Ebb and Flow

“I guess this is what it feels like to know you might die,” he says and the immortality granted to him courtesy of his youth ebbs away just a little bit. A smile in his words even as he delivers the news, determined to protect us but needing shelter from the coming storm.

Sleeping, trying to sleep, not sleeping. Not fooling myself.

Listening to him breath, listening to her breath, looking at the time, three more minutes have passed, almost time, last supper over, no more food for fear of the reaction, waiting, sleep comes and a moment later the alarm sounds.

Wake up, quietly, rub the sleep out of your eyes, don’t wake your mother yet, not yet, let her sleep for a few more minutes, let her hold onto the time before her precious baby faces the knife, maybe this will all be a memory soon.

Maybe it will be worse, maybe we won’t know for a long time which way to think, what is happening, why, silently screaming, pleading, rationalizing, staying calm; stop it; he needs your strength not your over thought, overwrought, overblown circular, looping, spirals of what might be, better not be, can’t be. Drama.

Late. Move. Move. Move.

Splash of water in the face, drive to the hospital, get him admitted, he’s so calm, I think he’s trying to make sure I’m okay when all I care about is that he is, follow the paths that don’t really make sense, stumble through the families with haunted eyes, waiting with you but not for what you care about, lost in their own thoughts, waiting and hurrying, and waiting, comparing obvious and not so obvious ailments in the hope, some morbid hope that you can find someone who is far worse off, what the hell are you thinking, why do our minds play this game of relatives, and strangers, and relativity?

Finally see the doctor, what am I not asking, what had I better ask, what could happen, don’t sugar coat it, sugar coat it, confidence glows around him, percentages sound good, wait not good, how to even think about these things, keep him calm, it’ll be ok, no real time to think. Thirty percent chance of mortality seems much higher than I remember hearing as this whole nightmare began.

All stops.

Hold his hand and wait. Lame jokes. Just wait.

Silence feels okay, he is strong.

Other hospital visits flash back; a few years old and he can’t breath, blue is the color of my baby’s lips; eleven or twelve and he just can’t stop throwing up; call from my wife as she returns with him from a cutting dance down a wet hill with an angry lawnmower, a pair of blossoming gym shoes attest to the spinning pirouettes, count the toes, still all there, mostly.

They ask me to leave, they take him in, shave his head (he asks for the whole Mr. Clean treatment but it turns out to be too complicated, too messy… clean will come later as we sponge the blood and clots from his head and soak away stains of antibacterial joy), wait, find a signal, find a pattern in all the noise, call home which at the moment is a hotel on the outskirts of town, arms that carried him in her heart, eyes that glisten and well up through the phone, “Is he alright? He’s strong, isn’t he? Has it started yet? Is it over? Did the surgeon know what he was doing? Did you ask all of our questions? How much longer?”

We sit and hold each other’s attention, feeling together, alone.

Waiting.

Plumbers reroute the flow, reduce the pressure, trample through the pathways of the garden we have spent 26 years growing, why, what is going on, deep sense of dread that this is not a dream, that this will not be as easy as the mechanics think, knowing that beyond the logical maps, and body of knowledge lies a landscape of the mind that is still just a mystery, a universe in a few pounds of matter, strange loops far from known.

Prayer comes. Hope, and after hope, pressure to do something to help, to make sure this time you don’t forget something, you ask the right things, you protect him from his own body trying to crush his mind, what else can we do? What have I completely forgotten? How have I stumbled in my wobbly dance with fatherhood?

Wait. Pray.

Run through all the scenarios.

Why is he still in there?

What is taking them so long?

Doctor arrives all smiles, “you can see him in 30 minutes,” time passes.

Hours pass. Ask, wait, pace. Eat. Call. Wake up. What. Now? What. Now? What now?

What now?

Walk in. He is so wasted. Blown apart and wired up, and blanketed and drifting in and out, I hold his hand and he cracks wise with the cute young nurse, breath relief, get kicked out, “Is mom coming soon?” he croaks.

Fight the parking garage, DC traffic, fears that it’s not over, knowledge that this whole thing is new territory, way too much time alone with my head.

Find her, hold her, don’t move and it won’t change; the news is good, stop this moment, freeze it in time. But it won’t stop. We just keep moving metronome ticking and tocking us through the motions, drive on.

