline through the line is unsuccessful, more screaming begins in the form of, “IT HURTS, IT HURTS, IT HURTS!”  Every ounce of blood in my body has begun to boil and nurse realizes that she has screwed up again.

It is at this point that I stick my hand out as the nurse moves in to start wiggling the port and I get all MOTHER OF THE BEAST on this woman.

“You had your turn. You get a nurse down from 2 Southwest (which is the oncology wing) to do this port correctly or I’m doing it myself.”

She tries to argue, she TRIES to blame it on Peyton….I TRY not to raise my voice as I explain that she comes near my kid with another needle and I will take her out with nothing more than the sheer force of my wrath.

We wait for an hour with the second needle still in her chest when someone from the IV team comes in to see what the problem is.  He takes one look at the needle, feels it for a couple of seconds and then rolls his eyes.

“This must come out. We will do again, the right way.”  I wanted to hug the little man.  Peyton wanted him dead because she realized that he was going to touch her port again.  Now she starts screaming before he even touches her…he hadn’t even rolled his cart into the room yet….and she’s hollering her head off.

Getting her to hold still so that we could get the second attempt needle out was an adventure.  I had to practically sit on her to hold her down so that IV dude could prep and clean the area.  When the needle came out for a third time, and Peyton saw it…well…my ears are still ringing.

One clean poke, an easy blood return, done.

After all the screaming was done, Peyton had received a bunny toy from IV dude and I had thanked him profusely, he left with his magic cart and Peyton sighed in relief.

Because I pissed off the nurse, we couldn’t get a drink for Peyton…we couldn’t get a pillow…we couldn’t get a movie…I had to go to the doctor and ask for a blanket.  When he gave me the “I wear a white coat” look, I explained that our nurse had made us very unhappy, in return I made her very unhappy and now I couldn’t get her to assist in the most basic of needs. Perhaps I verbalized it in a slightly different way, but those were the main points.

Two minutes later, a new nurse showed up with a blanket, a pillow and a stack of movies to choose from.

You don’t mess with my kid.

After the blood culture was taken, the CBC was sent for and all was quiet, we waited.  And we waited some more.  And stiiiiiill waiting at 3:00 AM.  Did I fail to mention that we got there at 8 PM? Something that should have taken all of 30 minutes at max, had now become an 8 hour event.  Peyton was asleep, worn out from her painful experience with the port Nazi.

A report of good blood counts, a stack of discharge papers and a quick goodbye found us on the road back home.

We rolled into bed at 5 AM.

This has definitely been a two-bottle-of-wine week.

By 9:30 last night I’d worked myself up into a good old-fashioned pity party. Oh yes. With the appropriate music, my handy dandy bowl of chocolate and a chip on my shoulder the size of an Easter Island Head….that spoke to me….and said “EAT MORE CHOCOLATE”.

Which I did.

As the most irrelevant of events, yesterday morning I got the “you do what?” from a new mom I met at my kids’ school. I GET it that most of the world may not understand the blogging thing…they don’t see the need for it…it’s a monumental waste of time and if you were a real writer you’d have something I can pick up at my local Wal-greens best seller rack.

Mom – So, do you work?

Me – Well, sort of, I write. I have a blog….”

Mom – Blog? You mean one of those website thingys?

Yeah, on that whole INTERNET thingy…you know, the one Al Gore invented?

Me – Yes.

Mom – What a neat hobby.  Must be so nice to have the extra time to do that.

Me – I make the time, it’s important to me, I write about my family and my daughter’s cancer—

Mom – WOW, that must be depressing.  Who reads it?

And that’s it, folks.

I have a depressing, useless hobby on my internet website thingy.

They just don’t make Hallmark cards for that kind of love.

After that rousing game of “Use Anissa’s Sense of Purpose as a Verbal Pinata”, I had to take Peyton to her clinic appointment.  If you read the post previous to this one, you can see how I felt about that.

