It’s New Year’s Eve, and you’re getting ready to pop out and celebrate with friends. You’re not ready for what’s about to happen.
Shortly before midnight, you’ll open the door to an emergency doctor clutching your elder son’s blood test results. She’ll tell you to get him to hospital immediately.
In a few days you’ll get the cancer diagnosis – and it’ll dawn on you how lucky you are that this determined and kindly doctor pursued you so late on New Year’s Eve. Your lovely six-year-old’s life was on the line.
The next few weeks will bring the horrors of force-feeding medication to a boy in hospital, who is maddened with steroids and has lost his hair, his home life and his school life. Yet, unbelievably, you will all survive.
All the people who showed up for you during your last crisis, when your younger son was catastrophically unwell, will show up again. Granny, aunties, uncles, friends, creating huge waves of kindness and care. It matters hugely to your two little boys: they will be made emotionally much safer by all this. And you will stay intact as a family, living between other people’s homes, hospital and nursery.
Later, as you emerge from the most gruelling bit, more friends will show up – neighbours, colleagues, strangers and nurses. They’ll all have their own ingenious ways to help a boy stuck at home, and his anxious parents. There’ll be the neighbour you’ve never met, who rings the doorbell to give you ice-cream and says she and her Buddhist friends will be chanting for you. The employer who sets up a car service so you can get around without disease exposure. The friend who leaves a home-cooked meal behind your big plant pot every Wednesday for when you return after the anxious days in surgery – and there are an unfathomable number of those.
Now, five years later, much of the edge has come off. Elder son is OK. All is so much better than you could have hoped. His return to school did not go so well. You weren’t on your guard – you’d learned to have remarkable faith in institutions and it was misplaced at this point; he’s lost some of his tenacity, and sometimes seems at sea. But at every parents’ evening they’ll tell you he’s kind and fair. He’s never accused of mean or cruel behaviour. He seems emotionally intact. And each time you hear it, you will know where this comes from. And you will silently thank them all.
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