Yes, we laugh. And this is why.

Charlotte again!

I have one more thing to say before I turn in for the night.

Something really irritating happened the other day, and I want to share it with all of you.

Just to review, Maisie is a bright, happy four-year-old, and as healthy as we could hope for. She has a lot of health issues. Way more than I do. But she's happy. And so I'm happy. And Grandma and Grandpa and Jeff are happy. Two days ago I posted a photo of Maisie and me in the hospital. In the photo she's hooked up to a dialysis machine. A little backstory: Maisie has a really shit immune system. She gets very sick very easily. A couple of days ago a girl in her preschool class came down with pneumonia. I flipped out. Grandma flipped out. The doctors insisted she stay in the hospital over the weekend to get blood work done, find out whether or not she's carrying the bacteria (it's bacterial pneumonia), and try to stop it before it kills her if she is carrying it. Well, Maisie also has really bad kidneys. She's got about 20% function out of the right one and maybe 50% function out of the other one. It's enough to live on until/if she gets a kidney transplant. But whenever she's in the hospital anyway, we hook her up to dialysis to give her poor kidneys a break.

So I'm sitting there reading a book out loud, the dialysis machine (which we call Wilhelm, because Maisie said so) is chugging away in the background and all of a sudden Maisie cracks up.

"What?" I say.

"The tubes look like a smiley face!"

So I come over and she tries to tell me how the arrangement of the bandages and tubes and stuff in her arm looks like a smiley face. I don't see it but she is so eager and it's so funny, neither of us can stop laughing. A second later a nurse walks in and takes a photo of us cracking up at her dialysis tubing. I posted it on Facebook. A friend of my mom's, who knows Maisie's deal, calls me the next day and goes on a tirade. "Your daughter is terminally ill (no, she's not) and has suffered more in her life than any four-year-old should (okay, yes). How can you laugh at her pain, laugh at her dialysis? You cannot comprehend how much she is hurting right now, and laughing at her situation is cruel." This went on for fifteen, twenty minutes. I'm not kidding. Eventually I just hung up the phone.

You want to know how I can laugh? You're right. Maisie is four years old and has suffered way more than any little kid should. But that's why I laugh. That's why she laughs. If we didn't, we'd go crazy! I laugh because she was born almost three months early with only a 50% chance of survival and holes in all sorts of internal organs. She could not breathe by herself for almost a whole year. She could not eat by herself for two years. She did not learn to walk until last year and today runs and jumps and skips and swings. She has 70% of a functional kidney and half an immune system and half of her left lung is dead and yet she goes to a mainstream preschool with twelve other kids. Her skin is half as thick as it should be and her eyesight is bad. She's had hemorrhaging and pain like you wouldn't believe. When she was thirteen months old she lost six of her eighteen pounds - A THIRD of her bodyweight - in a week. Five times she's turned blue on me from head to toe.

I don't know if my daughter will live to be five. Or six. Or seven. Her health problems are the result of a maniac interrupting her gestation, so we have no idea what the results are going to be in the long run. So I laugh to make the most of the time I have with her, even if it is not as much as I want. You would too.