Welcome to the machine, son.

My son (18) sent me a text from work today (target, pronounced "Tarzhay" for all you plebes):

Hope coffee with [my friend, in town fr. Southern Utah] went well, just on lunch. So damn sick of easter crap lol. Sold one of those scam credit cards today, managers seem pleased.

My son discovered the interest rate on those credit cards the other day - he was genuinely shocked (which made me feel all optimistic about his future financial well-being).

My reply:

Coffee was great. Glad to hear your evil corporate masters are pleased with your participation in the commercial blasphemy of this pagan, er, Christian holiday. Does Walmart have a credit card? [Bwaahahahahaaa!]

All hail the machine!
y-chromosome donor parental unit

I'm also starting to get all hopeful about the odds he'll attend (and graduate) college next year - only college students and graduates get to make jokes about evil American corporate empires and laugh without sounding rueful. [Crossing my fingers, as I type with one hand]

I heard my ornithologist friend was visiting Southern Utah this year,

so I offered to consult my parents on the topic of birds to watch for (my parents are avid birdwatchers). I spoke to them last night, after taking my children down for dinner.

My mother took her well-worn, dog-eared and note-filled copy of “Birds of North America” (some early 1960’s edition, I’m sure) with her whenever we were traveling. “Oooh, oooh, stop the car! It’s a Lazuli Bunting!" was a common enough exclamation whenever we were on a car trip, or taking a drive up one of the canyons. Or going to the dentist; perpetually late, mom never hesitated to stop the car and admire some rare avian or another. Dad accommodated when he could, I think more in appreciation of her enthusiasm than to see whatever she’d spied (my brother and I were less appreciative. Not being in control of the car, however, there was little we could do about it). There is always at least one set of binoculars in the glovebox of my parents’ car.

So they were happy to suggest my friend visit Lytle Ranch, if at all possible, in Southwestern Utah. There are migratory birds there that can be seen nowhere else in the state (and few places elsewhere, apparently). Dad suggested my friend watch for Hooded Orioles and Phainopepla. Mom directed me to the local birder website, where one can find not only a Lytle Ranch fieldguide, but guides to various other locations as well.

I remember mom directing my attention to hovering kestrels, Blue Herons, teaching me the difference between a scrub jay and a Stellar’s jay, pointing out the differences between the silhouette of a hawk versus an eagle in flight, and shocking various houseguests with her freezer full of brightly plumed birds which had brained themselves on their plate windows. She put me on the lookout for burrowing owls, when I visit the west desert, and was quick to note the sighting of a nest of barn owls on a route I frequently take (I believe I saw one, taking off suddenly from a fencepost as I drove past. Mostly, it left the impression of something very, very big winging away in a flurry of abrupt motion).

Mom got the results from her latest CT scan yesterday. The nodule on her lung, which had been dormant, perhaps due to her efforts (IV vitamin C, radical diet stuff) has grown from 8 mm to over 2 cm, and smaller ones have proliferated. She’s weighing her options, and considering a trip to a clinic in Mexico. She’s no more spare lung to take – they’ve taken lower lobes on both sides already.

It’s impossible to anticipate the permanent absence of someone who has always been there. Mom hovers around the periphery of things most of the time, swooping in to take center stage at only the most unfortunate moments, when she wants to share something with her grandchildren: something they will neither understand nor appreciate, though I hoped they’d eventually come to recognize the value of her desire to share, across that peculiar gulf that seems to separate my mother from the vast majority of people. She harnesses more intellectual firepower than my father, and has only learned late in life to temper her enthusiastic desire to share whatever obscure passion she happens to be pursuing: not so much out of respect for the listener’s limitations, but more as the late-learned impact of her eccentricity on her relationships.

She has a brightly burning mind, and her lack of appreciation of larger society is more than counterbalanced by the intensity of her examination of the areas in which she finds satisfaction. It is difficult for me to imagine how such a thing could be extinguished, and all the insights, observations and trivia will fall silent, except in the memories of the people who love her.

