Leroy Returns
The day for Asher to visit his fellow third grade classmates had arrived. He hadn’t seen most of them in four and a half months.
Prior to our arrival, the staff tried to gently prepare the students for what they would see. The last time Asher had been in this classroom, he looked like a healthy eight-year-old boy. Now he was confined to a wheelchair, difficult to understand due to speech problems, and visibly bloated from prolonged steroid use. He had gained in excess of thirty pounds over the course of his treatment. To say that the contrast was high is an understatement.
When I wheeled him into his classroom there were silent stunned looks on many faces. In front of them was their friend, embodying the horrors of a broken world.
For his part, Asher was fine. In fact, he had planned a demonstration with Leroy, his fellow port-bearing companion that had been given to him many months earlier.
Asher was known for his love of the military, and especially had a soft spot for medics. In his younger days, if he was injured, it wasn’t uncommon for him to cry out, “I NEED A MEDIC!” And he loved the idea of patching someone up with a first aid kit.
The little doll named Leroy was now part of a bag full of medical supplies that Asher had collected over the course of his treatment. Asher decided he wanted to demonstrate, using Leroy, how his port was accessed. So he put on some gloves, and with a little help from his mother relaying some of the less clear things he was saying, walked through the process of the port access. Though his kit didn’t actually include the needle on the end of the infusion set, when he reached the moment where he was about to “access” Leroy’s port, he proudly stated, “And this is the part where I stab him.”
I wish I could tell you that the place erupted in laughter (It made me giggle), but I think those poor kids were mostly still in shock. Their little hearts and minds weren’t just considering that something terrible was happening to their friend. Some were wondering, “Could this happen to me?”
