sharp words
“It’s an outpatient procedure - just a minor excision. For an older child, we would just use a local anesthetic, but we can’t count on cooperation with children this young. It’s safer to put them under with general anesthesia.”
Excision. Excision.
I can see the scalpel in my mind’s eye, imagine the table of sterile instruments. But every time I picture the soft skin of my son’s back, the jelly-bean-sized lump on his shoulder blade, I can feel the panic rising in the back of my throat.
It’s a simple procedure, he reiterates. He doesn’t call it surgery, even though it’ll happen in an operating room. Even though he’s a pediatric surgeon - one we have traveled an hour and a half to see.
I clear my throat.
“So you’ll have to give him an IV?”
“Yes, once he’s already under. We’ll start with anesthetic gases first, administered by putting a mask on his face. Once he falls asleep, we’ll wheel him into the OR and put in the IV.”
We are lulling my three-year-old into a dreamless sleep so we can remove something, cut it open, and make sure it isn’t cancer.
But I’m still stuck on that scalpel, and cringing at the thought of them piercing his skin.
* * * * *
I can still remember our last morning in the hospital, as we ticked our way through the battery of required tests and milestones for newborn discharge.
We were exhausted and shellshocked and stupid in love. Forty-eight hours into this parenting gig, and it was everything that people had told us, and also many things that no one had told us.
The love was there, fierce and overwhelming and indescribable. But no one had warned me how primal my mothering instinct would be, how desperate I would become when I couldn’t soothe his cries.
One more test, my nurse promised, and we’ll get you packed up.
Then a nurse who looked suspiciously like Willie Nelson showed up and ruined the rest of our morning.
She had a piece of paper with a small circle on it, maybe three-quarters of an inch in diameter. And she needed enough blood from Tim to fill that circle.
With little warning, she punched the trigger on her baby torture device and sliced two tiny lacerations into Tim’s heel.
He cried for a few seconds, and I seriously considered leaping out of the hospital bed, IV and all, to strangle the woman.
It was the first time his skin had ever been broken.
She squeezed mercilessly, rotating his foot as if the ankle bone were made of rubber, and managed to fill a quarter of the circle. Then she glanced up and noticed Reed and I, our faces a mix of horror and incredulity, and she had the balls to smirk at us.
“First time parents,” she said smugly to my mother, not seeming to notice that even Nana had murder in her eyes.
I suddenly understood that frantic, hypervigilant fight or flight mode that a mother dog goes into when a human picks up one of her new puppies.
She stuck his heel three more times, and each time, he cried louder than the last.
They sent us home, but we had to come back every day to test his bilirubins until the jaundice faded away. By the fourth day, he didn’t even cry at the heel stick.
But I still wanted to.
* * * * *
At 18 months, his doctor ordered a blood test.
I had already held him through four injections that day, steeling myself against the shock and disbelief flashing across his face with each subsequent jab of the needle. His tiny face crumpled up as he sucked all the air from the room into his lungs. He held it for a second, just long enough to be sure This Is Not Okay before unleashing a wail that reduced me to tears.
I hugged him and sobbed with him as the injection nurse covered the last red dot with a bandaid, gathered her tools, and slipped out of the room with crisp efficiency. We paced, we rocked, I smoothed his hair. The tension drained out of him slowly. I rubbed his back and pictured the lab down the hall, hating the task ahead even more because he did not suspect it.
We had the world’s nicest phlebotomist, and he was great with kids. He was great with parents, too.
“Okay, mom, you have the hardest job today,” he warned me as I sank into the chair, settling Tim on my lap.
He took Tim’s hand gently and positioned his arm on the table.
“I have to keep this arm still. But you have to control the rest of his body.”
I had been complicit in his injections, but it had never been like this. They were a surprise attack, over before he had a chance to defend himself, and then all that was left to do was comfort each other.
This was a different animal. I pinned his left arm to his torso and wrapped my arms and legs around his whole body while he struggled and cried. It was the longest 90 seconds of my life.
When it was over, he gave Tim a stuffed animal. I didn’t even get a sticker, so I settled for Starbucks on the way home.
* * * * *
He trusted me less after that, and I couldn’t blame him.
From the moment we conceive our children, we cradle them in the warmth of our bodies. When they are finally in our arms, we surround them with softness, from blankets to sleepers to breasts, and we put all of our energy into teaching them that they are safe and loved.
But the tragedy of innocence is that it is so quickly annihilated by bad people and bad luck. We learn quickly to accept disappointment, and eventually to expect it. We learn to fear. And if we don’t find something or someone to trust, the child’s heart within each of us dies away until it’s nothing more than a wistful memory.
And sometimes, that is exactly what we need.
Until the day we find ourselves unsafe or unloved, we will not know our own strength, our tenacity, our ability to heal. After thirty-three years on this planet, I still watch in awe at every little scratch on my body as it scabs over and then heals. Scars rarely survive on my pale skin; in a few months, or a year, they fade away, as if I have rewritten history somewhere deep in my epidermis. I treasure the few that remain, tiny love letters from the past that say yes, this happened, and you carried on.
We shed our innocence in blood and tears, but we trade it for a wisdom that prepares us for the road ahead. We stop believing in the gentleness of the world, and start believing in the resilience of our own spirits.