ParentingTrauma Revisited

The sky’s clear over Atlanta this afternoon, and as I land, I’m wondering how far Birmingham and Montgomery are from the Atlanta airport: nearly equidistant at about 150 miles, according to the mapping/gps software on my laptop. I wonder if I might ever take the time to visit some friends thereabouts, if they were receptive.

The sun’s down by the time I take off for Burlington, Vermont, where I understand it’s much colder. I’ll be taking the ferry across Lake Champlain tonight, and sleeping in New York. I’ll drive along Cumberland Bay, which always makes me think of my then three to five-year-old son sitting on my lap, watching “Shining Time Station”, while someone was singing about “Cumberland Downs.” Memories of my children always seem kind’ve sad, these days. I miss the times when my son was small enough to sit on my lap (he towers over me, these days). I love him just as much now, but you get to be closer to them when they’re younger. My daughter is much more petite, and almost fits on my lap still at 13. But she’s growing up, and the times of watching television with my arm cradling around her are about over.

When my children were young, I was a much more avid sports fan than I am now. It was the era of John Stockton, Karl Malone and Jeff Hornacek, and I watched as many Jazz games as I could catch. Rick Majerus had come to the University of Utah, and quickly built a basketball dynasty, of sorts. During my second year of graduate school, the Jazz were looking particularly hot, and I had some reason to hope this might be the year they finally reached the championship. But I had a lot going on that year – I was still working a lot (medical education, mostly), the coursework during that second year was taxing, and I had a half-time internship at the University Counseling Center competing with all of my other obligations. Plus, my daughter was born that year. I didn’t have a lot of time to watch basketball.

We’d been trying to conceive for some time, and had finally graduated from Clomid to Metrodin – a significant escalation in the fertility follies, courtesy a new specialist; we joked my son was a gift from God (the odds against that pregnancy are pretty staggering), while my daughter was a (pricey) gift of modern medical science. From the time of her birth, though, her health was a little shaky (and still is). Her mother had been unable to breastfeed, and she had such horrid constipation on milk-based formula that we thought we’d try soy. The result was several months of diarrhea, and she wasn’t gaining weight like she should’ve. Talking it over with her pediatrician, we decided to switch back to a milk-based formula and give it another go.

There was a basketball game on that night we were going to change formulas again – I think we were playing the Rockets. I don’t remember with certainty, but what I do remember is the game went into triple-overtime. This turned out to be significant – I told my wife I’d go to the store and pick up some Similac after the game, but the game didn’t end until nearly midnight. My daughter had already had her last feeding and gone to bed. I brought a can home, and my aggravated wife said she’d make the switch in the morning.

My daughter was five months old at the time. She’d never had horrid colic like my son and was sleeping fairly well, though she’d wake up around 5 am. We’d make her a bottle, but were able to get her back down for a couple of hours with the assistance of a marvelous new invention: the battery-powered baby swing. When I went to work that morning, I didn’t think twice when I saw her asleep, rocking in her swing, because that’s what I saw every morning when I went to work. Her mom was nursing a cold. She was grateful for whatever extra sleep she could get.

I was working at the VA that day, and got a call from my wife at about 11:00 am. She’d been awakened by a phone call, and was puzzled our daughter hadn’t gotten fussy while she was talking. When she went to check on her, she was still in the swing, but her color had gone gray and she was horrified to find her only minimally responsive. When her mom picked her up, she found my daughter covered with a diarrhea of a peculiar character – orange jelly (which I learned soon thereafter is a grave symptom, in an infant). I told her to take her immediately to the doctor, but when she did, the doctor directed her immediately to the emergency room at the nearby children’s hospital; she didn’t dare wait for an ambulance. I met them there.

The immediate concern was an intestinal torsion (a section of bowel loops, crimping off both ends and cutting off blood supply - the bowel becomes necrotic very quickly), and an abdominal X-ray showed her bowels had shut down completely. They were able to revive her with oxygen, thankfully, though she was obviously in acute distress. Her mother was unable to tolerate the trauma, so I was the one holding my daughter’s hands during the medical tests that followed (the upper and lower GI studies being the most invasive), rocking her, singing to her, trying to comfort her.

