Receive

Receive.

You need to learn to receive.  It was and still is a hard lesson for me to learn.  To accept help and generosity, to treat yourself to kindness.   

The volunteer stops by my door on the unit and I think, my kid wasn't up all night puking, you should really go next door and help her first.  I still remember that little girl.  The PCA had woken Josh up with vitals and he wasn't going back to sleep without a red dye infusion, in twin popsicle form.  I stumbled out in the hallway at 2 am and as I returned from the kitchenette, my eyes fell on the door of our neighbor.  There she sat, lit eerily from above by that dreadfully bright spotlight they use at night, her family in chairs around the bed.  She had to have been my son's age, bald, her eyes blackened by fatigue and exhaustion.  She looked at me, blankly, and then threw up and whimpered.  Yes I was tired the next day, but I hadn't been through that hell the night before. 

Infact Josh is sort of a legend.  He never threw up from chemo, not once.  Even on carboplatin and cyclophosphamide and etoposide, the kid just wouldn't toss his cookies, er, well his milk.  They tell new parents about him, the kid who didn't lose his hair on the first protocol, who never threw up from chemo, who pedalled a hand bike with a chest tube and only tylenol to dull the pain.  The hold him up, they give the newbies some hope, there's a chance you won't be trying to keep your kid from choking on their vomit at 2 am. 

How can I look around at all those other patients and moms, and feel like I deserve something special when I am already so lucky on a floor where the news is easily so much worse next door.  Josh lost a kidney, but he has another, and his sister and I are the same blood type, so hopefully we have some spares.  Trust me, I am a pro, I can talk myself out of anything, even that awesome cake with the yummy icing in the cafeteria that I don't need to spend the money on or really deserve.  It's hard to receive when on my good days I already feel so lucky.

Once you get sucked into the frequent flyer club at your Children's Hospital, you start to realize there are things as bad as cancer, some even worse.  And in so doing you can start to talk yourself out of a lot of selfcare, or the right to say no. . .or even yes.  Out of that latte a friend offered to bring by, or that long shower while the volunteer or grandma sits with your child.  Or those freebies down in the playroom. Here's a secret, you don't have to be locked up in bone marrow isolation or up all night with a vomiting kid to take some free bubble bath or that slice of pizza in the kitchenette. . .or the gloriously miraculous free girl scout cookies.

It took a stranger to teach me this lesson, to finally let myself get a treat just for waking up that day, a constituent of cancertown, down over in the pediatric quarter.  My hometown is near the headquarters of an intimate apparel and bath and body products company.  Once a month a wonderful woman visits the unit and brings the last campaign's travel sizes and goodie bags and extras to the unit to give them to the patients and families.  She comes laden, and will leave empty-handed, it's her whole point in coming to the unit.  One month I was in patient and she had more than the usual toiletries, she had mixed halves of pjs sets, they were so cute.  I knew the teenage girls on the unit would love them.  There was this ridiculous one with rockets and stars, it made me laugh and tear up a little, I knew my daughter (4 yr) would go crazy if I had it. I missed her, a lot.

I mentioned it to the woman.  She said I should take it.  I declined.  She insisted.  I insisted that sweet girl with no hair in Rm 8 deserved it more, I was just a mom, this should go to the kids.  I took a brown sugar bubble bath, Penny had already gone crazy over the last one I brought home and begged for more.  They handed me a matchbox car they had brought for Josh or other little boys.  I smiled and thanked them, and felt grateful they were here to bring such simple pleasures to the unit. 

I went back to Josh's room, and he requested the pizza.  The one I personally had to go downstairs and get from the grill.  I came back, piping hot pizza in hand, dinner for myself for later in the other. On my bed sat a men's toiletry bag from said company, with 8 more little bubble bath bottles inside, eye and face cream, divinely scented lotion, 6 other little samples and a nail buffer, the bag resting on top of the crazy purple flannel pj shirt.

That toiletry bag became my hospital bag, it was so nice compared to the clear pouch I had been using, it really became so handy and perfect.  Every time I took a shower on the unit I slathered their lotion on and returned to my room where the nurses would stop by and stand in the door and say how they loved how our room smelled.  That it was so nice to smell something decadent instead of hospital.  Each night I spent in my son's hospital room on the oncology ward, I wore that ridiculous shirt and thought of my daughter snuggling up next to me.  Each visit a nurse, or a mom, or a dad or ten would compliment my shirt.  I would smile and think of that woman, with the knowing eyes, telling me I deserved a cute shirt too.

That shirt lived in oncology world.  It would get washed and reworn, and washed and put back in the bag for the next admission.  Every admission it made me remember I deserve a pick me up, to recieve kindness.  It made me remember to smile at the tired mom in the hallway at 2 am.  It made the nurses laugh.  Josh would count the rockets as he fell asleep, and I would curl up exhausted on the extendo-couch-a-ma-tron contraption and think about my daughter and my family at home. 

My son finished therapy, for the second time, in May.  3.5 months ago.  I finally took that shirt down from the shelf and wore it to bed, at home in my own bed.  I won't lie.  I cried.  There is a whirlpool of emotion when you come off treatment, especially when you relapse immediately the first time.  We've never gone this long without chemo.  That silly shirt was more than a shirt to me.  There had been nights it salvaged my spirits and flooded me with silly memories I needed.  But it is time now.  To remind myself to receive again.  To let myself accept and reward myself in the simplest and silly ways.  To care for me too.  To wake up a little early and crawl in bed next to my sweet daughter and listen to her hysteria of joy over my awesome cool pj shirt.  Penny's face was exactly as I had imagined it, all those months ago, when a kind woman who knew better than me asked a nurse which room was Josh's and left a care package for me that I needed more than I could understand.

Allow yourself to receive, accept kindnesses for yourself as you would for your child. 

You deserve it.  You really really do.