Summer 2019

I kept doing my treatments but they seemed to get harder and harder every time. Momma said it was probably because I had been getting treatments for so long that it was just hard on my body. Everything hurt when I was in the hospital and a lot of times it was hard for me to even breath so they’d have to do oxygen. No one seemed to think that was a big deal but it scared me.

The nurses tried really hard to make my hospital stays fun. They always decorated my room before I came and my favorite nurses would come see me. Sometimes I even got to play with Chevy, who was a dog at the hospital that visited patients. He would get in bed and lay down with me and that made me feel like I was home with my own animals. I really appreciated how much they were trying to make things fun for me but I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted more than anything to have a break during the summer. I just wanted to go swimming and have sleepovers and be a normal kid with my friends.

Finally, it was time for scans again. For scans they would give my cancer a score, which was a number of how much there was. The score could go up to 30 and mine had been up to 26 before. Last time when we had the big meeting I was a part of with my team, my cancer had been a 5 and so momma said anything lower than a 5 was good. I couldn’t believe she would say a 5 was good.  I yelled and told her a 5 was NOT good. I didn’t want a 5, I wanted a zero and I told her. “I don’t want to have any cancer in my body at all!!” Momma said that a zero really wasn’t a choice for us anymore. That my cancer had been around for so long that there would probably always be a little bit there. She said as long as I wasn’t having pain we should just be thankful. But I would never be thankful for having any cancer in my body. I wanted scans that said ZERO and I said I was just gonna keep hoping and praying for that.

The day of my scans momma and I were both nervous. I usually wasn’t that nervous and it made me wonder if that’s how momma was every time. When I was little I didn’t understand that there were so many choices to be made after scans.  Now that I knew more about how it all work it made me worry. After the scans we went and just waited back in one of the clinic rooms. When Dr. Ali came in I could tell she had been crying. That made me even more nervous. I didn’t even want to hear what she had to say but I took a deep breath and I listened.

“Well, this definitely isn’t what we expected,” she said, and handed the papers to momma. Momma looked at them and started crying too. Dr. Ali started crying a little bit again and then she said it: “There is no evidence of any cancer in your body. Izzy, your score is a zero.”  I just smiled and said: I knew it. And that summer was the best summer I ever had. I got to stop doing treatments at the hospital and just be a normal kid.