i just spent some time with edith and her mommy, ahide...a few weeks ago, the seven month old was constipated and pale, and her mom took her to children's hospital...after a series of tests, the doctors told her that edith had acute leukemia...ahide and edith moved into the hospital right then and there. today was my first visit...i've never been to a pediatric cancer center...it made me sad just to walk through the doors...to know that in her ward alone there are 27 children fighting to live..edith was sitting in her little play thingy (jeez i don't even know what it's called). she lost most of her hair this week...she's on a lot of drugs, chemos, antibiotics, steroids, morphine, and she was hooked up to wires and machines and something in her chest to make it easy to draw blood. the feeling, when i walked into the room was very warm and sweet and quiet...the nurses were too...god bless the good nurses of this world...ahide breast feeds edith, and it seemed clear that it's the place edith most wanted to be. she is such a sweet little girl...i held her for awhile, and she started to fall asleep...that made me happy. i always kind of worry that infants will start crying if i hold them...i don't know why, i guess its just lack of experience...but edith relaxed in my arms...ahide and i talked about the moment that changed her life forever. how unreal it felt...i can't think of a harder thing than hearing that news. ahide wondered if she was being punished for something she did...i bet a lot of parents have that same thought when their children have life threatening illness...she told me that one of the hardest things is worrying about her other children at home. she's just can't be two places at once...edith will have to live in the hospital until august, which means ahide will live there too...she won't be able to work...she's a real trouper though, not complaining, just going with what is. that part is very inspiring to me. i don't think ahide ever had it very easy in life, but she's smart and she's kind, and she really loves her little girl. recently there was an article written about her, and the people she works with... they are really wonderful...they, and ahide, are the same people that i work with...
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 One Friday earlier this month, Ahide Chavez woke up worried. Her seven-month-old daughter Edith had been constipated for days, and Chavez was starting to wonder if she should see a doctor. She second-guessed herself throughout the day, as parents do, but evening came and Chavez found herself only more concerned. She'd begun feeding Edith solid food a week earlier -- had her intestines somehow gotten blocked? The pediatrician's office was closed for the weekend, so Chavez headed to the emergency room at the Children's Hospital in Oakland, hoping for that dismissal all parents hope for at some point: "Go home, you're being paranoid." But the triage nurse didn't tell Chavez to go home. On the contrary, she thought Edith looked pale, so a blood test was administered. Ahide waited for hours. Eventually she and her daughter were led to a room on an upper floor. Several doctors and social workers joined them, and one of the doctors began to talk. Abnormalities had been found in Edith's blood, troubling numbers with her white and red blood cell counts. Chavez wondered, what does this have to do with her baby being constipated? Finally someone broke it down: Edith has leukemia. This was nearly three weeks ago. Edith never left the hospital. She was admitted to the ICU that night and given a blood transfusion, followed soon by her first round of chemotherapy. Except for a couple of trips home to see her other children, Chavez hasn't left her baby's side. Stories involving the word "leukemia" are not happy. But amid the profound sadness and fear of Chavez's family, and in the larger uncertainty of the times, a tiny, heartening thing also happened this month -- a minor bit of goodness that seems worth noting, if only for its seeming scarcity sometimes. Chavez's coworkers threw a sidewalk sale. Chavez is the office manager at the Teenage Pregnancy and Parenting Project (TAPP), part of the Family Service Agency of San Francisco -- the office helps teen parents navigate their pregnancies and early days of parenting, connecting them with all available health, education and social services. Which is to say Chavez works with people who spend considerable time, and earn very little money, thinking about family. Within hours of Edith's diagnosis, her coworkers had heard the news and sprung into action. They found a way to transfer their own sick leave to Chavez, helped care for her other children and came up with the idea for a sidewalk sale benefiting her family. "A lot of us are having a hard time these days, financially, but we thought this might help at least a little," said Dana Hoffman, a supervisor at TAPP. "Even if this just helps with groceries for a few days, she'll be that much more able to focus on Edith." On a recent Sunday morning, a group of women from