{"id":1052,"date":"2010-06-23T10:35:47","date_gmt":"2010-06-23T17:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/?p=1052"},"modified":"2010-06-23T10:35:47","modified_gmt":"2010-06-23T17:35:47","slug":"day-6-facing-realities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/day-6-facing-realities\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 6 – Facing Realities"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We had the two older siblings come in today to meet with the doctor and team and to address their questions. Those two have not really handled this well for a variety of reasons. The plan is to tackle their questions, perceptions and misunderstandings head-on.<\/p>\n

Jeremy saw Patti crying when we first got the news about Angelica. He didn’t understand what leukemia is. He didn’t even really understand what cancer is. He knows that mom doesn’t cry very often, and he is VERY sensitive to emotions. He sucked up that tension and has let it bounce around inside of him for a bit. He has not been sleeping and has not gone to school for a few days. He did try to get back to school, but it wasn’t productive and coupled with the lack of sleep…<\/p>\n

Alexandra has read a lot of books and picks up a lot of information. She heard leukemia, then cancer, then I don’t think she heard much else. She started crying and saying “I don’t want Geli to die.” She has been into the hospital and we have explained that Geli will only be here for a week and that the chances of her being totally healthy are really good. But even yesterday she was still talking about Geli being gone for a long long time and really missing her, and wondering about a bunch of stuff.<\/p>\n

The doctor (and we have a very nice, personable doctor, that is really good at putting complicated medical stuff into kid language) set up a meeting for 1:00pm today. Jeremy came with a few random thoughts, rather than questions, but he really needed to see everything calm and moving forward and he needed to know that this time (parents gone and various family members being with them at night) was going to be over soon. Xandra came with a book of questions. She asked why Gel’s hair would fall out, what the chemo actually does, what the best case scenario was… and she really didn’t want to ask but she did, what the worst case scenario was.<\/p>\n

The doctor listened and replied to all the questions. He was impressed that jeremy knew that 45 years ago, the survival rate for leukemia was only about 4%. (In case you are wondering, the best case is that Geli responds to treatment, doesn’t get any infections during treatment. The worst case is that she would go through treatment and then have a relapse and have to go through treatment again.) He explained everything that the kids asked and listened to jeremy talk about fishing, guns, shooting birds, and other random stuff.<\/p>\n

When that was done, I took those two to Science World and let them burn off some energy doing something completely distracting. I wanted to do something special for them and at the same time get a sense of what they got out of the meeting. My assessment was that they were going to be ok.<\/p>\n

The realities are not easy, but in the end Angelica will have a normal life. It will be a change to our normal for a few years, but we will get through it as a family. I am pretty sure now that everyone in the family understands in their own way. And just to prove that, Jeremy and Xandra both went to school this morning and seemed to be happy about it.<\/p>\n

Jon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*** First, some comments submitted to the blog are being held for moderation. We’re not sure why and not looking into it right now, but we are logging in and approving them as fast as we can. If your comment gets held, we are sorry, but it will appear soon. *** We had the two … Continue reading “Day 6 – Facing Realities”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19,8,7,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gelica","category-health","category-jeremy","category-xandra"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1053,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions\/1053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}