Perfect
Doug Emory
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
"He's perfect," Joy said, whispering the first words ever spoken about our newborn son. She began passing Cameron to me, but her eyes never left his frowning pink face, and for a moment I wasn't certain she could let him go. When he finally made it into my arms, he was insubstantial, within his swaddling of blankets barely a weight at all. His hands gripped the blanket's satin fringe as if he feared falling back out of this life. His fingers were delicate, the ellipses of his nails aligned with the pink skin surrounding them and lines etched across each knuckle, drawn finely as if by an artist's pencil. One hand released the blanket to grasp my index finger, catching me with a strength I knew couldn't be broken.
During the days of Cam's infancy, defining what made him perfect was easy—total up the number of fingers then do the same with toes and hope each count reaches ten. Check out that head of dark hair, sleek as an otter's fur and framing his face like he'd arrived straight from the stylist's. Cup his oval face in your palm and watch his alert emerald eyes scan you, recording every element of your expression.
As he grew, that definition bifurcated. His personality came into focus. Certainly, he remained perfect in a corner of my mind, but he also battled like a wildcat whenever we tried washing that unruly mop of curls piled high on his head. He threw tantrums mad as Lear on the heath, hitting the floor before clambering to his feet instants later with a knowing grin. Although possessed of more energy than a nuclear reactor, from his first day at daycare on, he was sick. Falling asleep challenged him. Every night he suffered from leg pains, brushed aside by his pediatricians but severe enough to wake him sobbing in the darkness.
Cuddling him to sleep one evening, I stretched alongside him, my face level with his. The smiling brontosaurus printed on his onesie, right over his heart, rose as he inhaled then fell away. His breath brushed my face, cotton soft. A strange idea came to me, divorced from any train of thought I'd been following: "This next breath is the most important breath in the world. Without this breath, the world ends." And those words hung with me, a mantra repeated until I knew he'd fallen safely asleep.
At age five, Cameron set off to kindergarten. His personality was like a starburst, his enthusiasm for any task irresistible. At the car line, I might have been dropping off a rock star. Everybody knew him. Everybody waved on seeing him. However, the illnesses and unexplained pains that had plagued him since daycare never relented. He spent lots of time home or in the school nurse's office. In his school photo, he struggles to smile, but because of his ever-running nose, his upper lip is rubbed raw.
One afternoon after recess, his teacher called because Cam was in too much pain to climb the stairs to the library. We scheduled an appointment with his pediatrician for the next day, where we received the diagnosis we'd been hearing for three years: "It's growing pains." This was followed by a new point of emphasis to get us out the door: "I don't have anything else to tell you. I can't think of any other way to help you."
We scrambled to find alternate medical care. A naturopath noticed abnormalities in the size and shape of Cam's blood cells. A pediatric orthopedist spent an hour and half with him and came away concerned enough to recommend both physical therapy and an MRI.
I drove him to his MRI on one of those rare, luminous Seattle days that lodges in the memory forever, the sky jewel-bright and clouds drifting like clipper ships from horizon to horizon. The test took no time at all, leaving Cam and me with hours free before his therapy appointment. We killed time at our favorite outdoor mall. At the candy store, he scooped gummies, a rainbow of colors and species, into plastic bags. He picked out an exotic miniature champagne bottle filled with candy so disgustingly sweet he grimaced and rolled its beads from his tongue into his gooey palm. We wandered. Staring determinedly at a point just beyond his toes, Cam tightroped the low walls bordering the sidewalks. For lunch, we sat on the lawn, sipping milkshakes and spreading greasy hamburger wrappers open on the grass.
We were back on the road to the therapist's office when Joy called. "You have to come home," she said. Over the car's speakers, her voice sounded tight, a discordant sensation given how relaxed our day had been. Stupidly, I asked, "Why? What's up, hon? We're going to his PT appointment now."
"Doug," she said, "you just need to come home."
We ended the call, and I sped from surface streets onto the freeway. The traffic blurred around me. "What's going on?" Cam asked from his car seat. "Dad, what's happening?" I strained to hear him over the blood in my ears. He might have been miles away. My arms and fingers stung, pricked by electric shocks of adrenaline.
"Dad?" Cameron said. "Daddy, I'm scared."