By the time the lower GI was conducted, peristalsis had resumed (no torsion), which was a tremendous relief. Nobody could tell us what had happened, however. They performed a spinal tap to check for meningitis (negative). The ICU physician, a rather large and overwhelming man, was convinced she’d experienced what he called a “dive reflex” event and gone into shock (when some sea animals dive, their bodies expel the blood from, and shut down, their bowel). The gastroenterologists scoffed. We kept telling people about the change in formula, but nobody (including the gastroenterologists) gave any credence to the idea such a catastrophic medical event could’ve been due to an allergy.

They kept her in ICU for five days, without incident, and then on the medical unit for two more. Physicians consistently grilled my wife and I. They took samples of our formula and had them analyzed. Eventually, they decided she should just go home, but just to be on the safe side, they decided to challenge her with some Similac in the hospital before we took her. They gave her two teaspoons. In the course of about twenty minutes, I watched my daughter slip into unconsciousness again.

What I didn’t realize at the time, BTW, is that medical staff had become suspicious of us. It wasn’t until years later that I realized some of the questioning, and probably the lab analysis of our formula, were conducted not only as an investigation of my daughter’s condition, but also as the initial steps in an investigation of her parents. Someone was concerned about the possibility of Munchausen’s by proxy (in a stroke of amazing coincidence, I got some partial verification of this from the spouse of one of the treating physicians, who started in the same graduate program several years later). When we took her to an allergist, she was appalled by the amount of formula they used in their challenge. My take: they wanted to be absolutely sure, before they began lowering the boom on us.

My daughter had a milk-protein allergy, which (as is usually the case, apparently) also meant cross-reactivity to eggs, nuts and soy. We made her baby food ourselves, in the blender. She eventually outgrew the milk, egg and soy allergy, but we have reason to fear challenging her on nuts. Her allergist indicated this is the one she’d be least likely to outgrow, and when she was about eight, she ate some honey-nut cheerios at a neighbors house; her mouth and throat broke out in a mass of little sores and blisters. Also, while she was getting her abdominal X-ray during that crisis, they brought a young child into the same treatment room in anaphylaxis. She’d been in the waiting area for some unrelated reason, and a stranger had given her one of their peanut M&M’s. Our observation of that child’s distress left and the difficulty they had reviving her left quite an impression.

From a more detached perspective, the experience was instructive on a number of levels. I became involved in some cases of alleged Munchausen’s by Proxy several years later, and I soon realized the bullet I’d dodged not only so far as my daughter’s medical crisis was concerned, but also in the trauma of a hospital-instigated CPS investigation.

As I became more involved in cases of child abuse and neglect, I had ample reason (and opportunity) to reflect on (and observe) the nature and impact of abuse on children. If it were only the physical injury the child suffered, one would expect that many of the children from that hospital would be psychologically damaged by the experience of their medical treatment. Instead, what you find is children who are sometimes surprisingly well-adjusted who have experienced repetitive injury and medical trauma, while others who experience abuse-related injury of much less significance are often quite scarred. Medical treatment can be horribly invasive – my daughter’s certainly was. That it takes place in the larger context of caretaking seems to make all the difference.

A friend read my post the other day, in which I contrasted my daughter’s medical studies that day and sexual abuse, and asked about it – why I’d make such a contrast, or where such a thought had come from. I don’t know that I’ll ever really get past the trauma of that experience, but I’m not really sure I want to. Each day since has been a rare and precious gift.

I still find it staggering that I almost certainly owe her life to my appreciation of a basketball team, and a game that took a triple-overtime for the Jazz to win. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure – something about the importance of caring for the caretaker, or something, but I’m not gifted enough to articulate it.

My nephew's latest musical project.

Sound clip here. He's the guitar player, and co-writes the songs with the drummer. It's a very rough mix - he threw 4 together to shuffle my way on Thanksgiving. No singer yet - just him on guitar, a bass, drums and violin.

Full song is here.

I'll let you know when they come up with a band name.