This morning, as I was pulling up Idan’s shorts, he noticed the scar on his leg. He touched it, furrowed his brows, and — struggling to find words — asked me, “what’s that?” For the past several months, he has been finding his voice. Putting sounds together to make words, stringing words together to make sentences, but I was in no way prepared for this question. Not yet, at least.I looked in his eyes and my heart broke, knowing full well what that scar symbolizes and how it got there, but not knowing if or how to explain it to him. Maintaining my composure, I responded, “When you were little,” —when you were little?! —“you spent some time in a hospital. That scar is from an IV tube, and that IV tube helped save your life. There was a pesky teeny tiny fungus that got caught in your lungs, and medicine was delivered to you through this IV, and it helped the fungus go away. This was how we learned you had Hyper IgM.”
I know this will only be the first of many questions and conversations about his time in the ICU, the bone marrow transplant, and everything since, and undoubtedly the answers and explanations will be more complicated. How does a little boy process this information, and for that matter, how does anyone process the information that their very life once hung in the balance? But I hope, just as Idan found the right words to ask me this morning, we will find the right words to tell him.
