He finally woke up after about an hour of sleeping. He was so confused from the medication they used to sedate him. We gave him a snack, and then i put my baby into a wheelchair so that we could bring him up to the “patient comfort suite”. One of a few rooms they offer to families or patients for privacy. It had a bed and a tv like a normal room, but it was a bit bigger. In the mean time my dad and aunt showed up to the hospital. Looking back i imagine they drove about 200 miles per hour to get there so fast.

We got Danny comfortable in the bed and situated with a video game while we waited to hear from the doctors again. Finally the nurse came and led us to a meeting room with a long table and a bunch of chairs. There we sat across from a team of 3 doctors and listened to the top brain tumor oncology doctor explain to us exactly what kind of tumor he had, and the way it grows and then explained what they do to treat it. I asked him many questions. But sat and reserved the questions that i knew i didn’t want the answers to. (how long do we have? is this terminal) The questions kept screaming in my head. But i didn’t want the answer. Eventually in his long speech he told us that a “good case” is 9 months. Mentally i counted in my head 9 months ahead, and landed exactly a day before his 6th birthday. I was terrified. But really that was the least of my issues at the moment. I needed to know what i had to do next. I needed to know when i needed to do it and how and where. I felt like i was running as fast as I could down a never ending hallway. I literally felt my existence leave my body and begin walking in front of me.

The doctor told me that Danny would soon receive 33 radiation treatments. And during those treatments he would also begin chemotherapy. He told me that he had a new clinical trial running and that Danny qualified to join the trial. (I had no idea that kids actually had to qualify for life saving treatments) There is no known cure yet for his type of tumor, so there were a few trials running in different places around the world by doctors taking handfuls of chemotherapy medications and administering them to children in hopes of finding a combination that lengthens their lives.

We left the room floating in total shock. I remember seeing everyone’s faces. We just kept staring at each other and then at Danny, reminding ourselves that he was still the same boy that he was earlier that morning. I stared at his face because I needed to see that he was the same, and completely unchanged. I sat on the bed and picked up the video game remote and began playing with him. I wanted to remain as normal as possible for him.

Soon we were finally able to go home, it was dark outside, and I had no idea how to navigate around traffic to get home. We finally arrived home and was met by the majority of the rest of our family. Everyone was talking, Danny joined his cousins and was running around laughing. Everyone was talking in the kitchen. Like robots moving and interacting with each other.

I walked upstairs to my room (the room that i shared with Danny) and I finally allowed myself to breakdown and cry. I was absolutely sobbing for what seemed like an hour but was probably 10 minutes. My body was on overdrive. I knew I needed to do whatever was possible to give him the best treatments to make him better and i needed to do it right away. I had no patience and i just wanted to keep moving forward.

A few days later, on the morning of October 31 (yes, halloween) we were in children’s hospital to get Danny’s port placed in his chest. It was a surgical procedure that took a few hours. The port (as they explained to me because I had no idea what it was) is used to administer medication to his body through a small accessible device they place under his skin near his shoulder.

When he came out, because he was such a skinny little guy, the port could be seen protruding out of his chest like a button.

We were able to go back home a little while later. And we spent halloween snuggled up on the couch watching movies. We had a few visitors. Later on I asked Danny if it would be ok if I took Matthew out for a small walk. He said it was ok. So I took Matthew to a few houses on the street with another friend of ours. We collected candy for Danny as well.

When we had the first meeting with the doctor he told us that they have a new way of studying the tumor, they were now able to do a “core sample biopsy” of the tumor by putting Danny to sleep and entering the back of his head and taking a tiny piece of the tumor. So we went in to have that done a few days after halloween. While we were waiting in the waiting room the radiation doctor came and met with us and explained how radiation would work. Then Danny came out and was kept in the ICU overnight. I remember the nurse coming to get us from the waiting room and told us he was already in his room ad he was still asleep. I remember turning the corner and i was terrified. It was the first time i had to see him covered in wires, a bandage wrapped around his head, his skin looked grey, his lips were bright red. He looked so different. Within a few hours he woke up and returned to looking more normal. We talked to him a lot because he again woke up very confused. After my parents and my sister left the hospital for the night, I finally climbed into the bed with him. I snuggled into him. I was exhausted. All night long the nurses came and went, checking his vitals and checking his brain functions to make sure there was no damage done by the biopsy.

I got to finally take my baby home the next day. He returned to normal. But we made sure we all moved a little slower so that he didn’t over due himself. A week later we got to remove the bandage to see that the “small incision” was actually 8 stitches long.