It's a Small World

You might feel like you're alone once your kid is diagnosed. But trust me, it could get weird how small the world gets. Like, six degrees of Kevin Bacon weird.

Take me, for instance. Eve is home from the hospital for a week after being diagnosed with Wilms before I get a call from a friend saying that she heard about an old co-worker whose daughter was undergoing treatment for Wilms. I reconnect with said co-worker (Red Dye #48's Gina) and we wax poetic about cancer, cookies, and YouTube.

A few months after Eve is diagnosed, one of my best friends calls to tell me her next door neighbor's son, who will be in Eve's preschool class of eight, has just been diagnosed with bilateral Wilms. So, 400-500 kids get Wilms each year in the US, and of those, 5% are bilateral. And two of those twenty kids are in the same class and our families already know each other.

Someone contacted me and gave me the email address of Red Dye #48's Melissa early after Eve's diagnosis. We talked for months before my friend (the one with the next door neighbor whose son is in Eve's class) told me she was talking to a local business owner about selling them ad space in a local magazine. I heard the business owner's name a lot and kept seeing it on Facebook, but it wasn't until I looked at Facebook's fun and informative mutual friend feature did I realize that she was a childhood friend of Melissa's.

A neighbor of mine gave me the email address of a friend of her's whose daughter finished treatment for Wilms the year before. The mom also happens to be the teacher of another friend's son at my daughter's school.

This past Friday, we were in clinic hearing the good news that Eve's latest scans were clean. I ran into someone that looked awfully familiar, but it took me a second to figure out who it was. I then realized it was a mom that I had connected with on a message board and had since friended on Facebook. We already had plans to meet and have dinner this week, but now that we met in real life, neither of us needs to wear a red rose.

(I would never in my wildest dreams meet someone in real life who I have "met" online, but the rules are different if you've got stock in Zofran, Clorox, and Emla.)

So all I'm sayin' is, the world is a lot smaller than you'd think. Unless you're in China.