Something’s not right.

He had pale lips. That was it.

No fever. No bruising or bleeding. No bone or joint pain. No lethargy, nor any of the other symptoms you can find online that should cause concern as a parent.

It was just…pale…lips. And, that was enough.

________

Over the course of the two weeks leading up to my son’s 15th birthday party that his father and I were throwing for him, I would say, “Alec, you look sick.” And, my son, like every other nearly fifteen-year-old boy who’d grown tired of constantly hearing this from his mother, would roll his eyes, sigh, and say, “Mom, I’m fine.”

And, like every great mother who knows what she knows, I’d reply, “Well, you don’t look good. Maybe I should make you a doctor’s appointment. Something’s not right.”

It wouldn’t take long for that to prove to be very true.

________

No matter how much he denied it, nor how much he—other than those damn pale lips—otherwise looked like a perfectly healthy teenager, I knew he wasn’t a perfectly healthy teenager.

I wonder sometimes if he actually felt fine back then and just wanted me to get off of his back, or, even if he didn’t, if he just didn’t want to have to go to the doctor with his birthday party and the start of his sophomore year of football to look forward to.

I remember standing next to the pool that Saturday at his party. I watched him jump and thrash around in the water with his friends. At one point he became completely enraged at a friend who’d pushed him and had nearly caused him to hit his head on the pool deck. Alec had every ounce of his strength that day, which he thankfully chose not to use against this poor kid who’d made him so angry. And so, I did my best to let him enjoy the party and I made sure that I enjoyed that special day, too. Plus, I could always ask him after it was over if he was positive that he felt okay.

After the party, while Alec’s father and I were out celebrating our anniversary, my mom called and said, “Alec doesn’t want to get up.”

“Does he look pale?”

“He does.”

________

On Sunday, the day after his party, he didn’t want to get up again.

Now, every parent of a teenager deals with a kid who won’t get out of bed, and who likely stayed up entirely too late the night before. I called him and said, “Hey, you need to get up. Rules are rules.” “But, mom. I’m so tired.”

There wasn’t time to be tired. It was the day before “Hell Week.”

“Hell Week,” for those who don’t know, is the first week of high school football, where the kids are put through, well, hell, to get them into both mental and physical shape ahead of the upcoming season. Whether it’s long two-a-day practices in the summer heat, or the painful conditioning drills, or maintaining your mental toughness while being screamed at by your coaches, Hell Week is not easy. But there’s a lot of excitement around the start of a new season, and Alec was ready for it to begin.

He lasted one practice. One.

“I think you’re right,” he told me over the phone after that very first day.

“I couldn’t run, I was lightheaded, and I felt like my heart was going to pop out of my chest.”

We immediately went to the ER, and they had an answer that was supposed to explain everything, even the pale lips. The diagnosis was that Alec was, “severely anemic,” and he just needed iron.

So I gave him iron. You might think that your child getting a diagnosis of something so easily treatable would be a relief for a parent.

And, it would’ve been, if I’d believed for a second that that’s all that was wrong with my son.

_______

I looked at Alec in the pediatrician’s office the following day, and now it wasn’t just me; anyone could look at this child and know that something just wasn’t right. The tests came back, and the pediatrician said, “There are two things that don’t look good, but, he does have good white blood cells, so it’s possible we’re dealing with some type of bleeding in the intestines. We need to run more tests, though.”

“Alright, then run more tests. What are we waiting for?”

The tests were run, and “something’s not right” didn’t even begin to cover the results that came back.

His pediatrician called while our family was out to dinner.

“He has all the symptoms of leukemia. You need to take him to Children’s Hospital in Orange County.”

There was no point in trying to hide who was on the other end or the heartbreaking news I’d just been given.

“Mom? It’s cancer, right?” Alec said. I didn’t say anything back. I couldn’t.

I walked outside, screamed, cried, called my mother.

“Alec might have cancer,” I told her. “If he dies I will, too.”

_______

We took him to Orange County right away, and they immediately ran his blood.

“He has blasts,” I remember them telling me. “Blasts? Please excuse my ignorance, but what are blasts?” I replied. “Cancer cells. All over his body.”

We’d spend the next three days at that hospital. We weren’t allowed to leave.