Trading Chemo 4 Cupcakes

Pablo and his ladies!

Well, here we are. It's the last night of chemo. Can you believe it? Pablo will be six in June, and he's on the last night of something. Most people have to wait until eighth grade or senior year to finish something so monumental. So life altering. But our little chemohero has crested the biggest mountain imaginable in under six years. He has done it with courage, cuteness, humor + nonstop action. If we ever thought all these high end drugs were going to slow him down or bum him out, we were wrong!

Jo Ann, being the thoughtful + sweet woman that she is, ordered a dozen deluxe + yumalicious cupcakes from Alcove. Josh from Dangerbird picked them up, and Hrishi and I brought them to CHLA when we went up for dinner. Alison Amon delivered dinner. It rocked.

We sat in the conference room, as we have a hundred days before, and we ate while we caught up on the day, and while Pablo climbed all over us and the table, occasionally eating a bite of chicken. Hrishi is vegetarian, so he ate the off-the-hook risotto. It was fitting that Hrishi accepted my invite to leave the office and join us at CHLA for our last supper of the chemo regime-o. To me, we could not have had dinner alone tonight. Symbolically, we needed a friend to join us. We have not walked this path alone. We have walked this path with great help from a great many friends. There aren't enough Thank You cards in the world to cover all the friends we have, who have helped us in every possible way. Hrishi represents all our friends quite well. If you know him, I know you'll agree. If you don't, trust me: Hrishi is a brother to us.

Jo Ann's cupcake idea worked perfectly. We were able to celebrate Pablo's final dose of chemo—EVER!—at around 7:15 p.m., just as the day and night nurses were changing shifts. Pablo had planned to make some remarks, but as I held him in my arms behind the nurse's station, he looked at me, grinned and said, 'You!' So I did.

I had no choice but to paraphrase the message that P had rehearsed for the cupcaking (that's what I was doing in the above pic). It covered these areas: Pablo's final night of chemo, our gratitude for ALL of the nurses, and our love for them in the form of cupcakes. The nurses were all smiles and very quickly brought out the knives and bowls for some sugary stimulation.

Polly's at CHLA now. Jo Ann and I are home—we have a show to go to at Spaceland tonight. Then we'll be back at CHLA to breathe in the air of the final night.