That night, we were admitted to the hospital, and Cam, awake through it all, underwent tests that lasted until mid-morning. We drove home that afternoon, still lacking answers. For five endless days after that, our sole point of information came through the hospital's patient portal. With a cheery ping, our phones would announce a new message, and we would scroll frantically through unfiltered images and dense, incomprehensible texts. Conclusions were non-existent, so Joy and I would exit the portal for search engines, struggling to interpret words, phrases, and test results.
I couldn't halt my pointless, obsessive research. Every shattered fragment of new information added to a suffocating weight. Eyes locked on the phone in my hand, I stumbled through the house, searching for an isolated spot where I could stand alone and cry. Tumors riddled Cameron's beautiful body—along his spine, in his chest, his liver, and his hip. His femur had been weakened so severely his leg threatened to collapse. The mantra from that strange night, years ago now, kept echoing in my mind: "Without this breath, the world ends. Without this breath, the world ends."
On the sixth evening after we left the hospital, the oncologist called with the official diagnosis. We took the call and retreated as far from Cam as we could, our heads touching above the phone. Our son had cancer, the doctor said, specifically pediatric B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. As one, Joy and I exclaimed, "Oh thank god," because, while leukemia was life-threatening, it could be cured. The other diseases our home research had unearthed were without exception terminal.
The hospital allowed us enough time to pack, find a dog sitter, and let Cam say goodbye to his kindergarten class. We stood alongside his teacher while she delivered our explanation to the kids: Cam would be away for just a little while, only until he got better. The euphemisms fooled no one. Alone at their desks, kids around the room started to sob. Then, while Cam stuffed his backpack with his school supplies, they rose one by one to wrap him in their arms.
That afternoon in the hospital, Cam's child life counselor sat on his bed's edge and explained his illness to him. She held up a picture of a swimming pool. Smiling ovals, like M&M's with stick arms and legs, splashed in the water. That pool represented his blood supply. Over time, for reasons no one could well explain, his body had begun producing interlopers that forced out those happy cells he needed to stay healthy. She flipped to the second picture. Now the good cells stood frowning on the pool deck, hands on hips, while the intruders floated uselessly as flotsam. "But you will get better," she said brightly, and to prove that she flipped to a third image that mirrored the first.
Getting better, however, involved a lengthy, painful process. The definition of "better" itself was uncertain because a patient could survive but suffer lifetime impairments. Cam began classified as a standard risk patient and was scheduled for a two-phased treatment of chemotherapy. He had a port implanted in his chest through which he would receive a deluge of required medications. His body would be scanned frequently to monitor the status of his tumors. He would need major leg surgery to prevent his weakened femur from crumbling.
A person could legitimately assume a child whose own blood attacks him, whose body routinely spawns tumors, and who requires plates and screws to hold his disintegrating bones together had been born terribly flawed. Some days, traumatized by too many needles and drugs, even Cam accepted this view, blaming himself, shouting through tears, "I'm sorry. I can't do this. I'm sorry," as he squirmed from his doctors' and nurses' grasp.
But I never viewed him as deficient. I knew my son was perfect, and that knowledge became unshakeable. When he cried he was sorry, I saw only a tortured little boy, tangled in his sheets, restrained by people and circumstances that deserved the blame he shouldered himself. I witnessed incomparable strength. Cam wrote his kindergarten classmates he would "beat cancer like a drum," and we rejoiced at what they sent back to him, picture after picture of Cam standing over battered drums, victorious. When wheelchair bound, he tore through the hospital corridors terrifying as a Formula One racer. As chemotherapy weakened his muscles and bones and he began physical therapy to slow their decay, whenever asked to complete one repetition of an exercise, he kept going until the therapist intervened and called a halt.
Despite his strength, at every stage the chemotherapy protocol on which he was placed failed. The first phase—induction—was intended to achieve remission in a month, but with leukemia affecting over ninety per cent of his cells and his body filled with tumors that had flourished for years, that outcome was a fantasy. That initial failure elevated him into a high-risk category and a second phase of treatment that required three infusions of an especially toxic drug. The first administration of that medication sent him to the emergency room, and the second to intensive care for a two-week hospital stay.
A final biopsy in August confirmed what had become obvious: Cam wasn't in remission. He wasn't even particularly close. His doctors had trod this futile path to its end for two reasons: chemotherapy still represented the best researched of their limited medical options and, unless the protocol was completed, insurance wouldn't cover the treatments now in our future, any one of which would have bankrupted us.
