My best friend’s two-year-old son had a brain tumor. That is all I could think about the day I found out. That was impossible, but it was happening. That was impossible because I had been visiting them just a couple of months ago, and he was the cutest, smartest little boy that I had ever met. Just so you know, he is just like I remember my friend at age 6, but obviously younger and a boy instead of a girl. So, again, it was impossible that little copy of my best friend, my dear nephew-in-law, was so sick.
But he was. There was that whassapp, too terrible to not be true: “Alex has a brain tumor. He is undergoing urgent surgery just now to get a valve to release pressure from his brain, and as soon as possible he will have to go through major surgery to resect the tumor”. I read and read these stupid words too many times, and still did not know what to do.
– Do I call Megan?
– I don’t know, Won’t she be too busy right now?
– But, what then? Aren’t you doing anything?
– I don’t know, I don’t know
– Just send her a whassapp then!
– A whassapp?? Are we crazy or what? Since when do we give that news by whassapp?
– Apparently since this morning.
– Ok, whassapp then. And voice message. And something for my nervous breakdown, please
This –or a similar– dialogue with myself happened, and the next thing I remember is seating in a plane the previous day of Alex’s tumor resection. The x day I arrive to the hospital and find Megan because I recognized her family. I hardly recognize her, her face so swollen for so much crying. Five hours and a half later, the surgeon appears and says he thinks the resection has been a success; it looked like a medulloblastoma, he thinks. Further analysis would say.
Yes, it was cancer. In a two-year-old that sentence does almost mean there is no hope. He will not be able to undergo radiotherapy, being his brain still too young and underdeveloped. Chemo will be his only hope, for the following two years, at least. And then, what do you say to a mother who knows her first child is probably going to die? To have courage? To fight? It is really simple, right? I still wonder how can she does not get mad at me every time I try to comfort her with empty words on the phone. She is my heroine now.
Before Alex’s tumor, I thought I had great problems. My life was too difficult, my issues too big for anybody to understand. I usually felt that I was not very lucky. Even though I had my family, my friends, my studies, even my dog I felt happiness was something I had still to look for. It is funny how, when you have no terrible problems but no terrific achievements either, you can think you have nothing to be happy for. Before Alex’s tumor, I wouldn’t go abroad on holidays because it was too expensive or I was too tired, or it was not just the perfect time for it. I had planned two or three trips that never came true, for one or another perfectly reasonable reason. After Alex’s tumor, I do not miss an opportunity to travel, to do anything new. I have decided there is never going to be a better time that right now, or a better day than today.
Before Alex’s tumor, I wanted to buy a new car. I say wanted, because I would never do it. I just never found the right moment to do it, so after looking for a long time for the perfect car and not finding it, I was just resigned to continue living with my old junk. But after Alex’s tumor, I wondered what took me so long for deciding, and bought a nice car I could afford, and I enjoy every minute with it.
At the time I write these lines, Alex is still alive. He is in hospital, very sick and fighting for every minute of life. His parents never thought that he would survive this long –he has so far gone through a coma, several stays in the ICU and a strong personality change, just to name some– or that they would be fit to be there with him every single day an night since he was diagnosed. Megan lives in the hospital with Alex; and her only goal in life now is to make his life as nice and normal as possible. The side effects of surgery and medication seem quite irreversible, but somehow they find the strength to keep fighting every day.
I have never said that this event has changed my life, because that would just sound topical and meaningless, and for me it has been so much more than that. What I do think, though, is that I have been given the opportunity to observe how fragile life is and how vulnerable we stupid humans are. I have lived as if I had all the time in the world –time to make things, to learn, to be happy or just to chat with anybody– when, in fact, we do not know how long we are going to be here, or even if we are, in what condition are we going to do it. Time is finite, or at least our time is, so we better make it count for something.
The other precious lesson I have learnt the hard way is that, definitely, life is not fair, so I better do not expect it to be. If a two-year-old can get cancer, a piano can crash me on the street or a bullet can find me in the middle of its way. Maybe it is just my concept of fairness; I used to think that good people do not deserve bad things to happen to them, and now I believe that destiny can not be related to our behavior. So the only reward I am going to have for being a good person is feeling good with myself, but I better don’t expect any other prize. I could die tomorrow, or in fifty years, I don’t know. But if I die leaving unfinished issues after me, or not having taken the best out of every minute of my life, it will be my fault and my waste; because I was given the clearest of signs, in the form of a two-year-old sick child.