TAPP headed to Hoffman's Bernal Heights apartment. A small mountain of clothes, lamps, books, electronics, baby equipment and one Chia Scooby-Doo Handmade Decorative Planter grew in front of her stoop. More coworkers arrived. Even the former director, gone two years from the office, came to pitch in. "It's not that we're all best friends," Hoffman explained at one point. "But we're family, you know?" Isa Yana, a case manager who also runs the arts and culture programming, echoed the sentiment. "We deal with the most personal aspect of people's lives, so this family connection between us is inevitable. We lean on each other a lot," she said. Coworkers lean on each other every day; coworkers arrange sidewalk sales. But the kindness at TAPP seems notable, given the anxiety hanging over people's jobs there. As part of a state-funded nonprofit agency, the program faces an uncertain future. At one point since the state's budget crisis began, a complete elimination of the program was proposed. The staff fought back, highlighting some of their impressive stats: The case workers have helped achieve a five percent aggregate repeat birth rate with their adolescent clients, compared to a national average of 17.5 percent. Nearly 80 percent of active clients last year were enrolled in or completed high school and/or obtained their GED. And according to a recent study, teen pregnancy prevention programs save California taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion annually. According to Charlene Clemens, deputy director of teen and family services, the program is back in the state budget as of last week -- but tenuously so, as with so many government-funded programs. The employees at TAPP might have chosen to hunker down, hold off on giving until their own fates were clearer. But the kind of work done each day at the office has created a perhaps atypical orientation among the staff, according to Claudia Ayala, a program coordinator there. "The work we do is help low-income families. You have to have some level of compassion to work here. You have a different lens. You start to have a clearer sense of what people need," she said. Indeed, TAPP seems to have a special effect on those who encounter it. Yana, the case manager who runs the arts and culture programming, has worked at the office for a decade -- but in sense, she's been there far longer. "I started as a client," she said. "When I felt that genuine support from my case manager, I didn't know of any other way to give back. When I was 16, I told Charlene [Clemens] I was going to be a case manager myself one day. Seven years later, there I was." Yana and her daughter, now a teenager herself, were both at the sidewalk sale, which doubled as a kind of homage to Chavez, in a way. A toast was raised, pizza was ordered and the TAPP gang did their best to unload their goods throughout the day. In the end, Hoffman said they earned a few hundred dollars. Clemens was struck by her staff's spirit that Sunday -- particularly its connection to the work they do all week. "They're modeling the very philosophy behind a lot of the work we do. I've been quite amazed by it," she said. "One can survive tough situations when one has peer support -- that's what we try to encourage through the Young Family Resource Center." If the recession hovers over TAPP these days, it's a constant reality for Chavez and her family as well. Chavez's husband is a tile-setter, and had been accustomed to a good and reliable salary. But the collapse the housing market has turned countless professions like his upside-down. He was laid off three months ago, and with his wife on leave he must earn the equivalent of two people's salaries, through whatever work he can find on Craigslist. "He used to work on $30,000 projects. Now it's $5,000 projects," Chavez said of her husband. "Meanwhile we have financial aid payments, car payments, groceries, electricity, gas, water..." As stressful as her family's financial situation is right now, Chavez describes it almost at a remove, talking about it as though she'll deal with later -- her priorities have to be elsewhere for now. "Being here is kind of a full-time job itself," she said from the hospital the other day. "It's a lot of education and nursing and chemo and medication and side effects. It's been a roller coaster ride." It's too soon to know what will happen with Edith, but Chavez says there's a decent success rate for treating this kind of leukemia. She has to keep her daughter free of infections, as the chemo can weaken her immune system. Meanwhile doctors have to be sure Edith's body will even accept the chemo. Chavez expects them to be at the hospital another two months. "I took my baby to the pediatrician regularly. There were never any symptoms whatsoever. Happy little girl, playing with her toys, sitting up. Then suddenly we're here," she said. "And when this happened, I didn't have any sick time left, and the money -- I don't know what I would've done [without my coworkers]."They didn't just give at the office
View Larger Images
Comments