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Halloween Haunts 2013: The Ways We Bleed by Lori Michelle

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January 3, 2011, at 5 PM I stood over the bed watching as his little body breathed, inhale and exhale, then inhale and shudder slightly as he exhaled. I was glad he had made it out of surgery alive and was just waiting for him to wake up so we could go home.

It had been a long day already. We had arrived at 7 that morning. They started an IV on his small arm. He cried. We sat for hours waiting for an available opportunity for the operating room to be free. It was hard for mom to not eat all day, let alone a 3 year old.  But he was so sick and listless that he didn’t even make a fuss.  Finally, they took him back at about 4 PM. He cried my name as they wheeled him down the hall.

My heart broke. My little boy was going into an operating room for a bone marrow biopsy. I only hoped the news would be good.  It had to be good, right?

I looked back down at my little sleeping child and rubbed his back softly as he continued breathing deeply, the chirps of hospital machines in the background. He wasn’t the only child in the recovery room, but he was certainly the littlest at that time of day. His body was so tiny compared to the hospital bed he was on; the oxygen mask covering most of his face. This was my rough-and-tumble football-playing boy looking frail in a hospital bed.  It just wasn’t possible.

The craziness had started the October before.  He had fallen off the bed and hurt his hip. I took him in, but nothing showed up wrong on the x-ray. They sent us home with instructions of Tylenol and bed rest.  The told us it would be a few days and he would get better.  Well, he did and he didn’t.  Yes, the leg seemed to heal just fine, but every once in a while, he would limp. Then he would get sudden fever spikes, with no explainable reason. I finally took him to an orthopedic surgeon; our first appointment was not until December.

He shook and cried out in the bed. The nurse shushed him and took off the oxygen mask.  The blood pressure cuff on his right leg tightened up again and then slowly released its squeeze as it calculated the numbers. He turned his head to the left, plopping it down on the pillow, then immediately did the same thing back to the right.  He took another deep shuddering breath and calmed back down.

I know how rough waking up from anesthesia is. You have this total loss of control feel; you’re conscious, yet unconscious.  I can only imagine how hard it was on this little boy, not knowing what was happening to him. I rubbed him on the back again as the nurse continued to write in his chart.

The orthopedic doctor looked at the boy, moving his leg this way and that, checking the mobility in the hip socket.  He didn’t seem too concerned until I told him about the fever spikes. He told me he wanted an MRI right away. In the middle of December, it is very hard to get anything done, but we managed to get the last MRI appointment available in San Antonio.

If you have ever had an MRI, you know how loud and scary they are.  Now imagine you are only 3. I literally had to lay across the back of the MRI machine and hold his arms through the tube. Despite his crying and fear, he laid still enough for them to get good pictures of his hips. Unfortunately, the orthopedic surgeon was now on vacation, and the results would have to wait until after the new year.

“He’s going to be just fine,” a voice broke me out of my reverie.

“Excuse me?” I looked up to see an elderly nurse standing next to me.

“This is the best hospital for children. They will know how to get him fixed up and playing again.”

“I hope so.” I looked back down at my still sleeping child. The tears started to flow from my eyes as the stress of the past few days finally broke through.

The nurse hugged me. “Don’t you worry mija. God will take care of him and you.”

I continued to cry as I thought about our journey to this point. The past few days had really thrown our lives into chaos.

December 29th, the boy was playing at home with his grandma and grandpa, wearing the new socks they had gotten for him.  He started to run, like all little boys do, and slipped on the tile floor. He fell, smashing back down on the hip he had injured before. My father got him on the couch, gave him some Tylenol and put some ice on the hip.  When I came home, little man was still laying in the same spot.  His eyes were glassy from either pain or fever.  I held him and gave him more Tylenol. By the end of the evening, he seemed to be a lot better.

December 30th, I got a call at work. His fever was up to 103 and even with Tylenol and Motrin, it wouldn’t go down. I left and took him to the pediatric urgent care by my house. The doctor there moved his hip, he screamed, and she immediately sent up to the emergency room. There, they did all sorts of x-rays and ultrasounds and saw a mass surrounding his hips. Since they were really short staffed, they sent us in an ambulance to the children’s hospital downtown.

