A cough in the middle of the night.
Followed by another.
Then a soft moan of discomfort.
That’s all it takes.
I’m transported to a night over two years ago when I woke up to hear Peyton crying in her sleep.
“I hurt, mommy.”
Those three words foreshadowed pain and sickness and disease.
I didn’t know it at the time.
It would be the last nights I would ever be able to listen to her cough without wondering “Is it now?”
Is now the night that cancer will creep back in her body?
Is now the moment that we start over again?
Is now the beginning?
Or the end?
The days between blood tests will stretch into eternity.
I know that we have a lifetime of coughs and aches and midnight awakenings to fevers and sicknesses.
I hope we do.
The leap from a simple cold to cancer seems far-fetched.
Except we’ve done it before.
I lived with my daughter going to sleep with a random illness and woke up to cancer.
Yeah, I go there.
Sometimes its days between the thoughts.
Others it’s minutes.
It never really leaves.
It makes me feel crazy.
I don’t want to be crazy like this.
Seriously, I don’t chose to be consumed by my fears.
I just am.
No amount of pep talks about how it’s over keeps every fear from crowding in when I lay awake listening to her cough, sniffle, hurt.
It’s a cold. I know it is. Just a cold.
It doesn’t stop me from visualizing every white cell her body is producing to fight off this cold.
Please grow normal!
It only takes one microscopic cell to grow wrong.
PLEASE be normal!
To spread throughout her body and try to take her away.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t mutate and become a cancer cell.
It started with just one the last time.
please don’t do this to us again
I feel ashamed because I’ve watched it happen to so many others.
Why not us?
We talk about the survivor guilt…oh, I have it…I hug my friends who have lost a child, who are dealing with a relapse, who are my worst nightmares walking…and I do feel guilty.
How can we feel confident it won’t be us?
How DARE I feel relieved that it’s not Peyton?
If we say we prayed so hard and THAT’s why Peyton’s still in remission, am I saying that they didn’t pray enough?
If I say that we are so blessed to have her healthy and whole, are we saying that God chose NOT to bless them?
Is it easier for me to drown in the anxiety that it will happen to us than to try to find a way to express how relieved I am that it’s not?
Peyton has a cold.
And the crazy starts, just that fast.