Two Thousand Days Without Ana
The aftermath of childhood cancer
A decade ago, on a bright Saturday morning in August, I took my 11-year-old daughter, Ana, to an emergency clinic. She had a terrible stomach ache. Something seemed wrong.
That morning, there was a stick bug on our car’s passenger door mirror. The bug stayed on the mirror for the entire 10-minute ride. We had laughed about it — Ana and I — and I took a picture and posted it to Facebook with the caption, “coolest bug ever!”
The clinic doctor examined Ana briefly, noted how she winced and recoiled when he gently touched her stomach, and advised me to take her to the hospital. I’d asked about appendicitis and he agreed it was a possibility.
Maybe the doctor knew it was something worse. He’d examined her stomach — bloated and hard — and offered to call an ambulance. A burst appendix is an emergency, but I was worried about how much the ambulance ride would cost. I drove her two miles to the hospital with the stick bug still clinging to the mirror.
And so it was that about five hours after I posted a photo of the stick bug to Facebook, our lives changed forever. That’s how quick it happens. That’s how hard the line was between before and after.
