March 29, 2007
As I write this, my 16 year old daughter, Melissa, is asleep in her bed, slowly dying of relapse osteosarcoma with bilateral lung nodules; in other words, nasty cancer that we have been unable to cure. She was diagnosed August 22, 2005. We tried numerous different chemo-therapy treatments, she had a partial humerus resection (2/3 of her humerus was replaced by a cadaver bone), she went into septic shock and spent over two full months in the hospital, including a month in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit attached to a variety of machinery, and required dialysis multiple times a week for a while. She has a colostomy that she doesn’t tell anyone about and scars and stretch marks telling the tale of the many surgeries (including the removal of one lobe of her left lung), IVs, biopsies, etc. she has undergone. Her treatment has taken place at four different hospitals in two cities and we have visited others for consultation; all to no avail.
I am a single mother who has never received financial or emotional support in raising my daughter. I am blessed in the fact that my locally residing father is a highly respected physician, although all his knowledge of oncology has come only since his granddaughter was diagnosed. Thankfully, I have been self-employed for many years and I have the most fantastic clients in the world. They have not only chosen to stay by me, but they have gone above and beyond the call of duty in supporting me and my child, from insisting that I increase my hourly billing rate to getting a team-signed football from one of my daughter’s favorite teams (and recent Super Bowl winner).
I am lucky. There have been amazing people standing by me through everything I have endured over the past nearly two years. Unfortunately, not everyone has a father in the medical professional or family, friends, and wonderful neighbors who send someone to clean the house or mow the lawn or send a check to defray expenses without needing to ask. Not everyone has someone with whom they can discuss everything related to their child’s condition and surviving life in general. Asking for help is hard. How do you ask someone to clean your house when the only real reason you aren’t doing it yourself is because you just can’t motivate for trivial activities? How do you make someone understand how good it feels when you get into a normal parent-child spat with your terminally ill child, yet so awful at the same time?
We don’t wait for you to ask and we know, at least somewhat, what you are experiencing. As soon as we know that you might benefit from our services, we want to be there for you just like some key individuals have been there for me and my daughter during this horrific time of our lives. We want to support you while you are coping with whatever treatments require hospital stays. We want you to tell us your favorite local restaurants and we’ll make sure that you can get meals from them when you just don’t want to deal with cooking and cleaning. We’ll send someone to clean your house and perform other household duties from taking out the trash to tending to your 4-legged or finned loved ones. We are there for you when you need someone who has experienced a similar hell to talk with either about or specifically NOT about your child’s situation.
For her 17th birthday gift, my daughter asked for me to get a tattoo of the Chinese character for hope. She is not likely to be here for that birthday, so as strange as the request was, I gave her that gift recently. I think she wanted to make sure that even after she is gone, it is impossible for me to lose hope. Not only am I committed to holding onto my own hope, but to help you keep yours…not to mention some level of sanity….through any and every ordeal you face with your child’s health and well-being.
*Melissa Anna Fragen died on April 1, 2007
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