Finding Chika_A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family by Mitch Albom

Author:Mitch Albom [Albom, Mitch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 44072106
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

You

There’s a support beam in our kitchen that runs floor to ceiling. At some point we decided to make it the family growth chart. We measured our nieces’ and nephews’ heights on their birthdays, then scribbled the year in pencil.

When you first arrived, Chika, we lined you up, too, and drew a mark where the top of your head met the plaster. We let you write CHIKA. And every few months, you wanted a new measurement. Your pencil marks remain to this day.

A child is like a little ball of time unfurling. But your time advanced on two levels, for as you grew, your Invader could grow, too, which made the passing months our friend and our enemy. You got taller. Your hair filled out. You lost baby teeth and collected monies from the Tooth Fairy. You learned capital letters and small letters. Your English improved greatly. If I spoke to you in Creole, you would roll your eyes and say, “Mister Mitch, we are in America now.”

But there were also regular visits to hospitals, and blood tests, and constant MRIs of your brain, so frequent that one time, I was reminding you about lying still inside the machine, and you moaned and said, “I know, I know,” and made your entire body rigid, just to prove it.

Our hope was to get through one month then the next, like swinging from vines through the medical jungle. Despite the dire predictions with DIPG—nobody survives it—there was always the chance something radical might be developed, some new laser treatment or stumbled-upon medication. A doctor at Stanford was having early success with a chemo drug called Panobinostat. There was talk of a progressive clinic in Mexico. A London-based group was doing multiport CED deliveries, much like Dr. Souweidane at Sloan Kettering, only with four catheters at a time.

Every night that you said your prayers, we later said our own, silently asking for someone in a lab, maybe halfway around the world, to be peering through a microscope and whispering, “Look, it’s working.” You reach for fantasies like that, Chika, when you need a weapon to beat the unbeatable. Your tumor had been operated on in June, diminished by radiation in July and August, and unaffected by other treatments from September to the following March.

That was good news and bad. No matter what we tried, including the CED process—which we actually repeated a few months later in New York—the tumor held its ground, a bear in a cave, not growling, but not going anywhere, either. The treatment Dr. Souweidane had put directly into your brain stem—which glowed green on a computer screen, verifying its excellent distribution—nonetheless had no real effect. I remembered my conversation with him (“We don’t know if this is the right agent”) and fought the haunting sense that, despite their white coats and laboratories, these doctors, against this disease, were flying in the dark.

* * *

So meanwhile, Chika, we focused on making good memories. In January, after the Haiti visit, we organized your sixth birthday party, at a loud, animal-themed restaurant called The Rainforest Cafe.

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