Thursday my friend Jen drove me down to Portsmouth so we could deliver our work for the upcoming "Enormous Tiny Art Show 5" at Nahcotta. The drive went quickly of course, because it was good quality time to chat and catch up. Jen asked how my daughter Oriana was doing, and she is doing great, but coming up soon in March will be her now annual MRI to track her benign brain tumors. Time with friends can make a car drive go quicker, or can turn a stressful time into a bearable--even fun--experience. For the 2 years Oriana was on an MRI every-three-months-routine, my good friends Jessica and Moira met Carter and I at the hospital, and hung out with us in the small waiting room for MRI patients. Instead of sitting and reading bad magazines while attempting not to worry, I got to have 2 hours of good conversation with dear friends.
It's hard to imagine how people get through difficult experiences like having a child with a disease as Oriana does, (Neurofibromatosis), but the thinking about it is much worse than the actual experience (at least for me). Also, I had a major epiphany a couple of years after Oriana's diagnosis: her experience of her life is not my experience of her life. Children can't see into the future the way we do. Their life is about now. If, as a parent, you can make that now o.k., or even fun, when going through an otherwise difficult experience, great! So, we established a routine that Oriana would get to choose a toy at our round-the-corner Rite Aid a few days before each MRI. She wasn't allowed to open it until we were at the hospital. This made it so her focus was on the toy and not about worrying about getting the IV etc.
This post is way too long, so on another I'll write about how her hospital stay for cranial surgery went so well that she later commented, "I wish all my friends could have surgery".
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