Once upon a time there was a cup of syringes on our kitchen counter. It contained every size syringe imaginable: Silver dollar 60mL behemoths down to the pencil-thin 1mL munchkins. 

They also filled drawers, diaper bags, and purses. They could be found on night stands, under couch cushions and in cup-holders. Basically they were as common in our lives as loose change, a water glass or hair tie: scattered around just where you needed them and more often than not, exactly where you didn’t.  

We used these syringes for her five-times-daily medications, to flush her g-tube after a meal or release gas when she was bloated. After each use they were taken apart, rinsed, laid out to dry, then placed back in their cup for next time. Such a simple piece of plastic, but these syringes literally kept my daughter alive. Oh, I had my favorites of course: the ones that the numbers didn’t rub off of and the ones with the more durable plastic stoppers. The hospital always had the best ones so I would ask our nurses to leave me with their used ones instead of tossing them. 

After Adelaide died, I took her various medical items that had been heaped on the kitchen counter and placed them in her closet. 

“Leave the syringes.” Miguel said.

So I did. Like a bouquet of clear, plastic flower stems they sat in the cup in the corner of the kitchen.

In fact, I didn’t touch that cup until it was time for us to move away from Chicago. In a mindless purging flurry I threw most of them away keeping only a few, just because. When we made it to New Jersey and I was unpacking the box of random kitchen utensils that also held the syringes, I was unsure what to do with them. It felt odd to place them back on the counter in a home where they wouldn’t be used by a child who would never live there. So, I tucked a couple in a drawer, a few in a medicine cabinet and then put one in the pencil jar in my office. 

Everyday that I sit at my desk I see it. A symbol of the life we once led. Along with the other mementos of Adelaide’s life scattered throughout our room, it feels right there. Like your childhood blanket at your parent’s house.

This week I had the opportunity to visit the home of another fierce and feisty epilepsy warrior: Hadley. I was emotionally on guard as I entered their house: Hadley has intractable epilepsy, battles infantile spasms and is three years old. I was there to interview her family on behalf of CURE Epilepsy, something I’ve done dozens of times before, but I knew this interview was going to hit harder than most - poking deep bruises, as one of my friends likes to say.

I stepped into their gorgeous home and was met with warm welcomes, but still I held my guard up. I greeted Hadley and melted on the spot, like the Looney Toons characters when they liquify into a puddle of water, but still I tried to shield those bruises on my grieving heart. Then, before getting any closer to their medically-complex daughter, I went to wash my hands at their kitchen sink… and I saw them: the syringes. Two of them lined up on the edge the sink, still wet from use. 

Instead of crumbling in earth-shattering grief, I smiled. Those two clear plastic syringes, with their fading numbers on the side, grounded me in memory and comfort. These were my people, they spoke my language and understood the trials, fears and, most importantly, unexpected joys that come with a medically-complex life. It was those syringes on the counter that brought me the steadying peace and strength I would need to push through. Syringes that shouldn’t need to be there but are, that deliver life-saving elixers and that, at some point, become as common in our life as a butter knife.