A Tribute To My Friends and Family

Tom, April 2012, Captiva Island.

As many of you know, our son Tom was very ill last week and spend three nights at Children’s Hospital in Boston.  He was sick with Kawasaki disease, which for the record, does not mean you have motorcycles lodged in your stomach.  Someone tried to convince him that this was the case, and he felt so bad at the time that I am inclined to think that he was thinking that may very well have been the case.  You can read about this rare but acute disease here: http://www.childrenshospital.org/clinicalservices/Site468/mainpageS468P4.html

Tom will make a full recovery, and heart tests today showed that he has no lasting damage.  We are home, and he is doing better every day.  Times like these make me realize how I’ve often taken my friends for granted.  These days remind me of how important friendships are, and knowing that I had a great group of people to lean on during this ordeal made it much easier to get through.  Even though it was very scary, I ask that if you pray, say a prayer for those children we left behind on the 6th floor.  We were on the bone marrow transplant floor, and Tom met two little boys about his age who were chemo patients.  I feel like in retrospect we had it easy when they were in a panic over his sodium levels and his kidney function.

Thank you to all who have written notes, dropped off cards, or cooked meals.  It has been so appreciated by our entire family.  I’ll be back soon with a humorous post about the sleeping accommodations for parents in hospitals, but for now, I found a quote from Charlotte’s Web (one of my all-time favorite books) and I had to share it.  Thank you again.

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web