Man down. Send help.

Nathan is losing his hair.

You know how something can be right in front of your face, and you still don't see it?  I have been not seeing this development for a couple of weeks, and yesterday, I couldn't not-see it anymore.  More to the point, neither could Nathan.

It was a rough, rough, rough, rough night.

For a chemo patient, hair loss is an unmistakable sign of your other-ness.  You're not like everyone else who is healthy.  You're different, very obviously so.  And for a chemo patient in middle school, being different can be a fate worse than death.  This is what is weighing most heavily on our boy's mind, the fear that he will be a target for mean kids.

As a teacher, I know that some of those mean kids also feel different or ugly or left out or just plain wrong.  They try to cope by drawing attention to others whose brokenness is more visible.  "If everyone is looking at that kid," they figure, "they're not looking at me and at everything that is wrong with me."  And as a teacher, I feel for them.  Middle school sucks, their brains are not fully formed, they are trapped in a hurricane of hormones, their families don't understand them, yadda yadda yadda.

BUT.

As a mom, if some mean kids picks on MY kid?  I hope God has mercy on them, because I sure as hell won't.

So, this is one of the hard days.  Rationally, I know that the staff at Nathan's school is going to do everything possible to ease his way during this part of the journey.  I know that he has good friends who are his friends, no matter what.  I  know that, given the chance, most kids will rise to the occasion and do the right thing and treat his balding melon as no big deal.  But I am still scared, and so is Nathan.  So,  I'm doubling up on my prayers and asking Jon Jetton to watch over my boy - he walked this walk, and many of you walked it with him.  I'm asking for the rough places to be made plain.

And if they're not, I may be back to ask for bail money.

No news is good news. Really.

So Elizabeth and Melissa have both let me know that while it may have been OK for me to be a slug about keeping in touch with people in my pre-blogger-celebrity days before Nathan was diagnosed, I now have  a fan base  an adoring public  a compelling reason to keep my friends informed about how our journey is progressing.

So here's how it's going.  I worked last year with a woman who was battling some pretty heavy-duty personal and professional issues.  And regardless of what new fresh hell visited her on a given day, her standard response to "How are you?" was "I am BLESSED and HIGHLY FAVORED, my SISTER!!" That is how we're doing.  We are ridiculously blessed and highly favored.

Nathan has completed 5 chemo treatments, and his side effects have been as minimal as you can imagine.  On Nathan's I-Feel-Like-Crap-o-Meter, getting braces beat chemo side effects by leaps and bounds.  He has not lost the first strand of hair, and according to the nurses, if it hasn't happened by now, it won't.  Nausea makes a half-hearted appearance infrequently, but it retreats in the face of meds within a few minutes.  Nathan's experienced a little loss of appetite, and he lost of couple of pounds one week, but we have discovered Carnation Instant Breakfast and whole milk, and that is a hit (regular dinner vs. chocolate milkshake?  hmm, let me think about this...).  The cocktail Nathan receives can cause some hearing loss, but he passed his first audiogram yesterday with flying colors ("superior hearing," thank you very much, so there will be no more of this "Sorry Mom, I didn't hear you tell me to ______.")  He is having the easiest imaginable ride through Chemoville, and we are shocked and awed (but in the good way).

As for Dan and me, our ride is a little more like a roller coaster.  On up days, we look at Nathan, and we shake our heads in amazement at our Teflon boy and his ability to always, always see the bright side of any situation.  On up days, we open envelopes stuffed with gift cards and Mass cards and thinking-of-you cards, and we marvel at the thoughtfulness and generosity of our friends.  On up days, we hear from characters from our past lives who bowl us over with love and support and brisket and origami cranes and the greatest hits of the 80s and prizes of all shapes and sizes, and we wonder what we ever did in those past lives to deserve such enduring friendship.

Then there are down days.  On down days, Grouchy, Bitchy, Impatient, Thoughtless, Selfish, Self-Pitying, and Congested stop by, and they are nowhere near as fun as the other Seven Dwarves.  On down days, we poison the pot of what-we-have with toxic amounts of what-we-don't-have.   On down days, we forget that we are blessed and highly favored and loved to pieces by all of you and by the One whose strength is made perfect in our weakness.

Those down days are fierce, but they will be no match for the latest elaborate black-op our Angels have cooked up.  Next weekend, Dan and I are headed to Cedar Key for the weekend - without the kids!  The covert team behind this surprise has arranged for us to stay in a friend's home and eat at the best spots on the island, while Matt and Nathan hang with a Big Cousin, and Clare heads to Camp Nana & Papa.  I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it - honey, I am all three Pointer Sisters rolled into one.

So, that's how we're doing.  How are you?