Jenney's Story Featured on the Cancer Research Institute
The Cancer Research Institute published Jenney’s patient story on their site. It’s strange seeing our worst year turned into someone else’s summary.
If you’ve been reading here a while, you already know the broad strokes — headaches during pregnancy, two brain surgeries, stage 4 metastatic melanoma while we had a newborn and four other kids at home. The CRI piece covers the medical side well: the immunotherapy treatments, tumors disappearing after one infusion, the side effects that forced treatment to stop early, and the October 2020 scan that came back clean.
What a patient profile can’t really get at is the rest of it. The 3 AM conversations. The way our older kids stepped up in ways no child should have to. Watching Jenney relearn our children’s names after brain surgery — not as a metaphor, but literally, one syllable at a time.
That’s what I wrote the memoir about. Learning Your Children’s Names Again has the parts that don’t fit in a medical profile — the fear, the dark humor, the weird mundane details that somehow matter more than the scans did.
If you read Jenney’s story on CRI and want the full picture, the book is available now: Kindle eBook Paperback
Jenney’s still in remission. The kids are getting big. Some weeks I forget any of it happened, which I think is its own kind of miracle.