Prelude to the Birthday

Jack will celebrate his 11th birthday on Wednesday. As I usually do around Jack's birthday, I find myself thinking about where we started, where we've been and where we are today.  As many of you know, through the years I've written down my thoughts on Jack's birthday and have shared them with family and friends via email and on this blog.  As I ponder the last eleven years, I find myself thinking about how little Jack has changed, and how much I have changed over the years.  In terms of progress, Jack has made none in eleven years.  Yet, he remains the same easy going, content, sweet little boy today that he was the day he left the PICU at the age of seven months.  I, on the other hand, have morphed from a maniac taskmaster whose sole focus was to make this all go away into someone who is at peace with Jack's diagnosis.  More significantly, I'm learning to take the experiences and knowledge gained from living this very crappy hand that Jack and I (and the rest of our family) have been dealt and directing it in a positive light to try and make a small difference in this world.  Jack has changed me profoundly and together we are working to leave his faint footprint in the sands of time.

In thinking about how much I've changed over the last eleven years, I decided to pull out my stack of emails that I've exchanged with Jack's doctors since June 1999. There are literally hundreds of emails and oh, how they tell my story.  I'm somewhat appalled at the tone I took with Jack's doctors in the beginning - I sure was bossy!  I'm surprised they even stuck with me all these years given the attitude I had in the beginning.  On Jack's birthday, I will share with you some of the emails (mostly mine and a few by Jack's docs) that have been written over the last eleven years.  I think they do a good job of reflecting how my attitude and my focus changes and how much I "lighten up" with each passing year.  It was really hard for me to pick which emails to share.  I could have shared many more, but it would have made for a very, very long post (as opposed to only a very long post).  I'm not sure if anyone will even find the emails remotely interesting, but I'm doing this for myself more than anything.  Someday, I hope to write a book that is a compilation of all the emails exchanged between myself and Jack's doctors . . . when the time is right (and with their permission, of course).

See you back here Wednesday.