The Emily Updates (Vol. 1‪)‬

Seventeen years ago, when Vonne was 33 and Tom was 32, we were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: our only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, Tom worked for a defense think tank in the Washington, DC area and Vonne was a largely stay-at-home mom. We were trying – in vain – for our second child.


What followed was the defining crisis of our marriage: an intense 20-month battle to keep our first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to over one hundred relatives and friends. Over time we came to view it as something more important – a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom we hoped she would become.


Several things came together in the last couple of years to convince us that now was the time to finally publish this amazing diary. First – and most obviously – has been the meteoric rise of eBooks themselves. Second was Emily’s own matriculation into college. Having made it to adulthood, we felt the time was right for our family – and Emily herself – to share this story with the world.


Our family now hails from the Indianapolis area, and besides 19-year-old Emily – the girl who lived, we boast five additional children: sons Kevin (16) and Jerome (11), our adopted Chinese daughter Vonne Mei (7), and our adopted Ethiopian sisters Metsuwat (4) and Abebu (3). Would we have achieved such a blended clan absent the early experiences of Emily’s cancer? Probably not. But yes, that’s perhaps another reason why we wanted to revisit this tumultuous early family chapter. 


What you are about to read in this series of iBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of our second child, in included in this volume.


The first two chapters presented in this Volume I are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. We put these diary-like remembrances together in 1995, basing them on voluminous medical records. Various stories concerning the period between those initial treatments and the beginning of the updates in January 1995 appear across most of the 45 updates.


We haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective. We think it’s important to leave them in their raw, written-in-the-heat-of-battle state. Yes, we now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so we felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format. Simply put, we didn’t we didn’t think we could make them any more honest than they already are – despite the passing of time.


Once all of the updates are published as eBooks, in mid-December we'll put out a fifth retrospective volume co-written with our daughter Emily. It explores our memories of those tumultuous events and how they've continued to shape our collective and individual lives ever since. The volume also includes commentary on the updates themselves, and provides general advice to parents facing similar crises in their family life.


We can't tell you exactly what you'll find in these texts, but it's our hope that they'll help you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life.


Our best wishes to you.