The one thing I have learnt during my life, especially more so in the past two years, is that life is completely unpredictable. It will take you on one hell of a journey in the most unexpected ways, no matter how much you have tried to plan for the days, months and years ahead. It is full of twists and turns, and ups and downs that, for the most part, are completely out of our control. Yet, the most powerful we can hold onto, besides love, to help us through this journey and endure what life throws at us is HOPE.
Hope is that feeling, expectation or desire for something to happen, for something to be true. It is something we hold onto in the darkest moments of our lives as it allows to face the situation head on and battle through it towards the desired outcome. It can make those dark moments a little easier to bear, even when you only the smallest amount of hope of things turning out fine.
I started this year without any hope that things were going to get better for Charlie and our family. It is hard to have any when you are informed that something new has showed on the latest scan, meaning that possibility of Charlie losing his life to this horrendous disease had now become inevitable. No parent should ever be told that their child will die before them. Despite being told this, we handled the news well as we already had the time to accept this could possibly happen, having been told this after Charlie was diagnosed with a second tumour. However, that sort of news generally wipes out the last of any hope you have that child might beat the odds and beat the cancer.
Even though we had no details of what this would mean for Charlie in the coming months, we made sure to be upfront and honest with him and his siblings. This somehow then led to Charlie telling us exactly who would get what of his belongings, threatening to haunt Owen if he used the Nintendo Switch, demanding we build a shrine to him and then denying us the chance to ever go to Disneyland without him. It may appear to be quite a morbid conversation to be having, but there was a lot of laughter as he made these declarations. If it put a smile on all their faces, who was I to stop them?
Three weeks on, we returned to see Charlie’s Oncologist to confirm what his latest scan had shown and make the decision on how we wanted to approach the news we had been given. What we were not expecting was to be offered a slither of hope that maybe, just maybe, Charlie could beat the cancer.
It’s not a guarantee. Remember, life is unpredictable just as cancer is.
His oncologist’s exact words were that he’d had “a stay of execution”. Probably not the nicest of phrases, but it made clear that, even though there might be some hope, things could go the other way. Even so, the scan had not helped in revealing what was on Charlie’s lung, especially with what was classed a noisy picture. It could be something bad with the Etoposide no longer working or it could be an infection; no one was actually certain. The fact Charlie is well within himself and showing no symptoms to as what this could be didn’t help either. However, the one thing the doctors, who had discussed his recent scan results, could agree upon was that he did NOT meet the criteria to suggest they had lost control of the cancer. For us, that was what gave us back some hope, something we have been in desperate need of.
The one thing I can now say for certain is that I need to keep hold of any hope we have that Charlie could still beat the cancer and live a happy and healthy life. Even though this reprieve could only be temporary, I know I need to keep on hoping that it will end well until I am told its time to let go.
Baking & Tantrums 