Never mind my chemotherapy plans of ‘just do it, get done with it and move on’. Allah SWT is Al-Lateef {Subtle and Kind} and Al-Lateef was about to derail my plans, send me on a detour, and teach me a valuable life lesson in the process. Subtly.
Yaseen’s treatment started with a milder form of chemotherapy, commonly known as ABVD.
The ‘A’ in ABVD stands for Adriamycin, also known as the ‘red devil’. What an appropriate nickname considering the havoc caused by the side-effects of this drug!
Yaseen was severely affected by the treatment. Fever, loss of appetite, upset tummy, nausea, rawness of the mouth… these were just some of the side-effects that he (and we) had to deal with.
New dilemmas arose, some were anticipated and some weren’t, but these dilemmas had far-reaching consequences.
The first of it was Covid. It was rampant. and I became extremely paranoid about Yaseen’s safety. His immune system was compromised, at times non-existent, and I wanted to seclude him from everyone in order to protect him. The people who loved him and who he loved – friends and family – I wanted to seclude him from them. Even I wasn’t allowed to approach him like I normally did, with my ‘mom’ hugs and kisses. “Wear a mask, sanitize”, I nagged. And I kept on nagging, out of fear for him.
As the days of treatment unfolded, I began struggling with the effects of the chemotherapy on Yaseen. I could not see my child in distress without going into distress too.
It reached a point where the decision was made for Yaseen to reside with Mujeeb for a while. Mujeeb was emotionally stronger and he had a calm temperament – he wasn’t prone to panicking. His home was also more secluded for Yaseen’s isolation, and as a huge added benefit, Shubnum had a background career in nursing.
This was a role reversal for myself and Mujeeb. I had been the live-in parent from the moment Yaseen was born until a month shy of his nineteenth birthday. Now, I was seconded to the parent with visitations over the weekends and odd days.
I told myself that this arrangement was only temporary. Soon Yaseen would be back at home with me, and everything would return to normal. That is how I pacified myself.
But things didn’t unfold according to the normal. Yaseen’s blood cell levels were often too low for him to receive the ABVD treatment. Booster injections were needed to raise his levels and nutritional supplements had to be added to an already stringent diet. (It reached a point where Yaseen became put off at the mere sight of spinach and beetroot, foods that he normally loved.) And our original estimate of a 6 month treatment plan were beginning to fade.
No matter how hard you try though, things you try and avoid often have a way of finding you. Waseem being at school, or me being at work, or us being around family, inevitably led to us coming into contact with infected people or people who displayed symptoms. Given how compromised Yaseen’s immune system already was, he was then forced on those occasions to skip his weekly visitations. Better safe than sorry, right?
Around 4 months into the ABVD chemotherapy treatment, Yaseen went for a PET scan to determine the progress made by the treatment. The results we received were mixed.
There was some improvement, but not as much as we had hoped for. The results were sufficient, though, to determine that an alternative type of treatment was required, something more escalated than the ABVD. This treatment would need to be administered at a different hospital and under a different doctor. Not an oncologist, but a haematologist.
I found myself lost. I was at a loss when the results came back as Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I was at a loss on Yaseen being more at Mujeeb’s than with me. I was at a loss now that this ‘easily treatable’ cancer wasn’t responding as well to the treatment. I was at a loss of what lay ahead for us with this new doctor and the new treatment.
For all the years of meticulously planning out my son’s life and the dreams I had had of his future, I was now utterly lost. And scared.
That day in the oncologist’s rooms, when Yaseen had told me about this boy Mathew having a rare cancer, I was so grateful that Yaseen’s treatment was going to short-term, and that his life would resume back to ‘normal’ fairly quickly. But I was wrong.
Clearly, very clearly, Allah SWT had a plan that was different to mine. If my life was a puzzle and I imagined the end picture was going to look a particular way, then Allah SWT was subtly shifting the pieces around so that the image was now going to look different.
I had been cautioned – our journey with cancer wasn’t going to be as straightforward as I liked. It was going to be longer and harder. And longer, harder journeys required patience and perseverance.
If Al Lateef is subtle,then He is also kind. How?
For me to learn patience and perseverance, He blessed me with the best of teachers…
Yaseen.