Vampdaddy

There are reasons why people run screaming from a nuclear explosion or plant meltdown. Aside from the hell-fire that is guaranteed to singe away your clothes and most of what’s underneath, those who escape the blast but remain in the area fall victim to the effects of radiation. Nowhere, of course, do we see this with more horrific clarity than in Springfield:

Terrifying and creepy in its cute-ness, no?

Of course in lower doses, radiation does some good. In our case it was one of the many amusing interventions thrown at VB’s little head “back in the day”, in between cytotoxic chemotherapy baths that would probably kill an average adult. And now, every 6 months, we travel to Chez Healing for a day of hope and fear, as the MRI machine makes its loud thumpa-thumpa and searches for proof the kitchen sink approach continues to pay off. Today we once again arrived at that happy proof, but not before the unpleasant reminder that — when it comes to cancer — even the lifeboat can poke you in the eye and make you fall overboard.

Long-time readers may recall that last year we had a relapse scare. In the end it turned out not to be the return of the “big bad C”, but rather some damage to brain tissue near VB’s surgical site that most likely happened as a result of – you guessed it — radiation. It is nothing that affects him in any way, but just his brain’s way of saying “you know, I really don’t think a ping-pong sized hole in your son’s head is enough of a visual reminder. Now try this!”

Shoot forward to today. For some reason (actually, probably no reason, as that’s how cancer rolls, y’all) the tissue damage in one spot near where his tumor used to be has grown slightly. In the grand scheme of things the growth of this damage area is small, and its not causing any problems we can see. But there it is, and it causes us to have to wait an extra 4 hours to get the official “No Evidence of Disease” seal of approval while a team of people who use big medical words gather around computer screens and talk about “T2 prolongation” (really, that’s what the spike on the MRI is called).

We are back at Chez Healing tomorrow for follow-up meetings, and on Thursday a gaggle of the nation’s top experts will once again ruminate on my son’s head to ensure consensus that we have no more to worry about than we do normally. For now, however, we sigh that today was a bit more drawn out than we had hoped, but good news nonetheless.