"It’s that feeling where you hold your breath without knowing it and you feel your heart beating inside your head."

It’s not that difficult to tell when someone has something he needs to tell you but really doesn’t want to—you can almost always sense the news coming. It’s the same feeling you have right before a news broadcaster interrupts the regularly scheduled programming for a special message. Or when your spouse is talking on the telephone to someone in grave, hushed tones, only to hang up and invite you to “have a seat. I have some- thing to tell you.” It’s that feeling where you hold your breath without knowing it and you feel your heart beating inside your head.

Dr. Collins had ordered a blood test after examining Joshua; while the blood test came and went, I tried to keep a two-year-old preoccupied in the prison-cell-sized examination room. We played with trucks. Then we played with a lot of medical instruments that I’m sure we weren’t supposed to touch. Joshua ate one strip of his sandwich. Then the doc- tor came back. He sat across from me. Looking at him, I
subconsciously held my breath. My heart started beating in my head. Why was I nervous? We had been to the doctor before. But something was different this time. Then he started saying words that I never expected to hear: “hematology,” “children’s hospital,” “call your wife.” Then he said the word that would become part of our everyday vocabulary at heartbreaking speed: leukemia.

What do you do with a word like that? How do you respond? What questions do you ask? I didn’t know; I still don’t know. But I think I do know that some words in our vocabulary are heavier than others, words that linger in the air long after they are said. They echo in your mind and pierce your heart over and over again, and when they are first spoken, they drop to the pit of your stomach like lead. Leukemia.

Two hours later Joshua was still playing with his trucks, but he was playing with them on the floor of an examination room at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. My wife had joined us, and we were waiting for the results of a secondary blood test they had done. We didn’t speak. We didn’t cry—much. We hoped, we tried to pray, we wanted to believe. And then we had another sit-down moment.

Amid Joshua’s truck sound effects and laughter, we heard the confirmation that our two-and-a-half-year-old boy had a childhood cancer of the blood. And it felt as if someone had punched me as hard as they could in the gut. Leukemia. There was that word again, and there was the lead-heavy residue in the air. It echoed in my heart.

Over and over again the words punched. The emotion welled behind my eyes until I thought my head would explode. How could 82 percent of his blood cells be affected? He’s playing with trucks! How could he have cancer? I made him a sandwich this morning! And it wasn’t just the emotion that throbbed; it was the questions. So many questions that I didn’t even know where to begin.

There were the questions you’d expect:

• Is Joshua going to die?
• How can he be sick? He looks fine!
• Isn’t it just a rash?
• How do you treat leukemia?
• What does this mean about the future?

But then there were the other questions:

• Why this little boy, God?
• How could You let this happen?
• Is this punishment for something we have done?
• Are You even real?

Joshua finished his sandwich, and I started to cry. I cried because there he was, eating his strips of PB & J the same way he had hundreds of times before. And while he ate, I wondered how many more times he would.

- Michael Kelley, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal, p. 5-7