A Worried Mom Wonders Whether Her Daughter Will Be Okay

By Jennifer Kuhel

My oldest daughter sat up tall, each fingers on the steering wheel, able to take her Ohio driver’s license check. I sat within the passenger seat, and the examiner jogged my memory that my daughter would obtain an computerized fail if I spoke. She put the automobile in drive and launched her foot from the brake.

She’s going to be high-quality, I assumed, and a well-recognized uneasiness returned.

5 months earlier, I had repeated that very same mantra, struggling to persuade myself of its reality.

I used to be sitting on an extended stretch of quiet seashore on Anna Maria Island, Florida, greater than 1,100 miles away from our suburban Cleveland dwelling. I watched my daughter wade waist-deep into the ocean. It was Wednesday, June 10, 2020, and he or she and I had spent the earlier 5 days pretending that we had been on a trip.

She’s going to be high-quality. 

I assumed it again and again, my daughter sashaying farther into the crystal blue Gulf waters. The following morning, she can be in an working room present process surgical procedure to have a tumor faraway from her spinal wire.

My husband and I had been blindsided three weeks earlier when an MRI revealed the tumor.

Our daughter had acute nighttime ache in January, however she was additionally a aggressive highschool swimmer with a historical past of scoliosis. Her medical doctors chalked it up a potential herniated disc and proceeded with bodily remedy and medicine to alleviate the ache. However when the ache returned in late April—after a number of weeks of a statewide COVID-19 lockdown, distant faculty and no swimming—her physician ordered an MRI for a more in-depth look.

Intramedullary spinal wire tumors, people who come up throughout the substance of the spinal wire, are uncommon and the surgical procedure to take away them is precarious. The success of the surgical procedure trusted the ability of the neurosurgeon and the complexity of the tumor. It made for a murky prognosis. Greatest case, many of the tumor could possibly be eliminated and the surgical procedure would depart our daughter with short-term neurologic and motor deficits. Worst case was paralysis on one or either side from the tumor web site down. After which there was all the pieces in between.

Even essentially the most skilled neurosurgeons we noticed admitted that they carried out one, possibly two, of those tumor resections in pediatric sufferers every year. So after we requested for second opinions, all of them pointed us to a physician on the Johns Hopkins Kids’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was the professional in eradicating spinal wire tumors, they informed us.

“If it doesn’t break the financial institution, then I might go,” was one physician’s candid response after I requested what she would do if it was her baby.

We had been fortunate. The Florida physician was in-network and my insurance coverage absolutely lined the surgical procedure.

So we made the choice to drive to St. Petersburg in the midst of a pandemic so we might take the most effective shot our daughter had for a optimistic final result.

The summer time solar was intense on the Anna Maria Island seashore that day and I joined my daughter within the water. It was just a few hours earlier than we needed to depart for the airport to select up my husband. He’d stayed behind to be with our youthful two daughters whereas our oldest and I headed south to attend a collection of pre-op physician’s appointments within the days earlier than surgical procedure.

I crossed the white sand into the ocean and made my approach nearer to my daughter. I dunked beneath and swam to her aspect.

“I’m gonna try to take a number of strokes,” she mentioned. I watched as she took one stiff stroke of freestyle together with her proper arm, then tried a half together with her left. She stopped instantly and got here up. “Nope,” she mentioned. She flashed a smile, however shook her head. “Can’t do it. It undoubtedly hurts.”

My coronary heart ached and anxiousness overwhelmed me. In February, my husband and I had cheered her and her teammates on within the 200-yard freestyle relay at the highschool state championship meet. That she had this tumor nonetheless appeared surreal.

She’s going to be high-quality.

The following morning, I adopted behind two nurses who wheeled my daughter down the hospital hall.

“That is the place we break up,” the nurse mentioned to me, stopping subsequent to a set of doorways.

I regarded down at our daughter. Her eyes had been huge and moist across the edges. She hadn’t cried in entrance of me since her analysis.

“I really like you,” I bent over and gave her a kiss by my masks on her brow.

I needed to be encouraging and to inform her out loud, “You’ll be high-quality.” However I didn’t.

My husband and I had achieved our greatest to stack the deck in her favor, however the circumstances had been past our management. I couldn’t deliver myself to say one thing that may not be true.

The nurse hit the door pad and pushed my daughter away to the working room.

Just a few hours later, we acquired the excellent news we’d hoped for: The physician efficiently eliminated many of the tumor—a low-grade astrocytoma, we discovered—and regardless of some anticipated short-term deficits, she was, certainly, going to be high-quality.

With the help of a walker, our daughter left the hospital three days after the surgical procedure. She had weak spot in her proper leg and foot and numbness on her proper aspect, however with time, persistence and bodily remedy, she recovered her approach again to the lifetime of a typical teen.

In July, we celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Then in August, she started her junior yr of highschool. In September, she returned to swimming. And on that November afternoon, I quietly sat subsequent to her within the bureau of motor autos parking zone, the place she’d simply accomplished her driver’s license check and the place, collectively, we waited for her outcomes.

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The examiner approached her aspect of the automobile, clipboard in hand. “How do you assume you probably did?” he requested her.

Not sure and nonetheless nervous, she hesitated, “OK… I believe?”

The examiner’s eyes smiled at me above his masks and I nodded again.

This time I knew for certain: She was going to be simply high-quality.