Resolved, Sort Of…

Posted On December 29, 2020

At the end of 2019 I made the same New Year’s Resolutions I always do: lose weight, be smarter with money, exercise more and stare at my phone less. This year I also had a bigger, more difficult, more important, secret resolution: I wasn’t going to be afraid anymore. And I really meant it; I wasn’t going to fall apart. Hearing bad news about Tate’s health racks my whole being; my heart aches at his constant pain and the prospect of loss, and it leaves me staggering as if I had been dealt a physical blow. The last few years have been so hard; all of us pulling our breaking hearts back together over and over while Tate endures treatment and its complications. Looking back, I don’t know that I could have lived those days and watched Tate suffer through anything other than the lens of fear; the weeks were heavy with it.

It was a heck of a year to try to remain calm! I’ll admit right now there were a few 2020 level meltdowns.

Most recently, Tate’s knee is what’s keeping me up at night. I can’t hear words like lesion and tumor and still actually sleep. An MRI revealed Tate has an Encondroma at the top of his tibia. An Econdroma is a benign tumor that in a small percentage of cases can become malignant. The Orthopedic doctor and the surgeon decided that “wait and watch” is the approach they would like to use. Tate will get another MRI in six months to see if anything in his bone has changed. Neither doctor felt that surgery would be beneficial at this time, and they suspect that the tumor is not the cause of his pain anyway. They believe Tate has patellar tendonitis, and it took me three weeks to consider that the discovery of the tumor would have never happened if it weren’t for a different injury in the same general area. Maybe it’s one of the small mercies my friend Stephanie was telling me about? Without the tendon issue, we wouldn’t even know there was something else we needed to watch for.

Tate has been prescribed physical therapy for his knee, and I could not be happier with the accommodations they made to keep him COVID safe. The Ortho doc called the PT facility and talked to them about Tate, and they set up the appointment so he was the only patient in the facility. Wow! I hope you never need them, but the doctors at Phoenix Children’s Hospital are amazing.

The physical therapist Kelsey was amazing, too. She was so knowledgeable, and she managed to assess and exercise Tate without injuring him, and that is really hard to do. She sent us home with a list of exercises for Tate to do at home every day and an elastic band to give an appropriate amount of resistance, which it turns out is approximately 4 pounds.

Somehow, despite being the only patient in the whole office, Tate woke up sick the day after his physical therapy appointment. His COVID test is negative, which is awesome. But today is day 7 of him fighting something, and he is miserable. We’re waiting and watching this, too. It’s 100% safe for you to assume Tate has not done those at-home physical therapy exercises even once; he has been too sick.

Scott stayed with us for a few days at Christmas, which was wonderful. He hasn’t been inside our house since March, and we have missed him so much. Hearing Scott and Tate laughing and squabbling is the best sound ever. Scott quarantined and got COVID tested before coming over. Ironically, with Tate waking up sick and his test results not available yet, Scott was afraid of us and wore a mask the whole time.

As this crazy year comes to an end I am not quite ready to give up on my resolution to manage fear better, but I am adding the more easily attainable goals of hiking weekly and learning to arrange flowers through YouTube tutorials.

Thank you for checking in on us and following Tate’s story. Knowing you’re out there means more to us than we can ever say.