He was immediately admitted to the hospital and placed on the floor for really sick kids with no diagnosis. It’s really scary that such a floor even exists. It’s even scarier that it was mostly full. That night, I got no sleep as they did x-rays, MRIs, blood tests, and everything else. I lost track of all they did. I lost track of who we saw, I lost track of what they said.

The doctor came in to the recovery room. He had brought someone else with him. We stood there for a moment overlooking the small child who still lay sleeping in the bed. He finally spoke up.

“We got the test results back from the pathology department.”

I looked at him hopeful. I had met him just a few days before when he had come in with the boy’s MRI results. The doctor had suggested Langerhans Cell Histocytosis as a possible explanation for the boy’s condition. It’s a serious disease needing some chemo, but it wasn’t life threatening. This was the doctor that had made us come in for the bone marrow biopsy. He was here to tell me we were going to be fine and that I could take the boy home for dinner. Right?

He continued, “This is the hospital psychologist and counselor for the hematology/oncology department.”

I shook her hand and smiled at her.

“I’m afraid the diagnosis isn’t good. The cells came back as lymphoblastic leukemia cells.”

The floor dropped out from under me and I could feel the psychologist holding me in a strong embrace. Tears flowed freely as I sobbed over the diagnosis.

Cancer. The ultimate horrible death sentence. My son. My son has cancer.

It has been almost three years since that day. We have discovered many things along our journey. Leukemia is not the death sentence it used to be. Now most children survive with very few having any sort of re-occurrence. Cancer in children isn’t as rare as you might think. There are a lot of kids who have some form of cancer or another; some of them not near as lucky as my son.

Going to the hospital has become commonplace for us. We know all the doctors, all the nurses, all the day surgery staff, all the front desk people, and even the cafeteria people know us. These people become part of your extended family and you rely heavily on them to help you get through the rough times.

Michelle_cover_BleedBack Michelle_cover_BleedFrontThere is some help for families of cancer kids, but unfortunately, it isn’t enough. Bleed was put together in hopes that it would raise enough funds to help someone. Hopefully several someones. The horror community rallied and donated stories, poems and personal essays to help.

After all is said and done, 47 different authors contributed to this great anthology. Among them, Bentley Little, William F. Nolan, Rick Hautala, Joe McKinney, Mort Castle, Gene O’Neill, Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Tim Waggoner, Jason V Brock, to name just a small few of the fabulous authors that grace the pages of this collection. All profits will go to the National Children’s Cancer Society.

My son has about six more months of chemotherapy to go. Barring any sort of horrible medical crisis, he should be considered cancer free in March 2014. Yes, we will always hold our breath to the possibility of the cancer returning, but after the severe challenges my son has faced over the past couple of years, it should be second nature.

No one deserves to have cancer, especially a child. Let’s give these kids a fighting chance.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Lori is offering one free digital copy of Bleed.

Giveaway Rules: Enter for the prize by posting in the comments section. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail. You may enter once for each giveaway, and all entrants may be considered for other giveaways if they don’t win on the day they post. If you would like to comment without being entered for the giveaway, include “Not a Giveaway Entry” at the end of your post. You may also enter by e-mailing memoutreach@horror.org and putting HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header.

LORI MICHELLE is the co-owner of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, as well as co-publisher and managing editor of both Dark Moon Digest and Dark Eclipse. She is the author of Dual Harvest and the editor of Bleed, an anthology to benefit the National Children’s Cancer Society. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies, including the 2012 Bram Stoker Award® finalist, Slices of Flesh. She is an associate member of the Horror Writer’s Association.

Lori was born in Los Angeles, where her dream of being a ballerina was dashed by a career-ending injury. She turned her creative efforts elsewhere, and now lives in San Antonio with her life partner, where she’s a mother of two, a dance studio owner, a LaTex software formatter, and a graphic designer.

Lori can be found on Facebook, Twitter and on her own website.  She urges everyone to go out and grab a copy of Bleed.

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3 comments on “Halloween Haunts 2013: The Ways We Bleed by Lori Michelle

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