Gloria in Excelsis Deo: Second Anniversary of Diagnosis Day

Saturday June 4, 2022, was Thomas's second-year anniversary of being diagnosed with a softball-sized neuroblastoma cancer at four years old.

The night before, Chris and I discussed the anniversary and, while we are now again living an exceedingly active family life, we are remain, post-trauma, "last-minute" kind of people, a reverberation of a year and a half when we could make no plans at all, not even plans for the next day. Even now, when we host parties and such, we invite everyone over the day before! Thus, we had no plans for the anniversary day, but we both confessed that other anniversary days rock our core in a way this one doesn't. Thomas's two worst surgery days of November 18th and December 4th are hard.

I still remember on that June 4th having taken Thomas to his primary care provider, having blood drawn, and taking him for an hour-long ultrasound, at the end of which the sweet, young tech said, "Does Thomas's doctor know how to reach you? He'll be calling you tonight."

I left the clinic to take Thomas to dinner and I remember the suffocating feeling in my throat that I knew with certainty our lives would never be the same when I heard whatever the news was going to be. I sat in that moment articulating in my mind that the truth of Thomas's condition already existed even though I didn't know what it was and that within hours, the curtain obscuring reality would be ripped aside.

Thomas (4) eating dinner with his Mama, waiting for his diagnosis

And I remember when I called my friends to ask their teenage daughter to babysit for me so we could take Thomas to meet his oncologist, whose office had called the next morning and asked, "Is there any way you could be here within the hour?" I remember thinking I was holding myself together until I tried to talk and out came primal screams and weeping such that, to this day, I don't know how the friend on the other end of the phone understood me, but the babysitter showed up within the hour.

Nowadays Chris and I walk around knowing a little more about how any sense of control over our own lives is mostly false, but that God's truth that we cannot see is always behind the curtain. I try my best not to live with paranoia, but to remember that I know what I know, but God knows everything and His Will will be done.

We spent Thomas's anniversary day doing very normal things. I was downstairs at 5:30 a.m. to bake (no sugar, low-carb, high-protein) chocolate chip muffins for a special breakfast. At one point I pulled Thomas on my lap to tell him what today was. He grinned happily, asked me to bake him a (no-sugar, low-carb) chocolate pound cake for his anniversary, and ran off.

After my teens went jogging with me, our family spent the morning doing some landscaping clean-up work. Thomas did quality control on the leaf piles.

Thomas and David requested a picnic lunch.

Later the family went swimming and Chris went to a church event, while I did the Saturday grocery shopping, three loads of laundry, and probably five dishwasher loads . . . in other words, a typical day. Busy housekeeping days mean leftovers for dinner.

My pound cake fell apart, which seemed symbolically fitting for what happened on this Diagnosis Day two years ago. And then Thomas refused to eat it at all, which makes him a typical, capricious six-year-old.