As my head hit the pillow on my formerly lucky Friday the 13th, the title of the children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” popped into my head.

Maybe if I close my eyes, I’ll wake up. It’ll have been a bad dream, maybe I was dehydrated? Who knows…

But then I woke up Saturday and it was still our reality.

Youngest has been having some health challenges of late. We figure the half in September just brought to a head some things that have been percolating. That the clot and crazy blood was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Last Friday we got to the root of it. Just like it takes your body time to heal, it takes your body time to break and then show symptoms so they can figure it out.

My vocabulary didn’t include Acute Myeloid Leukemia until last Friday. Leukemia had been floated in November. It scared the stuffing out of me. But now the reality is AML.

They moved so darn fast, it was scary. From doctor’s office to a room in Roswell Park Cancer Institute in the matter of hours. Total whirlwind. No time to think, or really do anything.

Hopefully, in the end it won’t matter and is post fodder for another day but there wasn’t enough time in a Friday afternoon to get to a definitive diagnosis before around 7pm. The insurance office closes at 5pm. I can only hold firm to the everything happens for a reason… we just don’t always know the reason. That the weekend wait won’t matter.

It allowed us some time to process it, to get through the initial fog that sets in when catastrophe hits. It actually took a couple days, maybe if we talk in a month I’ll say it took longer.

You want to be able to say that you made good choices, you know, looking back. But how do your know that you made good choices when you’re brain is mush and you’re just trying to put the pieces back together?

I started this post last Saturday, and it took some time to decide to post it, to share my Mom journey. We started a FB group, but not everyone needs/wants to see my Mom thoughts. Maybe it’ll help someone else. I’m posting.

Last week was insanity. But like some have counseled, you do it, it’s your life, you’re stronger than you think and every day starts, is filled and ends. Even though you think you just want to crawl into a hole. You don’t.

I’ve pondered deleting that Friday the 13th post. I won’t. It is lucky that they found it, AML is a fast moving train. Even another couple days would have made the difference.

So maybe it is still my lucky day… just in a way I could have never imagined.