Daughter’s illness hints at ordeals of others

A kindly caller left a message wondering where I’d been. To that person, thanks for noticing this column has been missing from the paper. In a sense, I’ve been missing, too.

Where? Right here in Everett, but on a journey far from my take-it-for-granted life. I’ve been away, to someplace I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I’ve been to the Everett Clinic, where after a summer of doctors’ appointments and diagnostic tests, my 19-year-old daughter learned it was likely she had thyroid cancer.

I’ve been to the waiting room at Providence Everett Medical Center’s Colby Campus, fidgeting through a five-hour surgery that ended with word that a year ago I couldn’t have imagined would be good news. Yes, it was thyroid cancer that also affected some lymph nodes. But it wasn’t something worse.

I’ve been to the hospital’s eighth floor, in a room overlooking the sycamores along Colby Avenue. I looked, but with an indifference to the beauty outside. For hours and then days, all that mattered was that the morphine did its work as it dripped into the young woman I still think of as my little girl, that she slept peacefully, that she could keep down a few spoonfuls of soup, that when she got up she was strong enough to walk.

I’ve been to the video store, the drugstore and Ray’s Drive In to pick up essentials of recovery – movies, painkillers and vanilla milkshakes.

I’ve been to work, but unable to think or write worth a darn. I’ve been home, but not much of a presence for my sons.

Now, with a ton of worry lifted from my shoulders, I’ve been to the airport, where on Sunday my mostly healed daughter hopped a flight to California and the university where she is well into her sophomore year. She’s taking a political science midterm as I write this.

Here’s the deal: Papillary thyroid cancer is treatable. My daughter will be fine.

And I am back from where I’ve been with a whole new understanding of families living with long-haul illnesses. I hadn’t intended to write about this even after my daughter said from her dorm room Monday, “Why not?”

Those other families are the reason for writing about my own.

Since 1997, when I began this regular column in The Herald, I have met parents awaiting a heart transplant for their 6-year-old son; a young couple involved in years of leukemia treatment for their preschooler; a father gracefully enduring the debilitating stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease; a mother who spent every day in a nursing home room with her 24-year-old son, the victim of a severe head injury; and a man who lives behind the scars of burns he suffered as an 11-year-old.

I wrote about all those people and more, yet I had no clue.

It took a month of anxiety and uncertainty, four days at the hospital and a week home with a child recovering from surgery to get an inkling of the stresses on families living with long-term illnesses.

Now I know how it feels to have your child suffering. I know how all-consuming it is to sit with someone in pain. I know why a father would tell me he has $1 million in medical bills but it doesn’t matter, what matters is his son.

I’ve been there, barely. I’ve been there enough to have my eyes opened.

What I see is how much others have been through. I see how those high-priced doctors are worth every cent. And I see that daughter of mine, brave, resilient and back from where she’s been.

Julie Muhlstein’s column runs Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. She can be reached via e-mail at muhlsteinjulieheraldnet.com, write to her at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206, or call 425-339-3460.