Amy

29 years ago today, as the sun was rising on another hot and sultry Houston day, my daughter Amy lost her eleven month fight with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia.  I miss her every day.

She was in Houston receiving experimental chemotherapy at  M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. We knew the odds were against us. The odds won.  Her mom, her brother Andy,  her maternal grandmother, and I were all in Houston for her last days. I was sleeping on a sofa in her room when her grandmother, from the doorway, told me that Amy had just passed away. Just before I heard her grandmother’s voice, I felt the pointer finger of my outstretched arm being pushed down. I was alone. To this day, I believe that was Amy saying goodbye to me.

Amy was seventeen when she died. I want to try to use a few anecdotes to explain who she was. She was born in January  with a tiny hole in the chambers of her heart. Because of this she couldn’t come home from the hospital right away. When she did come home, a couple of weeks later, she used to sleep 20 hours a day. She was a good baby and cried very little.

She wasn’t the greatest student in the world.  Her lack of reading comprehension held her back in many classes. But she tried very hard and always did enough to pass.  She loved her friends. In elementary school she used to hug them so hard that we had to teach her to ease up a little bit.  She had a passion for her friends, and was well liked.  She was a bit of a couch potato. But she was our couch potato.

She was definitely not a morning person. She would sleep until noon on a weekend and you couldn’t talk to her in the first hour. That ability to sleep helped her out during her long hospital stays. Nine months of her eleven month fight were spent in either LVHN, Hahnemann, or MD Anderson.  She and I would watch the soaps together.  I think it went, All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital.

She and her younger brother, Andy, had a typical sibling relationship. They would bicker and at times be mean to each other. But their love was strong. That was made obvious when he donated his bone marrow for her bone marrow transplant.  At one point they were talking to each other, by phone, from their separate hospital rooms.

Dreams Come True Foundation sent her to California to see Guns n Roses. She spent time with them during a practice session. Remember how I said she really loved her friends? There were three tickets. She took her mom and her best friend, leaving her brother and me at home!

Her transplant was done in Philly at Hahnemann Hospital. The doctors described it as bringing a person to the brink of death and then bringing them back stronger. Amy was a fighter through the entire process. There was a chart in her room where we would track her blood chemicals. We particularly watched her bilirubin levels because if they got to a certain level, she could go home.  Eventually she did go home, but she relapsed soon after.

She was a wonderful patient and would do all that was asked of her. The nurses and the doctors took a liking to her. I remember a nurse at Hahnemann got in trouble for spending too much time in Amy’s room.  A doctor had tears in his eyes when he told us about her relapse.

She kept her sense of humor throughout, She had lost her hair from the chemo and I used to call her chowder head, a term from the old McHale’s Navy TV show.  She would get back at me and tell me I will be bald someday too. She was right!

One last memory. Hahnemann Hospital. Close to Christmas. I was in her room and a group of carolers were singing outside her door. I remarked on how nice that was. Amy said, “Oh no. It’s those Catholics again!”.  She could be pretty feisty at times.

She’s gone now, for twenty nine years. No one really knows where, or if, she exists today. We all have our different religious views. I believe she is off somewhere living another life and is happy. I just hope that she gets a little longer than seventeen years this time.