Part 2: My 8-Year-Old Daughter Hid Under a Blanket for a Month During Chemo — Until a Blotchy-Coated Pit Bull Walked Into Her Hospital Room
I’ll tell you about the program first.
Doernbecher has something called Healing Paws. It’s run out of a volunteer coordinator’s office on the third floor. Trained therapy dogs come in on weekday afternoons to visit pediatric patients whose parents have signed a release. The dogs have been evaluated for temperament, vaccinated to hospital standards, groomed, tested around medical equipment and IV poles and the particular kind of chaos that only a children’s hospital has.
I signed the release in week one. June didn’t want any visitors, but I signed anyway, because I couldn’t leave any door closed that might somehow open.
For three weeks, the coordinator sent me polite emails. Would June like a visit today? And every morning I’d ask her through the blanket and she’d say no.
On day thirty-two, I asked again.
She said, “What kind of dog.”
I said, “I can find out.”
The coordinator, a woman named Denise with reading glasses on a beaded chain, wrote me back in four minutes: We have Patches available at 2 p.m. He’s a sweetheart. Pit Bull mix. Six years old. He has a really unusual coat.
I wrote back: What kind of unusual?
Denise wrote: He had severe ringworm as a puppy before he was rescued. His coat healed patchy. Brown in places, white in places, pink skin showing through in others. He’s the gentlest dog we have.
I didn’t know what to do with that information. I showed June the email on my phone, blanket-and-all.
The blanket moved a little.
A small voice said, “Show me the picture.”
There was a picture attached. Patches was a blocky-headed tan-and-white Pit Bull with big sweet brown eyes. His coat looked like a map of an island nobody had finished drawing. Patches of dark brown fur. Patches of white. Patches of pink skin. A strange beautiful asymmetrical creature.
The blanket pulled down an inch. Two eyes appeared.
June said, “His head is weird.”
I said, “A little bit. Yeah.”
She said, “Like mine.”
I said, “A little bit. Yeah.”
She pulled the blanket back up.
But at 1:57 p.m. she was sitting up in bed.
Patches arrived at 2:04 p.m.
He came in on a leash with a handler named Miguel. A paraplegic Army veteran who ran the Healing Paws dog on Tuesdays. He rolled his wheelchair up to the bed. Patches walked next to the chair like he’d been doing it his whole life.
June was under the blanket.
Miguel didn’t push it. He said, “Miss June, this is Patches. He had a pretty rough start in life. He was covered in a bad skin thing when he was a baby so his fur grew back funny. He doesn’t mind if you want to look at him or not. He’s just here to say hi.”
There was a pause.
Then the blanket pulled down.
All the way down.
I saw the top of my daughter’s head for the first time in eight days. I saw the fine blue veins at her temple. I saw the small pale curve of her skull.
She didn’t flinch.
She looked at Patches.
Patches looked at her. Head tilted, exactly the way dogs in stock photos tilt their heads except he meant it. His tail hit the side of the hospital bed in a slow rhythm.
June reached out one thin arm.
She put her hand on a patch of white fur on his shoulder. Then on a patch of brown. Then on a spot of pink bare skin near his ear.
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said the sentence that I’ve written down on a piece of paper in my wallet.
She said, “We’re the same. Our heads aren’t pretty.”
Patches leaned his big blocky head forward and licked her wrist.
June laughed.
It was a small laugh. Almost a hiccup. It was the first sound of that kind that had come out of her in thirty-two days.
I turned to the wall and put my hand over my mouth.
Miguel was polite enough to look at his shoes for about thirty seconds.
That visit was thirty-five minutes long.
Patches came back every Tuesday for the rest of June’s induction.
She waited for him. She started writing him letters in crayon on Monday nights — “Dear Patches, I ate a green bean today but I did not like it.” She kept them in a folder. Miguel would bring her back a polaroid he took of Patches next to a sign she’d asked him to hold up, like “PATCHES IS A GOOD BOY” or “HELLO JUNE IT IS TUESDAY.”
June let the nurses see her head after that.
She let me see it.
She started leaving the blanket on her lap instead of over her head.
In June — the month, not the child — she finished her heaviest round of chemo. She went into remission in August.
In September, her hair started growing back.
I thought, We made it. We’re okay. The worst of it is over.
I was wrong about that. Not wrong about the cancer. Wrong about the worst of it.