It sucked. Up one side and down the other. It both sucked and blew at the same time.  It was one long never-ending stream of suckage.

It involved:

1. Peyton not being able to eat anything from 7:30-4:40
2. Peyton’s port not cooperating, making special meds necessary, driving our time over the school pickup and having to call in reinforcements to go get them from school
3. The spinal tap from hell that involved screaming, tears, mistakes, insufficient amounts of pain medication and a child in unnecessary excruciating pain.

I took the kids to dinner because I knew I’d be throwing rolls of Ritz crackers and fruit snacks at them if we went home to eat.  This, in turn, made it impossible for me to get Rachael and Nathaniel to chess class in time.

They were disappointed, but so sweet about accepting the weary look on my face as reason enough.  I felt another blow to my heart.

By the time I got everyone to bed and I sat down with my bowl of chocolates, I was ready to just call it a day…a sucky day that makes me wish life came with a do-over button.

I didn’t answer my phone. I didn’t answer emails. I didn’t answer chat messages.

But what I did do was open my Google reader, and start reading. Maybe someone had a worse day than me out there in the world of blogging, and by Joe, I needed to find them and realize my sucktoberfest wasn’t the worst.

It wasn’t.

It’s not often I read about other cancer children on sites that don’t originate from a cancer parent.  Last night there were 2.  One shared about the loss of a friend’s child to cancer.  The other was from a mother who lost two twin sons before birth and how she was sharing her grief with a mother who lost a daughter to cancer.

I felt the big hand of God come down and just slap the snot right out of me.

Anissa, you hearing this? You? You don’t get to complain! You don’t get to sit down and have a pity-me moment because you had a bad day. Yeah, Peyton’s day was rough. There will be more of them coming.  You get to be thankful that your child is still breathing, is still in remission and you’d BETTER be thankful that she has treatment options because too many kids don’t.

I was humbled beyond belief.

Yeah, I get that.  My day was awful. I hope not to have another like it for a very long time. Do I think for one moment that my day compares to every day in the life of a parent who walks in their house and hears an emptiness where a child once ran?  Who walks by that bedroom door and wishes with all their heart for a voice to call out and ask for one more story, one more drink, one more kiss goodnight?  No.  And I know that.

I got to wake up this morning and start a new day with all of my kids.  Yesterday is a memory. A bad one, but it’s in the past and I can sit and brood about it, or I can grab the joy that today offers and make a better memory to replace that one.

This was a good start.

I told her, “Leave your sister alone, she doesn’t feel good and she’s hurting.” Thank God she doesn’t listen to me.

Today I was proven wrong.  Because today? Today I watched my child have a BAD one.

Peyton had her monthly visit at the clinic for a spinal tap with chemo injected into her spinal fluid and chemo in her port.

I’m not going to go into the awful details of WHY there was blood on the table, WHY she had to have two needles stuck in her back and WHY she had to scream for 20 minutes…and sobbed for half an hour.  I’m just going to leave it that I am not happy, I am devastated for Peyton who had to suffer today. Mistake were made and my 4 year old paid the price.

Tonight as my baby walks slowly through the house, groans in pain when she tries to lay down on the couch and whispers things like, “Mama, it hurts when I have to bend”, I am wishing I could take this all from her into myself.

I’m reminded of all the reasons I hate cancer.

Maybe you look around your house at the end of a day and think about how glorious it is for everything to have a place and for it to be there. Perhaps you glance around with pride at the perfectly organized existence that is your world.  Dishes washed, laundry folded and tucked away into tidy drawers, your clean abode is a beautiful representation of your tidy life.

I don’t like you.  You can feel free to stop reading now.

Because right now I’m sitting here in front of my computer thinking about the to-do list of things I have to get caught up on from our leisurely 3-day weekend.

