{"id":2736,"date":"2020-08-24T07:16:45","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T11:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/?p=2736"},"modified":"2020-08-24T22:38:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T02:38:15","slug":"duetting-memoir-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/duetting-memoir-30\/","title":{"rendered":"Duetting: Memoir 30"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Duetting:<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Summer 2009 was gone. A second whole summer pirated away by mobs of mutinous white blood cells wreaking havoc with my daughter\u2019s body. Marika had gone under sedation in an altered mental state\u2014as my adoring three-year-old\u2014and at the end of August came out of it, dazed but driven. Fifty-seven days in the hospital. In oblivion, mostly.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMom. You\u2019re staring.\u201d<\/span>
\n\u201cSorry. It\u2019s just good to see your eyes open again,\u201d I said, not daring to ask how it felt to wake up near September when she\u2019d lost consciousness in July. Or how it was to discover her friends engrossed in new movies, new music, and new relationships. To have gone to sleep skinny, and then wake up swollen. To find a fresh growth of hair instead of her balding head. To climb to her bedroom after being gone and find things moved, to find a huge pile of mail on the bed that hadn\u2019t been slept in except by her cat that no longer seemed to recognize her. The Rip Van Winkle<\/em> and Sleeping Beauty<\/em> stories don\u2019t take into account what it feels like to wake up and find a chunk of your life gone. And I never asked Marika. But much later, I would find her journals and the poem above, Wake Up, and stand in awe of her strength and resolve to pick herself up and build a new life. And when I felt my own losses were too much to bear, I remembered her indestructible hope, and kicked myself to reset my course and carry on.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Marika\u2019s Journal, September, 2009: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I sometimes wonder if it was all a dream. I don\u2019t feel as sick as most people think, but the doctors still advise me to \u201ctake it easy\u201d and \u201clay low,\u201d which makes living normally and finding a job or an apartment even harder. It feels like it was all a dream until I look at my pillbox. Twice a day (usually), I extract a dose of chemicals\u2014poisons\u2014to heal my would-be dying body.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My health has improved, so it\u2019s hard to even believe that I almost died three times, or that a few months ago, my once athletic body required two nurses in order to walk. I\u2019ve had to relearn how to walk many times now. After being sedated for weeks on end, your body forgets, and your muscles shrink. What you\u2019re left with is a bed-ridden, weak, catheter bearing, poor excuse for a human soul, who has a long road of walkers, falls, and chipped teeth ahead of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m much better now, but I\u2019m not \u201cout of the woods\u201d yet. I may be moving into an apartment with a puppy and starting over where I left my life. It\u2019ll be different now.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summer 2009 was gone. A second whole summer pirated away by mobs of mutinous white blood cells wreaking havoc with my daughter’s body. Marika had gone under sedation in an altered mental state—as my adoring three-year-old—and at the end of August came out of it, dazed but driven. Fifty-seven days in the hospital. In oblivion, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1998],"tags":[2122,2130,1438,2049,2123,2121,2124,2120,2090],"class_list":["post-2736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1998","tag-coming-out-of-sedation","tag-duetting-memoir-30","tag-finding-strength","tag-mother-daughter-relations","tag-parenting-through-cancer","tag-starting-a-new-life","tag-strength-and-resolve","tag-waking-up-after-a-long-sleep","tag-young-cancer-patient"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}