Because the hair that grew back wasn’t her old hair.
It came in patchy.
Chemotherapy had damaged her scalp unevenly. Her hair grew back in some spots thick and dark, in other spots fine and almost white, in other spots not at all.
From above, her head looked like a small pale map of an island nobody had finished drawing.
I sat in the parking lot at Fred Meyer and cried about it for a long time the first day I really saw it in good light. I hadn’t cried like that the day of the diagnosis. I hadn’t cried like that on day thirty-one under the blanket. I cried in the Fred Meyer parking lot because my daughter had survived cancer and the universe had given her the meanest possible crown as a reward.
She didn’t know yet. I hadn’t shown her.
Her follow-up appointment was on a Tuesday. I brought her home afterwards and she went into the bathroom to wash her hands and I heard her turn on the tap and then turn it off and stay very still.
I knew she had seen herself in the mirror over the sink.
I was standing in the hallway bracing for a scream.
It didn’t come.
After a long moment she came out of the bathroom.
She walked past me into the living room.
She stood in front of the full-length mirror we keep by the front door.
She looked at herself for maybe twenty seconds. Small. Pale. In a pair of sweatpants and a purple T-shirt with a unicorn on it. Her hair a patchwork of dark and light and bare.
Then she turned to me and she smiled.
She said, “Mom.”
I said, “Yeah, baby.”
She said, “I look more like Patches now.”
I started to answer. I couldn’t. I was holding the back of the couch.
She wasn’t sad.
She was proud.
She turned back to the mirror. She put one hand on top of her head, on a patch of almost-white fine hair.
She said it again, softer. “I look more like Patches now.”
I sat down on the floor right there in the living room.
And everything from the last eight months rearranged itself.
The blanket over her head had never been about not wanting us to see her. It had been about not wanting to be alone in being seen. She didn’t have a version of herself in the world to match up to. Every person walking through her hospital room door had a full head of hair and a symmetrical face and the casual intact body of someone who had never been sick.
Then Patches walked in.
A Pit Bull with a face like a map. A dog who had been photographed by the rescue. A dog who had a handler who loved him. A dog everyone at Doernbecher asked for by name. A dog nobody covered with a blanket.
My daughter had looked at that dog and understood, in eight seconds, that there was a place in the world for a creature with a patchy head.
And she had waited, quietly, for her head to be patchy enough to live there.
Everything else followed.
The Tuesday letters in crayon. The pulling the blanket down all the way. The way she started standing up straighter in September. The way, when her hair first came in uneven, she hadn’t wanted to wear the beanie I bought her.
She hadn’t been bracing for ugliness.
She had been hoping for a match.
June went back to school in October.
She did not wear a hat.
I offered. I had a bag of them in the front hall closet — soft cotton beanies, the kind hospitals give you, and a fuzzy lavender one her aunt had knit. She looked at the bag.
She said, “I don’t need those anymore.”
She walked out to the bus stop with her hair in the air.
Third-grade children are not gentle. That’s something everyone knows. The first day back, a boy in her class pointed at her head at lunch and said, “Why is your hair like that?”
The cafeteria went a little quiet, the way cafeterias do.
June said, very clearly, across the table, “It’s like my dog’s fur. It’s cool.”
The boy said, “What dog?”
June pulled a small polaroid out of her lunchbox. Miguel had given it to her on her last Tuesday visit. Patches in a Santa hat, sitting in the pediatric oncology hallway, Miguel’s wheelchair just visible in the corner.
The boy stared at the polaroid.
He said, “That’s your dog?”
June said, “Yeah.”
It wasn’t technically true. Patches belonged to Miguel.
But it also wasn’t untrue.
The boy said, “That’s pretty cool actually.”
June said, “I know.”
She ate her sandwich.
That was a year ago.
Her hair is still patchy. It’s coming in slower than the doctors hoped. They tell us it may always be like this.
June doesn’t mention it.
Patches visits us at home twice a year now, when Miguel has time. He parks his van in front of our house and June runs out on the walkway with both arms out and a Pit Bull gets wheeled up to meet her on the porch.
She always puts her hand on the same spots.
The white patch on his shoulder.
The brown patch along his ribs.
The pink spot near his ear.
Then she puts her hand on her own head.
She never says anything when she does it.
She doesn’t have to.
If someone once showed up looking like your reflection — say their name below.