Wander the maze, wait for permission, tears edge her eyes when she sees him but she’s always been the strong one, the defiant one in the face of the world, fighter when we just want to hide away. He’s ok… what is all that stuff, all those tubes, the machines, why are they alarming, hello is anybody watching out for our baby?

Sit, stand, squeeze, hold him, room designed for bacteria more than families, reminder that the longer he’s in the hospital the more likely the single cells will win, the history of the world is written in these battles and I’m pretty sure that by any count they are winning. But he looks good all things considered, he’ll have more character. He comments that he’s on his way to becoming a Borg, sci-fi shorthand for assimilation into the singularity.

Can we not grin? We grin. We look away, lump in throat, eyes blurring.

Too soon…

Trying to get him to eat solid foods, get up and out, your fine, until late that night it all comes back up and fever pulls him under, his skin is burning up, pressure in his skull escalates while those damn alarms keep begging for someone to notice.

Welcome to the best healthcare money can buy. Nurses wander in and out, nothing amiss. How could you even know? Numb to the screams of the machines that call, “Wolf!”

Please (please, please, oh just forget the pleases and) FIND the doctor.

We start to wonder anew. We doubt and don’t sleep that night.

She tosses and turns and we just squeeze his arm, pat his leg, pushing our thoughts and prayers deep into his soul. Pressing down the darkness, imagining some invisible flow of something, power, safety, love, infusion of time. Take ours, use us, pick him up and hold him in the light, breath.

Wait.

“What can go wrong? Well there is a nicely annotated list of hypochondriatical dimensions.”

In fact each doctor, researcher, Intertube search can handily, silently, waitingly, wonderingly, fill long hours of delight uncovering byte size tidbits of unfiltered dread.

The litany of clinical voices echoes in our heads, to wit: diminished capacity, infection, hemorrhaging, mood shifts, and return of the crushing pressure (of course these things happen). Could be weeks or months or years later, closing of the new pathways, endocrinal variations. Might need to re-open it, shunt it (which is destined to fail and medically closer to last century’s stumbling than this new, shiny and clean approach). Oh, yeah, death, and taxes, and that wonderful, maddening so full of hopes and dreams, playful light, fading to something a little closer to a newborn puppy.

The waiting and not knowing and over thinking and senseless fear are all too much, too real, too sapping of strength, and we are left to wonder why we can’t fix it, why this rare and unexplained tragedy has placed its ghostly hands on his head.

Sure that five, ten, twenty years from now we’ll find out how foolish we were, how blunt the instruments of his cure have turned out to be, hoping it doesn’t turn out to be so, that he’s not one of the statistics, that somehow someway the ebbing tide just begins to flow and the dollar coin size stamp of approval embossed on his head fades from memory.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful day breaks.

Dappled light strobes through cheery blossoms as moments flicker through the days.

He begins to return. He gains strength.

His friends are legion. They try to make us smile. They reminisce about childhood Zen. They come to sit and cheer him on.

Friday he calls and asks for escape and there is an epic fight with the never-ending traffic to pry him loose from his crushing maw of clinical sterility.

We wait and live and wonder as we hold him tight. Now we find a new hotel, closer to his apartment. Sleeping with us so we can doctor him and nurse him and hold him still as he fights his need to move. The doctor has prohibited any exertion, beyond hauling a gallon of milk, for the next six weeks. He battles a ringing rushing rising torrent of something bubbly that he only hears in the quiet of the night. Cushioning crushing streams settle into new pathways, braiding a tapestry through his head.

“Will I always hear this, is this my fate, I’m trapped in my own head with an angry river?”

His body aches, his hands oddly chilled, his life on hold.

She makes things happen. Reminds us of all the little things we’ve lost track of, holds us together as we orbit this strange new world, starts to cheer him up by getting royally pissed off at him as his senses return and he turns into a smartass, twenty-something, the world revolves around me, baby again.

We catch a glint in her eye that is so obviously love it stops us in our footsteps. We are both, in our way, sure that we don’t deserve it.

She holds us so tightly in her caring gaze that it hurts with bittersweet pressure and we squeak and scream.

We are, he is, alive to fight another day. Together we roam on this meandering, stomach dropping, sunrising, journey into tomorrow and life starts again.