Birthday Redemption

When my son was turning 8 years old, we planned a party for him at the hospital where I lived.  Cancer had not  yet come into our lives, and I was making promising strides in therapy where I walked with a walker and did arm exercises to carefully increase the mobility of my recently operated-on upper back.  So we were full of optimism, not yet knowing how many more months I would remain in the hospital and how much worse things were going to get.  

We reserved the community room and invited close family.  We were going to have cake and presents, all of us there together.  His party was going to be on a Saturday.  But on that Friday, during my physical therapy sessions, I found that whenever I stood up, it got difficult to breathe.  It was hard to do much in therapy, being so short of breath.  I kept getting dizzy from it, too.  My therapists became concerned, and left messages for my doctors.  So sometime in the middle of the night technicians came and took me from my room, and wheeled me down to ultrasound, where they made a discovery that ruined my son's birthday.  I had lungs full of blood clots, and was moved at 4am from the rehab unit to the acute care unit, where there could be no party for my son, not even any visits from my children.  My son's party was hastily relocated to his grandparents' house where it was celebrated without me, and I spent most of that anxious weekend crying and using my deep breathing apparatus.

Today my son turned 9 years old.  We had doughnuts for breakfast, all of us, together.  We played his favorite video games together in the morning.  We had cereal for lunch.  After lunch, my son and his dad played kick ball in the yard, while his sisters watched preschool television and I took a nap to prepare for dinner.  Because for dinner my son chose one of his favorite restaurants, IHOP, and we all walked into the restaurant together.  We all walked into the restaurant together, and we all walked to the car, together.   Mommie's wheelchair, relegated to emergency-only use, stayed in the car, while the pretty matching metallic blue canes came with me.  

On Saturday, we will all go to his bowling party together, and we will all bowl, and I swear he will never have another ruined birthday as long as I live.