Memories of Max - A Father's Story

Chapter 3 - Waiting

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For me this news produced very contradictory reactions. Despite having seen Max in extreme pain and watched the tumour growing, it did not match what I now saw. You undergo a narrowing of the mind's eye. Your whole world becomes compressed into the here and now. What happened a couple of days ago, however good or bad, is rapidly lost. What matters is how your child is now. Tomorrow and the days beyond are irrelevant. They are other days. Anything can happen. There is no point in thinking about them. Their time will come and when it comes you will try to deal with them the best you can. I had a problem because I was told the worst possible news, and yet only metres away, in the ward, my son was running around, playing jokes on his peers, laughing and generally acting like any other normal seven year old.

The consultant continued to tell us more about Max’s condition.

“The form of Rhabdo that Max has is very aggressive and difficult to treat. It has the profile of reacting to treatment and apparently being resolved, but rapid relapses are very common. We are trying out a new treatment which we would like you to consider?”

“How rapid are the relapses?”

“This form of the disease often reappears within six months of treatment. If Max survives for four years after treatment then that is a good indicator of cure. What I must stress is that a third and different cancer is not out of the question.”

Another little bombshell exploded. Even if we got through this cancer there was no guaranteed expectation that there would be long term survival. There is no cast iron guarantee with any cancer. Nothing is guaranteed but we were being told that the hospital did not even expect it. The statement regarding the third cancer was taken in at the time but rapidly forgotten. I think that there are two reasons for this. The first is that we were only just coming to terms with the fact that Max had got a second and different cancer. That was our immediate problem. Nothing else mattered. The other reason was that the enormity of this statement and its implications were just too much to take in. I know it was forgotten, because of a later conversation with another consultant which actually brought home the true nature of our situation.

I asked her more about Max's treatment.

“What form does the new treatment take?”

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