Laundry

It’s all clean.  No, no really, you can stop applauding now.  But it’s sitting around in hampers and if I don’t fold it tonight it stands a really good chance of staying there for the rest of the week, only being folded at the last minute when I need the hampers again for next week’s laundry.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Floors

I have tile floors throughout my house, so you can hear the sand being shuffled from room to room via little feet.  There is a cluster of suspicious foil wrappers under the coffee table that tells me someone has been into the Hershey’s kisses.  I MUST vacuum.

My kitchen

Well. There just aren’t words.

The bathrooms

Peter was home for the past week, so having two male in the house again should make the conditions in there pretty clear.

This doesn’t even touch on the ongoing list of things that should be getting done that probably won’t until the earth stops rotating on its axis the day we move…things like windows getting scrubbed, air vents that need to be cleaned, stacks of pictures that need be rehung after our last painting adventure…in MAY. When you start to think that the cleaning scene from “Enchanted” looks pretty good, rats and roaches and all…you have a problem.
I wonder if I burned this house to the ground, would the insurance company would use this blog as evidence in my arson case?

The first two weeks of school have passed us by. Smoothly, with no big hurdles to jump…except that part where I got talked into accepting the role as a home room mom. Yeah.

It’s a tippy-toe dip back into my pre-Peyton-cancer life.

Before she got sick I was all about the PTA, volunteering to read in the classrooms, bringing the baked goods, making photocopies, cutting out stuff, doing whatever to keep the teachers happy because happy teachers mean happy classrooms.

Then she was diagnosed the summer before Rachael went kindergarten and Nathaniel went into second grade.

Hello, I’m going to drop off my kid, forget to bring their lunchbox, probably left their agenda on the kitchen table (remember to sign it? I scoff!), they may not have gone to bed until 10 pm because they came down to visit us at the hospital that’s an hour away, and they are probably going to cry at some point during the day because…..well, their life stinks. And ME?  I got nothing for you.

I had so many days when the kids asked me to do something, come meet them for lunch, bring in snacks for movie day, something. And I had to say no.  The PTF group didn’t even ask me to volunteer for any jobs because they knew I was going to say no.

But this year is a new start.  This year is the first year I’m really starting to see the light at the end of this chemo tunnel.  I’m making some baby steps and some groundshaking steps into freeing us from the restrictive lives we’ve inhabited for the past 2+ years.

I can be a homeroom mom.  I can plan a weekend where I’m going to leave my kids. I can see a future that spans farther than the end of the week. I can try to recapture that mom I was before.

Yet, REALLY? I can’t.

Because, I will always be the mom of a cancer child.  I will bear the scars of that forever.  The part of me that sailed through life blinded to the mortality of children died with Peyton’s diagnosis.  I can’t go back.  I can’t close my eyes to that.  Ever.

In a lot of ways her cancer diagnosis changed my life for the positive.  I try very hard to glean every blessing out of it I can or it could cripple me.  I know that living in the NOW is all we have.  You have to hold tightly to the joys that each day brings, because we aren’t promised tomorrow.  God has a great plan. I seek my place in that.  I don’t always like it. I often throw myself on the floor in a tantrum and rage against what He lays in my path.  But like any parent, he grabs my hand, gives me a good solid shake and sets me back on my feet.

The visual of my life as a darkened path, with light only coming after I’ve walked a step is so clear to me.  It’s scary, frightening, the end is shrouded in the darkness of the unknown.  I hesitate and falter.  But I have faith that the next step I take is the one that the Lord laid in front of me.

I will put my foot into the darkness and my heart will be enlightened.

Please keep the many children battling cancer in your prayers.  Consider being registered with the bone marrow registry.  Give blood.  Donate to support our team for the Cure Kids Cancer Challenge, where our team will be walking in honor of Peyton and in memory of the many friends who lost their battles.

THIS is for Karalyn, who said I had to post cute pictures of Peyton to make up for the skeevy spider. What? I need more reasons to post pictures of my kid? Are you kidding me?

Make a Smilebox photobook