Cameron was scheduled for a bone marrow transplant, the riskiest procedure he had endured yet. Because he still needed to achieve remission before his transplant, he began receiving immunotherapy, a newer and less destructive class of drug. He carried a pump in a backpack so he would receive medication twenty-four hours a day. He loved the new drug—writing his class "then blina came"—as though this medicine had arrived on a white charger, waving a banner. His months on immunotherapy, rebuilding himself after chemo, became a relative oasis. Cam felt great. We had time to prepare for an estimated month-long hospital stay. I steeled myself for impending conflicts with insurance companies, outdated medical protocols, and perpetually understaffed hospital wards. Joy commissioned a contractor to decorate our house for Christmas, so on his return home Cam would step from the car right into the holiday season. Without much difficulty, the hospital located a donor, a person from Germany who matched Cam in every genetic marker his transplant team had hoped to find.
Within two weeks on immunotherapy, Cam achieved remission. His tumors vanished. His physical strength slowly returned. The Roc Solid Foundation and a group of local volunteers built a playset in our backyard and recorded him dashing pell-mell for the swings, his backpack flopping behind him. Each morning afterwards, he dashed outside to start the day, laying back and kicking himself horizontal against the sky. While he and I chatted, I would lean against the railing, keeping my voice light as my feelings cycled on a never-ending loop of joy, terror, and mourning.
I mourned because these days were both fleeting and false. While Cam swung his tennis shoes toward the clouds, I knew the reality of where we were headed. He'd nearly recovered, but we adults were readying a betrayal, preparing to tear him down once again, to shatter the lining of his veins with poisons and threaten every aspect of his future. These pleasant, ordinary mornings, a parent watching a child play on the swings, were illusions, distorting our vision like smoke.
The afternoon of our hospital readmittance, we wheeled carts overflowing with clothes, blankets, and toys upstairs to our new home. A relative greeted us outside the ward, a balloon of a golden sun bobbing above his head, its eyes pressed shut and lips forming a serene crescent. Balloons were banned on the ward, so I tied it to an anteroom chair. After packing up yet another load from the car, I got off the elevator and stopped to watch the balloon. It drifted on currents of hospital air, autumn hills bright through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind it. Then I pulled out my phone, snapped a picture for Cam, and wheeled my cart inside for what became a 54-day hospital stay.
Joy and I did the best we could to disguise our situation as normal. We both stayed in Cam's room every night, keeping our family together, sharing the workload, and speaking with one voice when we advocated for our son. Joy slept in a reclining chair, buried deep under blankets. I spread a foam mattress topper onto the foldout couch beneath the window. We had limited ways of making the days varied and fun, but we never gave up trying—returning with snacks from expeditions to the cafeteria, setting up a video game player, and watching Zootopia and The Bad Guys a hundred times apiece. We ordered out for dinner from different restaurants every night. The hospital pitched in too, sending Cam physical therapists, play therapists, video gaming volunteers, and even teachers for school lessons.
The donor cells for transplant arrived in the middle of our eighth night. The nurses managing the delivery woke us and gave a detailed explanation, but in truth the process was anticlimactic. From where I lay, knees drawn up on the too-short couch, all that happened was two men crept in in the dark, hung yet another bag from Cam's IV pole, and spent several hours observing his monitors. The drama, the risks, were all buried in potential, in what might happen once those foreign cells encountered Cam's own, in how the powerful medications that blocked transplant rejection affected him. Nurses rotated in, drawing blood for labs every four hours. I tracked Cam's pulse rate on the monitor because that was my only way of evaluating his pain.
Nights after the transplant, once Cam fell asleep, Joy and I gave each other half-hour breaks. I spent my time on a walking route past the cafeteria, through the parking garage, and outside into the neighborhood, where I hiked the sidewalk toward the ridgeline. Christmas was just weeks away. Multicolored lights decorated the brick homes, framing doorways and drooping from gutters. Trees glimmered behind drapes that muted their light.
At the crest, a bridge arced above the street, connecting the neighborhood park to its school. Streetlights at either end pooled deep shadows beneath it. Once, I thought a man watched me from the bridge's far side, but I ascended the stairs and crossed without breaking stride. The prospect of being stalked seemed inconsequential somehow. I could only imagine harm in terms of harm to Cameron.
