Published: September 06, 2008 11:30 pm            

Courage in action

I used to think I knew what courage is. It seemed very simple to me: courage, I reasoned, is being afraid of something and doing it anyway. That was before I watched courage in action.

My 6-year-old, Lyra, is undergoing chemotherapy for a brain tumor. She’s old enough to understand what’s going on, but it’s beyond her control. The grown-ups are in charge, after all, so she doesn’t have a choice.

This isn’t quite true. She could refuse to cooperate.

I’ve watched Lyra go through things that would defeat me. From the first time she tried to turn her head after the back of her skull had been cut open, to the present, she has shown time and time again what she’s made of.

For example, awhile back we had to give Lyra shots. She’d received a particularly virulent form of chemotherapy and was neutropenic. That is, her immune system wasn’t doing its job and she was in danger of getting sick and not being able to fight off the sickness. For 10 days we had to give her daily injections of Neupogen to bring up her white blood count.

Lyra is terrified of needles and I was none too happy about having to give her the shots, so the first injection was rough. Lyra kept trying to brush away the needle with her hands. I was trying to give her the shot at the same time I was trying to fend off her hands. So I’m sure the first one hurt. Besides which, the medicine burns as it goes in. It was not a pleasant experience. She cried and I felt like crying, too. She had chosen to get the shots in her stomach, which I thought was brave all by itself. I put a bandage on her tummy to make it feel better, and it was over with for the day.

The next time I had to give her a shot, she started waving her hands toward the needle, so I told her to lie on her hands. She did that, then pulled them out, then put them back, and so on, until the shot was over with. This one went more smoothly.

After that, Lyra put her hands down by her sides or underneath herself without being told. She was still scared, but allowed me to give her the shots without interference. She was crying, all the same.

That’s courage. And every time Lyra lets someone inject a needle into the infusaport that’s in her chest, I’m impressed by her bravery. For that matter, every day when she gets up and rides the bus to school, I’m impressed by her bravery.

She shows her courage a hundred times a day: when she kids around and laughs, when she asks to get her head shaved because her hair, which was coming back in has started coming out again, even when she goes to bed without complaint, exhausted from the chemotherapy and her activities. She is a very brave little girl, and she is my hero.

Now I know what courage is. I see it every day.

E-mail Kay W. Thompson kaywt@suddenlink.net

        

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