Back to School….Kinda 🤷♂️
We’re coming up on the 2nd “anniversary” of Huttons cancer diagnosis. When she started 4th grade, we met with her teachers and told them that she would not be able to do PE for a while because she had what we thought was a hamstring strain; boy were we (and the doctors who diagnosed her) wrong. On the first day of fifth grade she was in the hospital for what we thought was her last round of chemo. We thought she would ring the bell and chemo would be done, the cancer would be gone, and she would be able to go back to school and be a normal kid again. Well, that obviously didn’t happen either.
Now, this was the week she was supposed to start 6th grade, and we are once again dealing with her not being able to go to school in person while still facing the unknown.
She is on a new chemo, with a new chemo schedule, and her 6th grade future is unknown. Will she be able to go back to school in person this year? Will we have to go back into the hospital for inpatient treatment? Will we be living in Westwood out of a hotel for a week while she gets outpatient treatment? We just don’t know.
Also, this is the first “First Day of School” since Hutton was 3 that we didn’t take a “First Day of School” board picture. Moms, you know what I am talking about.
Last year the picture was taken in the hospital and I remember her nurses coming in for the picture and it being a whole “thing” and the nurses made it SO special. This year we just didn’t do it. It has been on my mind for a few weeks now. It seems so trivial, its just a picture with a board that says “Hutton’s first day of 6th grade” but it is so much more than that…and I don’t know if this year I was ready to deal with the feels that come from that picture.
Its such a hard thing to explain because we see Hutton’s friend’s lives…starting school, playing sports, hanging out with each other, and doing all the “normal” things kids do. Then we see Hutton’s life, most of the time isolated because of chemo, can’t walk or run around with her friends (she was an exceptionally active kid before all this), and can’t be a “normal” kid. Saying that’s ROUGH is an understatement. We are in survival mode, daily, and to see life just moving on is hard when we feel like we are stuck.
We have faith that Hutton is going to kick this cancers ass, and we will be able to move forward as a family…but the reality is, Hutton will never be able to go back to being completely normal, due to her surgery. There is a very high chance she may always need some form of assistance when it comes to mobility, and the weight of that reality also weighs on us constantly. But through out this entire ordeal, Hutton has shown her strength and resiliency and we know that no matter what her future reality will look like she will be able to handle it.