Once across the bridge, I turned downhill and stopped in the hospital's serenity garden to read the panels describing how the garden evolved with each season. Then I scanned my badge to get back inside and rode the elevator to the ward. Many nights, other families' friends and relatives filled the couches and held vigils under the anteroom lights. Usually, these visitors sat huddled, their conversation low, but even when everyone sat alone, no one met my eyes. Inside the ward, the lights were dimmed, and most of the nurses' stations sat empty. Always, a child cried somewhere in the night, inconsolable behind drapes that sheltered the rooms from view. In the break room, sometimes I would happen on a couple sharing dinner or playing cards. More often, I'd find a person standing by themselves, staring vacant-eyed over the city.
Two weeks after the transplant, Cameron began adding three pounds a day to his skinny, fifty-pound frame. Each night, his heart rate increased on average by ten beats a minute. The doctors tried, without success, to drain the fluid overflowing his system. Soon, his liver function stopped altogether. That in turn impaired how every major organ—hearts, lungs, kidneys—functioned and banished from existence that frail mirage we'd created in our hospital room.
At three a.m., five days into this deteriorating situation, a team rushed through our door. A medical assistant flipped the lights on and rattled the screening curtain back. She and a peer unlocked the partitions in the glass front wall and swung them wide while a nurse stomped the brake off on Cam's bed. With nurses at his bed railings and the assistant steering his IV poles, they rushed him to the elevator and into intensive care.
Just as when Cam's illness was first discovered, he lay awake through a blizzard of emergency procedures. His intensive care team announced he needed another IV for additional drugs. He protested, as he had done so many times before: "I'm sorry. I can't do it." His veins had collapsed, and his rail-thin arms lacked space for yet another puncture. The phlebotomy technician missed once, twice, three times at finding a vein, all while my son screamed.
Cam was too weak to free his arm from the nurses and technician who pinned him to the mattress. Clinging to the bed railing, I chanted, "You're OK, hon. You're OK," like a lullaby, and I kept repeating those words even after his team shouldered me aside. They all chatted breezily, laughing about the cafeteria's latest abysmal entrée, griping because they were going to miss holiday dinner. I hated the sound of their voices. I wanted to ask how they ignored the gravity crushing this room, but I was powerless as Cam was. Throughout the next day the doctors trooped in, telling us that Cam needed dialysis, restraining, intubation. I argued each decision before always finally nodding my assent. I lacked the strength to do anything else.
Cam spent the next week unconscious. Daily, technicians wheeled in machines to scan his organ systems, searching for permanent injuries from the shock his body had undergone. Whenever our phone rang with test results, Joy and I again frantically scrolled Cam's patient website, reviewing images inscrutable as tarot cards for predictions about our child's future. Every morning at rounds, Cam's medical team—now grown nearly twenty strong—listened as specialists reported their findings. Every interpretation was qualified. Nothing was ever definitive, but no obvious point of damage materialized either, and I felt a grim sense of relief as each report concluded. We might stand on a barren plain, clouds spiraling overhead, but one more lightning strike had missed us.
One after another, the tubes that had kept Cam alive were removed. We moved back upstairs to the transplant ward. His physical therapist resumed her visits. At first, she asked him simply to dangle his legs off the bed, all while I remembered that grinning kid rocketing for his playset just weeks before. The next day, she pulled out a mat, and he slid to the floor and played nonstop for half an hour. A few days later, she asked him to test a new computerized exercise program because she'd learned who she dealt with—ask Cam to walk a lap, he'd walk three. Ask him to perch on one foot and spread his arms like he took flight, he'd make a dozen attempts until he held the pose perfectly.
The week before Christmas, the results came in from the most significant tests of all. His transplant was working. Donor cells were replacing those corrupted ones his body had generated. His biopsy showed he remained, for the third straight month, in a deep remission. Late on Christmas Eve afternoon, our family was finally released for home.
Within the boundaries erected for us, we experienced an authentically good holiday. We left the Christmas lights and fake tree we'd purchased up till Groundhog Day. With Joy on leave from work, we spent every day home together, reliving early COVID protocols, shopping online and masking in public. With his immune system deliberately suppressed, Cam couldn't be indoors with anyone besides family members, but after New Year's he attended first grade virtually, meeting children over Zoom and completing recorded lessons with me sitting beside him. His medication schedule was complex—twenty doses a day—and we still had twice-weekly doctors' visits. But Cam choked the endless stream of medicines down, and, on our still-frequent visits to the hospital, his results came back increasingly strong.
