This is our son Ryan Douglas. He’s 6 1/2 months right now and about a week ago my wife and I where more scared, angry, and lost than we will hopefully ever be again. It was December 29, 2012 at 4:30 am. I may have worked a 12 hour day the night before and only gotten 4 hours of sleep, but I will remember this moment for the rest of my life. My wife (Jess) came in to our room holding our inconsolable son in her arms. “Dan, I need your help.” I would never in a million years would have guessed those five words would usher in the end of life as we knew it. After a slow and semi comatose husbands gets up grumbling under his breath, he walks out in to the living room to find his wife and child sitting on the couch. I asked Jess what was up and with the tired eyes of a first time parent, she looks up and says “Ryan has been crying uncontrollably for an hour. He has a fever of 102.1 and his eye is incredibly puffy.” My wife called our insurance provider to see what urgent care we where authorized to visit. After finding an available urgent care, we decide to give him a dose of baby Tylenol and wait to see how he does. At noon we decided to go to the urgent care office just to be safe since his fever was unaffected by the Tylenol. After a 30 minute drive and a 3 hour wait, we where finally allowed to see the physician. We told him about Ryan’s fever, his swollen eye, and his stool. He said he was no expert on children but prescribed Ryan an antibiotic and told us to see his pediatrician on Monday. Pleased with the diagnosis we returned to the house and gave Ryan a dose of the antibiotics, some more Tylenol, and booby milk. His fever didn't seem to be affected by the Tylenol. Finally his fever spiked at 103.3 so we immediately went to the Emergency Room around 6:40 PM. Once we arrived and waited for the triage nurse. 2 hrs later and she was going to just send us home having the ‘non emergent’ doctor prescribe us more antibiotics. Luckily for us, the moment he saw Ryan he seemed immediately concerned by the information that we gave him about his status and the treatment we had received thus far and called for him to get an x ray and blood work. If it were not for that doctor we would not have known what was brewing under the surface. After watching the E.R. staff try and fail to get a good I.V. line, blood was drawn and we where all finally able to eat and sleep. 12:20 AM, those numbers, will be burned into my mind for the rest of my life. Ryan was fast asleep, Iron Chef America was on, and Jess and I where trying to sleep. (unsuccessfully) We both knew that something wasn't feeling right, everything about the moment was wrong. The doctor comes in to our room. He pulls the curtain aside and I try to look in to this man’s eyes. But with every attempt he looks away. I've seen this before, the aversion to eye contact, the fidgeting hands… bad news. Expecting the worst, I remember thinking it was a good thing Jess and I where both sitting. And then, the words come out like daggers and gun fire. “Your son has leukemia.” There it was, no wind up. No “I have some bad news…”. Just THAT word. It sounded hollow at the time. A word with immense weight but no meaning. I felt numb, everything stopped working. Had I been standing… I woke up and there was a man in a white doctor’s coat talking to me. Had he been there long? I felt my head shaking up and down. As if because there was no meaning to the words, my mind defaulted to the only appropriate thing. A scream to my left. Ryan’s awake and the man leaves. I pick him up, still not hearing anything except THAT word. Rocking, I’m rocking back and forth now, mumbling something. Still no meaning but I hear the words coming out. “You’re not allowed to have cancer. You’re not allowed to have cancer.” As if by sheer will alone he’d be okay. We pass him back and forth, both of us crying tears of pure sorrow. I pray we never see those tears again because it would probably be the last time. Finally the doctor comes back in and tells us that we’re going to be taken to the Florida Hospital for Children and that an ambulance will be there to pick us up shortly. I deftly drove home to pick up some essentials still thinking that the doctor was wrong or lying to us. (As if Ashton Kutcher would jump out of the bushes screaming “You just got punk'd ”) I get back to the E.R. just as the EMT’s where about to leave with my baby boy and wife. They tell me to follow them in my car to the hospital and I nod in muddled understanding. The rest of the night is still a delusional blur. A dream shrouded in a fog thick enough to cut with a knife. The drive to the hospital was one of the longest drives of my life. At one point, I thought the back of the ambulance was a robot that was waiving at me. At another, a plane revving up to take off. I finally “wake up” from my dream in the parking lot of the Orlando Science Museum at 3:30 am. After that, everything is a blank. Between the shocking news we had received not 2 hours ago and the 4 hours of sleep I had received the night before, the fog came down and didn't lift for almost 2 days. So I’ll let Jess take the story from here.
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