June 22, 2022
We are a couple days away from the one-year anniversary of Aurelia’s diagnosis. Today is the last day of school and the kids begrudgingly stood still for three seconds so I could take a photo: In my parent support group there is a lot of talk about the maintenance phase of treatment. It seems that medical teams all over the world make this phase of treatment out to be a breeze, but the parents recognize this is because they want to get through frontline treatment in a successful and positive way. We are pretty lucky in that Aurelia has been in school and doing fairly well, but I think the realities of cancer hit like a bag of bricks in this phase. We honestly didn’t have much time to sit and ponder things in frontline. It’s constant hospital stays, chemo, tests, etc. We can’t even remember half of it, nor do we want to. Now things have slowed and the questions of the future loom larger. Chemotherapy has side effects. A lot of them. While many made their appearance during frontline...