FathersStory's Blog

 A couple of more things about our visit to Dr. Grad.  He wanted us to schedule a test for my son’s lung function, to make sure he can handle the chemotherapy.  That’s scheduled for Monday.

Another thing we brought up were possible travel plans.  My wife has been saying for a couple of months that it would be nice if we could take a family vacation over the holidays.  I told her in response before all this came up that our destination may be picked for us.  What hasn’t been mentioned yet in this forum is that we have another son in college, at the University of Illinois.  He’s in the Marching Illini.  We found out this past Sunday that Illinois’ football team would be going to the Rose Bowl, and thus, so would our son.

So we brought the idea of this trip up to Dr. Grad.  Being a U of I graduate, he understood.  He thought it would be okay for our younger son to travel.  And besides, he said, there are worse places to be than Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles if we had to go to an emergency room.

 

Well, the prospect of that wasn’t too encouraging, but we thought we wouldn’t be going anyway.  I made an attempt to get tickets but could not.  I even asked our band member, who got two tickets to each home football game during the regular season.  He said he didn’t know of any tickets being made available.

 

Until the day after we saw Dr. Grad.  Our college son called me at work and said, “I can get tickets.”  How many, I asked.  He said he could get four, which would cover everybody in our family.  But we’d have to pay for them.  I brought it up to my wife, but we put off doing anything immediately.

 

On my way to work the next day, I called my son at U of I to find out when he needed to know about the tickets.  I left a voice mail, and then he called me back about 4pm that day.  He said he needed to know by 5pm; that was the deadline to purchase these tickets.  I tried getting in touch with my wife but could not.  So I told my son to get the tickets, and we would work things out later.

 

On the next day, Saturday, we were invited to the new house of a family who just moved out of our neighborhood.  By this time, only three families in the neighborhood knew about our son.  We went out with a group of neighbors the weekend before for dinner and a comedy show, with two of the families who knew in attendance.  We got them on the side and thanked them for all they had done and all their support.  We didn’t tell anyone else, though my wife suspected some of the other neighbors knew something may be up.

 

And on this night, it certainly wasn’t our intent to tell anybody, with the holidays coming up and the occasion of this house-warming party.  We got there and mingled, talking with a number of the neighbors.  A couple of them already knew that I was able to get tickets for the Rose Bowl, and word, I guess, started to get around.  One of our neighbors who didn’t know found out and caught up with me later to talk to me about it.  He got really excited and interested.  He said, “You’re going, aren’t you?”

 

I told him, “Well, there are some things we have to work through first.”

 

He continued, “But you’ve already done the hardest past… finding the tickets.  How can you not go?”

 

I said, “Well, there are some issues we have to work out.”

 

He said, “And you have a son in the band!  You HAVE to be there.”

 

“We’ll see.  We still haven’t got a flight or a hotel, and it could get pricy.”

 

He went on, “But there are a number of ways you can get to L.A.  There are several airports there,  You could also fly to San Diego, or even Las Vegas or Phoenix, and drive the rest of the way.”

 

I reiterated, “Well, we still have to work through some things first.”

 

“And the parade,” he said.  Sometimes the Tournament of Roses Parade is even better than the game.  You gotta go.  You’re so close to the floats you can smell the flowers.”

 

“We’ll see,” I said.

 

He also offered to help with securing grandstand tickets for me to the parade, because he knew some people out there with connections.  I thanked him for his offer and was able to move on.

 

I didn’t want to tell him the real reason for our hesitation.  I and my wife talked ahead of time about not bringing up our son’s situation at this party, because we knew it would then dominate the conversation, and we didn’t want that to happen on such a festive occasion.  It wasn’t his fault.  I really felt sorry for him because he didn’t know.  When he later found out a few weeks later, he called to apologize, saying he felt so bad about it.  But he didn’t know.  I thought his interest and enthusiasm for our situation was sweet; I just didn’t know how to tell him, and it just wasn’t the right time.

 

During the past couple of days, through the recommendations of friends and colleagues, we have lined up second and third opinions from oncologists.  That’s all happening next week.  And we’re also going to see Dr. Einhorn in Indianapolis.  Those visits, in the next installment.