Pleas for mercy have turned into threats of suicide and the nurses are not prepared.
“Legos?” they suggest to my son. All of them, at one point or another, over an extended period of time.
It’s a recurring theme, these Legos. A powerful distraction to the pediatric bone marrow transplant ward where my son is on his umpteenth round of chemo. That or they’ve gotten a f--- ton of Legos donations.
Also: basketball, archery, coloring books, Bingo, watercolors. But nothing to smash. Nothing fragile to shatter. Except for the 8-year-old boy lying in the bed, already well and shattered. He stares at a spot on the wall and takes refuge there, as if willing a portal to open and take him away. It’s worse than a thousand-yard stare; it’s an unblinking slow slide into surrender.
“Just let me die,” he pleads, covering his sobbing face with a pillow. “Leave me alone and let me die. Or I’ll just kill myself!”
This, because a steady stream of therapists really, really want to make him smile. And sometimes when you’re feeling bad, there’s nothing worse than well-intentioned strangers trying to make you feel better. Especially when they use sing-song voices and fidget spinners to do it. Energy therapy and healing beads don’t really address the issue, and “fun” is a misnomer when it’s coerced.
“At least throw the basketball once,” one of them tells my whimpering child. He hurls it at the wall and is back beneath his blanket before it bounces off and rolls into a biohazard disposal holding an ungodly amount of chemo puke aftermath.
He’s been on an unrelenting drip of poison boiling his insides. A chemo blitz to eradicate the core. Cancer patients get chemo at lower concentrations, spread out over a longer time–a softer touch to keep from destroying the most vital part of blood cell production, the bone marrow. But bone marrow transplant patients? They require a full-on carpet bombing inside; the bone marrow’s slated for elimination. And there’s no other treatment for the rare genetic disease that, if allowed, would subject my son to a kind of suffering that’s exponentially worse.
I watch him shrinking underneath his blanket, willing himself invisible, and I wish the team of cheerful visitors would drop the act for just a moment and tell him like it is: You feel like this because the chemo is burning the life out of you.
But there is instead an offer for Play-doh.
How insulting this must be, I think. To be surrounded by adults turning on candycoated voices to assure you they understand how you feel. Not a single one of them does, author included. I do not know what it feels like to have tubes placed in my chest to flood me with as much poison as it takes to decimate my bone marrow. I do not know what it feels like to then be told routinely I’m “doing a great job” as I am ceaselessly poked and prodded for blood and urine and vitals and mandatory antiseptic showers and nature therapy all while puking uncontrollably and losing control of my bowels.
The sun somehow still shines and laughter drifts in from the hallway and cars out the window wait obediently at red lights, everyone acting like everything is as it should be—but if it were, the sky would be black and the world would be on fire. Because that’s how it is to be 8 years old and dangled over the edge of the abyss by grown-ups who say there’s no other way.
Of course he wants to die. Who wouldn’t?
And suddenly I have to tell him a story, a really good story. A story he can see in his head as he’s violently retching off the bed and convulsing, that eclipses even the deafening sound of the pity sighs, doing exactly nothing and landing nowhere. Worse only than the pity groans.
The pity sighs are all that’s left when Legos are no match for a nuclear bomb going off inside a child’s body. “We have to almost kill you to save you” is something I’ve tried to explain in kid-friendly terms but it has a very short shelf life. Ceases to be convincing as reality constricts to vomit and pee and tube feeding and pain, and “I want to kill myself” becomes a steady mantra from the lips of a child who shouldn’t even know what that means.
So I lean into it, the suicide plans. Let’s explore it, I say, your wish to die. Air it out rather than let it fester. It’s a scary feeling but if it’s what he’s feeling, better he be heard than feel ignored (Any child psychologist will say so – and don’t worry, I double checked.)
“How would you do it?” I ask.
“With a gun?”
“How will you get a gun? They don’t sell guns to children.”
“Attack the police and steal theirs.”
“Well yes,” I say, “the police do have guns you could steal. But they also have Tasers and they’d probably tase you before you could get away.”
“I don’t care.”
“But you will, when they tase you.”
Silence.
“So now you’ve been tased and I’ll have to come save you. And then we’ll have to flee and start our new lives as fugitives. And if we’re running from the law, we might as well live it up! So how ‘bout this: We buy a bunch of emus and let them loose in a shopping mall. We do all the things you haven’t had a chance to do yet.”
“Like what?”
“Like, did you know there’s a lizard that shoots blood out of its eyes?”
“Really?! Where?”
“Right here in the United States. Texas, I think. Oklahoma.”
“Can we go there?”
“Sure! There’s also a cat island in Japan and a red beach in China and a forest of stone and mountains inexplicably rainbow. There are so many things out there that you just can’t imagine while you’re stuck in here.”
“Like what?”
Like all sorts of animals you’ve not yet heard of, existences of which you’re unaware. A tiny bird in New Zealand that screams like a demon, adorable goats that faint at sudden sounds. Strange and exciting foods you’ve never tried. Inside jokes you’ve yet to make, friends you’ve yet to find, teachers you’ll give quirky nicknames who’ll never live it down. Dares you have yet to give, curfews you’re bound to break. Unsuspecting old people you have yet to prank.
Horror movie villains still in the making that’ll one day make you feel scared but alive. Drive-throughs where you’ll drunkenly make embarrassing memories with friends.
The kind that seem mortifying at first but emanate warmth over time. There are so many colors you haven’t even seen yet, maybe colors not yet known, that only you can find.
“And don’t forget lottery tickets,” he suddenly adds. “When I’m an adult I can play the lottery.”
His eyes are alive again and he can see things in his mind. Things beyond the stifling black veil of the here and now.
“I really hope I don’t die,” he says.
