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Mastsisters

I love all my masto kids. But there’s something special about this little girl. The week after her second birthday, her mother, a total stranger to me, called me to convince me to be part of Addie’s team in her very complicated, very high stakes, very frightening, very literal fight for her life. I agreed. Addie was my very first case.

When our paths converged four and a half years ago, Addie was living on the edge of disaster every single day. Incidentally, so was I. We got our first PICC lines the same month. I started chemo two weeks after her mom called me. We were both in and out of the hospital with protracted anaphylaxis and scopes and procedures. We both sustained significant organ damage that year. Things were not good. But I always believed that if we could just stay alive that one day we would get better. Maybe not healthy. Maybe not well. But better. Better was the dream.

Today, we walked around Salem on a perfect breezy June day. We breathed in the salty ocean air. We looked for Halloween figurines in the small shops at Pickering Wharf. We squeezed through secret passages in dusty four hundred year old houses. We struggled to read the lettering on the smooth white faces of centuries old tombstones. We talked about school and safe foods and hospitals and ports. We ate things that would have put us in the ground when we first met.

This is not an easy life. It is never going to be easy. But there is something about looking back years later that makes you see this journey as worthwhile. We can eat food now. We aren’t admitted constantly. We are not shocking left and right. We are not always on the brink of anaphylaxis.

We made it. We are still here. We are still living in the happy moments and getting through the hard ones.

We are mastsisters. We are survivors. We are alive.

Me and Addie, Los Angeles, May 2015
Me and Addie, Salem, June 2018