A journey with childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia
We’ve never been helicopter parents, hovering over our kid worried about every little sniffle and scrape, but there’s no escaping the necessity now of careful monitoring. His weight, his temperature, how quickly incisions and...
I’m going to have to do better, somehow, at managing my stress levels. Over the past few years my work has been fairly solo, and the challenges mostly technical – activating some extra neurons,...
Neither of us have ever been germophobes with Wes, and fully bought into the notion that a little filth was good for his immune system development. We let him play barefoot all over Long...
We’ve gotten a lot of questions around what, exactly, Wes’ diagnosis is, what the treatments look like, and what his chances are for recovery and return to health. I’m going to try to summarize...
Unless our national healthcare policy changes, for the rest of his life two-and-a-half-year-old Wesley is going to be punished for what happened to him this year, through no fault of his own. He –...
Every day for the past week we’ve interacted with dozens of staff and volunteers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and it’s impossible to put to words what heroic humans these are, though I’d like...
Hospitalization is a remarkable stressor, and for parents whose children are seriously ill it can trigger all kinds of behavior that may otherwise be dormant. This morning alone I’ve witnessed three fathers acting out...
If you’re the parent of a healthy child, I completely understand being unable to process our story. Until exactly five days ago that was me too. It’s too hard to contemplate how quickly, without...
It’s really remarkable and impossible to overstate just how strong and resilient the kids here are. Some of these kids have been undergoing treatment for years but they are still full of smiles and...
