The chemofairy

I really enjoyed the learning to talk phase.

Paige was a bit over three when Hillary was diagnosed. As a fairly chatty three year old, provided you were one of the people she deigned talk around, she was developing her communication abilities quickly.

But, she was a three year old and many different phrases and larger words started showing up around the dinner table. We did our best to give simple kid friendly explanations for these words and phrases.

For illustrative purposes:

Cancer: A sickness that you get when a part of your body starts growing too fast and in a bad way. Your sickness fighting parts usually cannot fight the bad stuff that is growing fast. You cannot catch it from someone else like a cold.

CT Scan: A machine can take a picture of your insides to see if things are healthy and in Mommy's case, if the cancer is getting bigger or smaller.

Chemotherapy: A type of medicine that is dangerous and makes you sick, but if it works, it makes the cancer sick faster. Sometimes it stops working.

Immunotherapy: A type of medicine that is dangerous and can help the sickness fighting parts of your body fight the bad parts that are growing too fast. Sometimes it doesn't work though.

Our dinner routine was always to talk about what was going to happen the next day. Hillary's appointments always came up in those. One day, probably in late November or early December, as that would have been a couple of months into the chemo routine, I mentioned that, "...and Mommy has a doctor's appointment tomorrow."

Paige responded, "Is Mommy going to the chemofairy tomorrow?"

I think we stifled our laughter. We didn't really correct her. We also used chemofairy more than a few times between us. It was another small inside joke we had. One that came out of our kids, which made it more special.