Just as he had after chemotherapy, he rebuilt himself. He had lost so much muscle mass that the stairs to his room were imposing as Everest, but he clung to the banister, dragging himself up step by step while Joy or I hovered behind him. He fell in love with Minecraft and constructed Legos like a fiend, filling our dining room table with his "builds". His daily school agenda included "Brain Breaks", exercises on YouTube videos in which we both played characters from Mario, jogging in place, leaping goombahs, and dodging Bowser's fireballs. Cam's thick, beautiful hair was long gone, and his face again grew puffy with steroids. Still, in every picture from this time, his smile shames that on the balloon I'd photographed the day of our hospital admittance.
Because online school didn't meet Wednesdays, that became Adventure Day, a chance to escape the house and wander lightly traveled outdoor sites. After our long absence, we revisited Cam's favorite parks along the Snoqualmie River. He piloted his bike through local parks devoid of children, and we branched farther afield, searching out the newly erected Thomas Dambo troll sculptures hidden around Seattle.
In April, Cam's fascination with Minecraft inspired an interest in actual mining. We drove on our most ambitious trip yet, to the Coal Mines Trail outside the historic coal town of Roslyn. Guided by a vague online map posted by the town's museum, I turned onto a side street and parked near an abandoned railroad crossing below a forested ridge.
A wooden sign at a junction ahead announced, "Coal Mines Trail", but it provided little help since paths branched off in every direction. I stopped. I wanted Cam to see the mines but didn't want to risk walking him too far. I cinched his hood against a curtain of dust blown on the wind. The sun shined unbroken but the air was chill. Like a tube of glitter had been sprinkled across the frozen ground, ice crystals sparkled in the dazzling light.
From the clustered houses a block away, a woman appeared, stepping high through stalks of bunchgrass that grew between the railway ties. She wore a blue windbreaker and wrestled a German shepherd pup that yanked its leash tight. At a distance, she resembled a strand of barbed wire uncoiling, tall and spare with a stoop to her upper back. She looked irritated, not just with the bounding pup but with the wind and dust and squinting sun as well. I shaded my phone's screen with my hand, still trying to read the map and get oriented. Cam wandered away to meet the dog.
"Dammit, Benny! Get down!" Benny stood, paws on Cam's shoulders, staring giddily into his eyes. I gave up on the map and started running. Cam couldn't get scratched or nipped, and the medical line in his chest might get torn by a claw. Before I reached him, though, he'd taken a step back and started scratching the pup's ears.
"I have two dogs," he told the woman.
"Well, I hope they're better behaved than this guy." Her voice, inviting and warm, contradicted the image I'd already formed. "His name is Benny. Not so bad really. Just young."
I laid a hand on Cam's shoulder and eased him another step away. "I'm sorry," I said.
"You two lost?" Her grey-white hair was yanked back in a high ponytail that nearly unraveled with each gust of wind. Her hands and face were chapped red by the cold.
"Cameron is hoping to see the mines."
"Then follow me, Cameron." She spun on her heel, the dog straining ahead and Cam at her side. "We can see two of the mines, and Benny can get his exercise."
The woman might have been a docent from the historical society. She led us off the path paralleling the tracks and up the ridge into a pine forest. I waited for Cam to tell me his legs were tired, but he never slowed, scrambling uphill and listening to stories about the immigrants who worked the mines, the excavation technique used on the region's narrow ridges, and the value of the coal left buried in the ground. We paused at the mine entrances, now blocked by boulders for the safety of the town's children, then traversed the hundred-foot-high slag pile the mines had produced.
Following behind, I heard the woman clearly, but Cam's voice not so well. He'd been shockingly quiet so far, but after the trail rounded the slag heap, his arms started flying. Clearly he was relating another of his tales—probably about his latest discovery of a Minecraft building technique. But just as we reached the path beside the railroad tracks, he said something that stopped the woman short.
"You did?" She knelt beside him as I caught up. "You've been through all that? And now you're all better. Heck, Cameron, kiddo, you've made my day." She looked up at me with a level gaze, her face beside his. This was, she said, the fifth anniversary of her grandson's death from cancer. He had been a patient at the same hospital Cam had. Football player Russell Wilson, who left Seattle tagged as a self-absorbed pariah, had sat and comforted her daughter for two hours the day her grandson died.
