Not again.

We tried to get on with our lives. That makes it sound like we dusted our hands off, said "well that's over", and moved on. Hardly. We were grieving, attending grief counseling with Mae Page. But we also spent a lot of time at the shore with our friends, we returned to work, we received Spencer's bench from England, set it up and planted the tree in Pretzel Park. With $10,000 in equity that we had built up in our house over the last 4 years we replaced our roof, reworked the eaves to make them historically accurate and had the wide plank wood floors on the first floor sanded and refinished. It was was also time to get on with our family plan. As fall came, Sandra became pregnant. When Spencer was sick, our lives came to a standstill. Now we were starting to do things again, continuing to build our lives together.

Jessica had pointed out to us that she had a bump behind her left ear, at the hairline. We noted it, but did not panic. Every time we brushed her hair we would check it out to see if it changed or grew. At her next checkup we pointed it out to our doctor. He said that it probably was nothing, he said he would give it a 99% probability that it was just a sebaceous cyst. My layman's explanation for this is that sometimes a pore in your skin is  trapped below the surface. It creates oil, which your skin does naturally to keep it soft and supple, but it accumulates under the surface and creates a lump of fat. The doctor said that in light of our history, we could schedule an outpatient surgery to have it removed.

On Wednesday, October 28th, 1992, five months and one day after Spencer died, we went into CHOP's day surgery department to have the lump removed. We went in at 8 am for pre-surgery screening, Jess went into surgery for a quick procedure, and Sandra and I went back to the bench between the atrium and the entry to the double doors to the surgical suite. Spencer's primary nurse on 7 east left Oncology to work in Surgery. To work in Pediatric Oncology takes a special kind of person, it is an understandably difficult job, and not everyone is able to cope. Suzanne was assisting the same surgeon who nicked Spencer's artery for Jessica's procedure. We were not aware of any of this until they both came out of the double doors crying. Jessica's lump was not a sebaceous cyst, it was a tumor and it was malignant. They feared it might be lymphoma.

Sandra's notes: Shocked, despair, "why?". Spencer's primary oncologist Dr. Bruce was paged. He took her to the clinic, gave her a physical, chest x-ray, did blood work, took a bone marrow aspirate and did a spinal tap. She was admitted to 7east and put on Methotrexate. Primary diagnosis: Leukemia.