And if we’re lucky, we get a cool scar out of the deal, too.
therealljidol week 22 part 2: sharp words
Excision. Excision.
I can see the scalpel in my mind’s eye, imagine the table of sterile instruments. But every time I picture the soft skin of my son’s back, the jelly-bean-sized lump on his shoulder blade, I can feel the panic rising in the back of my throat.
It’s a simple procedure, he reiterates. He doesn’t call it surgery, even though it’ll happen in an operating room. Even though he’s a pediatric surgeon - one we have traveled an hour and a half to see.
I clear my throat.
“So you’ll have to give him an IV?”
“Yes, once he’s already under. We’ll start with anesthetic gases first, administered by putting a mask on his face. Once he falls asleep, we’ll wheel him into the OR and put in the IV.”
We are lulling my three-year-old into a dreamless sleep so we can remove something, cut it open, and make sure it isn’t cancer.
But I’m still stuck on that scalpel, and cringing at the thought of them piercing his skin.
* * * * *
I can still remember our last morning in the hospital, as we ticked our way through the battery of required tests and milestones for newborn discharge.
We were exhausted and shellshocked and stupid in love. Forty-eight hours into this parenting gig, and it was everything that people had told us, and also many things that no one had told us.
The love was there, fierce and overwhelming and indescribable. But no one had warned me how primal my mothering instinct would be, how desperate I would become when I couldn’t soothe his cries.
One more test, my nurse promised, and we’ll get you packed up.
Then a nurse who looked suspiciously like Willie Nelson showed up and ruined the rest of our morning.
She had a piece of paper with a small circle on it, maybe three-quarters of an inch in diameter. And she needed enough blood from Tim to fill that circle.
With little warning, she punched the trigger on her baby torture device and sliced two tiny lacerations into Tim’s heel.
He cried for a few seconds, and I seriously considered leaping out of the hospital bed, IV and all, to strangle the woman.
It was the first time his skin had ever been broken.
She squeezed mercilessly, rotating his foot as if the ankle bone were made of rubber, and managed to fill a quarter of the circle. Then she glanced up and noticed Reed and I, our faces a mix of horror and incredulity, and she had the balls to smirk at us.
“First time parents,” she said smugly to my mother, not seeming to notice that even Nana had murder in her eyes.
I suddenly understood that frantic, hypervigilant fight or flight mode that a mother dog goes into when a human picks up one of her new puppies.
She stuck his heel three more times, and each time, he cried louder than the last.
They sent us home, but we had to come back every day to test his bilirubins until the jaundice faded away. By the fourth day, he didn’t even cry at the heel stick.
But I still wanted to.
* * * * *
At 18 months, his doctor ordered a blood test.
I had already held him through four injections that day, steeling myself against the shock and disbelief flashing across his face with each subsequent jab of the needle. His tiny face crumpled up as he sucked all the air from the room into his lungs. He held it for a second, just long enough to be sure This Is Not Okay before unleashing a wail that reduced me to tears.
I hugged him and sobbed with him as the injection nurse covered the last red dot with a bandaid, gathered her tools, and slipped out of the room with crisp efficiency. We paced, we rocked, I smoothed his hair. The tension drained out of him slowly. I rubbed his back and pictured the lab down the hall, hating the task ahead even more because he did not suspect it.
We had the world’s nicest phlebotomist, and he was great with kids. He was great with parents, too.
“Okay, mom, you have the hardest job today,” he warned me as I sank into the chair, settling Tim on my lap.
He took Tim’s hand gently and positioned his arm on the table.
“I have to keep this arm still. But you have to control the rest of his body.”
I had been complicit in his injections, but it had never been like this. They were a surprise attack, over before he had a chance to defend himself, and then all that was left to do was comfort each other.
This was a different animal. I pinned his left arm to his torso and wrapped my arms and legs around his whole body while he struggled and cried. It was the longest 90 seconds of my life.
When it was over, he gave Tim a stuffed animal. I didn’t even get a sticker, so I settled for Starbucks on the way home.
* * * * *
He trusted me less after that, and I couldn’t blame him.
From the moment we conceive our children, we cradle them in the warmth of our bodies. When they are finally in our arms, we surround them with softness, from blankets to sleepers to breasts, and we put all of our energy into teaching them that they are safe and loved.
But the tragedy of innocence is that it is so quickly annihilated by bad people and bad luck. We learn quickly to accept disappointment, and eventually to expect it. We learn to fear. And if we don’t find something or someone to trust, the child’s heart within each of us dies away until it’s nothing more than a wistful memory.
And sometimes, that is exactly what we need.
Until the day we find ourselves unsafe or unloved, we will not know our own strength, our tenacity, our ability to heal. After thirty-three years on this planet, I still watch in awe at every little scratch on my body as it scabs over and then heals. Scars rarely survive on my pale skin; in a few months, or a year, they fade away, as if I have rewritten history somewhere deep in my epidermis. I treasure the few that remain, tiny love letters from the past that say yes, this happened, and you carried on.
We shed our innocence in blood and tears, but we trade it for a wisdom that prepares us for the road ahead. We stop believing in the gentleness of the world, and start believing in the resilience of our own spirits.
And if we’re lucky, we get a cool scar out of the deal, too.
therealljidol week 22 part 2: sharp words