Affected

I've been thinking for weeks that Teague runs crooked. Quinn didn't think so; it's hard to notice. Even Dr. Watson didn't see it when he checked him a few weeks ago.

Then yesterday, when he was checking him, we went through the usual drill.

"Skin looks good. No nausea?"

"No."

"Appetite?"

"Good."

"How's his balance?"

We said it was good. He doesn't fall down much, but we didn't really know what to look for. Dr. Watson said that we might not notice it when he's rested, but when he's tired, he might list a little.

That's it. The crooked run. He tilts left, tired or not.

My baby's brain is damaged. I know it's minor and that he will compensate, and that we had to do this radiation to give him the very best chance of not having that same original ependymoma grow back. I know we made the right choice with this treatment, but it is still hard to take. I hate it.

The whole time during treatment, all we could do was get by. Just get up and get ourselves there every day. Survive. Didn't really have room in my frazzled brain to think about what this invisible treatment might be doing to my child. We even spent the first few weeks (before the hair loss) allowing ourselves to believe that maybe it was pretty safe, that it wasn't really hurting him (even though the radiation therapists go into a separate room to push the zap button and wear little electronic units that register any radiation they're exposed to). But for us, that head-in-the-sand way of thinking was part of the survival.

Now we can see it. Add the hair loss and the crooked run to the realization that he is now more likely to develop cancer over his lifetime because of all the cells that the radiation damaged but did not kill, and it's a tough pill to swallow.

Duh. Go back to high school biology, or even anything you know about brain injuries, and you know that brain cells don't regenerate. Here's the significance of that. The leftover cancer cells that were killed are gone forever. If there are some that survived radiation and they begin to grow, we know that they were the strongest of the diseased cells, and that's why comeback cancer is more aggressive.

But what about the healthy cells that were damaged but didn't die during radiation? They are Teague's future general cancer risk. Those cells will still be there years and years and years from now. Once Teague reaches a five-year cancer survivor mark, he will still have to be checked every year for the rest of his life.

So the radiation gave us the best odds of not having anything grow back. Good. And it messed with this little child's balance, made his hair fall out, and filled him with free radicals. Ugggh.