A Scene From the Parking Garage
Thursday morning, 7:42 a.m. Third level of the parking garage at Advocate Children's Hospital in Park Ridge.
I was buckling my son into his car seat after a port-flush appointment. He had been very brave. He had earned a sticker. He was negotiating with me about whether the sticker should go on his shirt or on the back of the car seat.
Two spaces over, another family was getting out of a minivan. Mom in the driver's seat. Dad sliding the side door open. A small girl maybe four years old being lifted out, very gently, with a little hospital wristband on her arm. A toddler, maybe a year and a half, still strapped in the second row, watching.
The dad was carrying the small girl on his hip. Her head was on his shoulder. She was not crying. She was not talking. She was just very still in his arms, in the way kids get when they are going somewhere they have been before and they know what is coming.
The mom was getting the diaper bag out of the back. She caught my eye for a second across two parking spaces, in the slightly chilly Thursday-morning light of a hospital parking garage, and we nodded at each other.
Two cancer moms. Two strollers. Two hospital wristbands. One nod.
There is a thing that happens in pediatric oncology parking garages. Cancer families recognize each other in a way most other families do not. You can tell. The car seat configuration. The hospital bag. The slightly grayer skin on a clinic morning. The way one parent is carrying a child who is just a little too still.
We did not say anything. We did not have to. That nod said: I see you. I have been where you are walking to. I will be here when you come out.
I hope her morning went okay.
I am writing this from the car.
If you are a cancer mom reading this in a parking garage somewhere, the nod is for you, too.
Dina
Mom of Max | Founder, Maxwell’s Toy Shoppe
Childhood Cancer Advocate 💛
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