Thanks, all of you. Andrew has had a fun year. He's now right at 18 months off treatment. Minus the emotional and attention issues, he's a perfectly normal 8, almost 9, year old. I was just talking to someone recently and finally felt able to use the word "normal". After his treatment, I never thought I'd ever be able to use that word again! But the cancer diagnosis no longer clouds over our daily existence. It's definitely lingering in the background, but I don't worry about it's daily effects every day anymore. He is fully vaccinated as of this past January. And since that was 5 months ago, I feel safe in that regard. And he gets timeouts, restrictions and spankings like any other kid would/does. And believe, he truly gets his share. Right now, it's laptop restriction!
Our family is so blessed! We're still learning about cancer stuff. There's a parents class Tuesday night at the local Life w/ Cancer office in Fairfax. They're having a person come in and talk to us about the emotional side effects for the child with cancer. That's gonna be a huge help. They'll talk about how play therapy can help. To this day, he struggles when he sees a pic of a child in active treatment (bald and puffy faced). He remembers it so well and think tries to forget about it. So, I want to learn what he thinks and how it really affects him on a regular basis. This will be an important chapter in my book, too (whenever it is written). So many people forget about this side of cancer and just think that when it's gone, everything's ok, when those emotional demons are still wreaking havoc. I often wonder how much of the bad behavior we see sometimes is controllable and uncontrollable. Hopefully this course will help. I will say the ADHD and depression meds truly help in this regard. Which reminds me that I need to schedule an appt. w/ the neuropsych to have that testing redone and updated.
This is probably more information than all of you wanted, so thanks for indulging me and listening.