She rose, her hand lightly on Cam's shoulder for balance. "I mean this," she said. "I can't tell you how happy I am for you, Cameron. So happy to have met you. You're going to be my inspiration all day long."
After we said our goodbyes, Cam and I walked to our car, the wind spattering dust off our jackets. His legs were wobbly, but he refused to let me carry him. Between the ridge climb and the distance, this was the farthest he'd traveled since his diagnosis.
Back at home, I told everyone the story of our day at the mines. No one felt its magic like I did. Didn't I think it ghoulish, some friends said, scaring a young cancer patient by discussing another child's death from the same disease? Some even questioned the outlandish, Dickensian coincidence underlying the story. Despite that, each retelling made my voice rasp and set tears itching in the corners of my eyes. On just one short walk we'd encountered a tiny miracle. We'd been blessed. Cameron, as I'd known from the start, was extraordinary. He provided light against not just my fears but the darkness confronting others too.
Soon after our Roslyn adventure, Cam had his six-month, post-transplant biopsy. He remained cancer-free. Equally important, his donor cells had completely replaced those from his failed immune system. Summer arrived. The plates and screws came out of his leg. Eight weeks after that, he sprinted looping circles around our backyard, his dogs bounding beside him as if they sensed how a combination of personal magic and hopeful test results had brought us near to our former lives.
Our required hospital visits decreased to once per week. Ironically, as our time in the halls and clinic rooms diminished, other children and parents began appearing to me in hyper-realistic detail, like they moved under a perpetual spotlight. Perhaps, I told myself, the grinding stress under which we'd lived had temporarily blinded me. Maybe my sight was returning. Perhaps I again saw my surroundings through a perspective I thought I'd lost, that prism through which normal people viewed the world.
I marveled at how hospital parents cared for children so impaired, so flawed, and did so radiating joy. A dad pushed an IV pole past me, running an exaggerated race with a toddler whose slippers slapped against the tile. Hadn't I too once steered an unmanageable pole, scooping up plastic tubing before it crimped under the wheels? The memory was scarcely believable. Everywhere in the halls, parents with sick bags sticking from their jeans' back pockets chatted with infinite patience to children whose eyes were blank from medication and pain. Despairing, I observed children with misshapen bald heads too big for their bodies, as though some malicious being had tried refashioning them into tortured facsimiles of their infancy. How could these parents do anything but weep at how damaged their children had become?
On the way upstairs to our clinic visit one morning, Cam held the elevator for a teenage boy in a wheelchair and his mom. We stepped to either side, clearing a space. The wheelchair carried an oxygen bottle. A stiff orange flag thrust from a pole behind one armrest. Once the steel doors clattered together, the woman sank down before the chair. The boy's head drooped, and she pushed away the shock of hair that fell in his eyes. She seemed oblivious to the Gordian knot of tubes running from her son's body and his breath rasping within his oxygen mask. She spoke so low her words were indistinguishable, but I recognized the tone. Her voice was natural, untroubled as water. She, I realized, knelt beside a different child than the one I saw. She saw first steps, stroked the ragged fur on an overly loved stuffie, and heard laughter unrestrained as bells. She was a witness to perfection.
When the elevator stopped, this time I held the door. The woman wheeled her son down the hall, and I watched them, just as dozens of people had watched Cam, Joy, and me. I understood, finally. Perfection isn't inherent to any person. It can't exist at all without an alchemic reaction to a love that cannot in life be broken. On that foundation, perfection endures until every hope is lost. I can't say with certainty it ends even then.
We left the hospital that afternoon and resumed lives much like those we had once had. After two years away, Cam is back at school, thrilled to be among friends and away from the drone of my voice. He'll tell any adult willing to listen about the intricacies of Minecraft and the mad skills he has developed. We ski and hike and have even gotten out of the house for a couple of weekend vacations.
Cam is still in remission. His test results remain promising. I understand, brain and muscle, heart and bone, that nothing is guaranteed. I experience "safe" as a series of relative levels, with those levels set by all the formerly mundane events that construct a day. For absolutes, I rely on Cameron. He'll tell you he once beat cancer like a drum. He hasn't changed. He defies a backward step. Surely, those experiences that buckled me beneath their weight scarred him too, but Cameron hasn't changed, not really, not from the moment his mom passed him into my arms and whispered the word that defines him.
