A second opinion

My middle daughter was diagnosed with scoliosis three years ago. For two years we simply monitored it every six months because the doctor believed she was nearing the end of her skeletal growth.

Then she shot up five inches (overnight?) and the minor curve grew alarming. A Boston brace was ordered. I cringed in sympathetic embarrassment when the man making a cast of her body stroked the plaster-of-Paris strips tight against her nearly naked adolescent curves. Two weeks later, at the final fitting, the same man walked in holding her brand new torture device. 23 hours a day, seven days a week. He chalked and adjusted, chalked and adjusted, and finally satisfied, pronounced it done. She could get dressed and we could leave.

But odd mother and daughter that we are, we laughed hysterically behind the curtain, instead. When she tried to dress, nothing fit and we hadn't thought to bring clothes a size larger. For five minutes, the absurdity of that awful brace poking out from unzippable pants and a suddenly too-tight shirt superceded the pain of having to start high school being "different" and wretchedly encumbered and so we laughed--laughed until the tears streamed down our faces. I sometimes wonder what the receptionist in the waiting room thought. Do other families laugh at times like this? Or are we the only ones with such absurd coping mechanisms?

But we used it as an excuse to buy new clothes and borrowed a few of her older sister's things, and for six long, hot, summer months she endured that brace, taking it off only to shower and for swim practice and meets (and a few hours in December for a formal dance). She was more faithful to that brace than I can imagine any other teenager being. She cried herself to sleep some nights, but she didn't take it off. She dealt with it. She bounced tennis balls off her stomach to entertain her friends. She urged, "go ahead, punch me in the abs." She made humorous sounds by scrunching her stomach under the brace and creating a vacuum of air. She called it her eight-hundred dollar push-up bra. And if a brace was ever going to work, it was going to work this time because my brave young daughter had been so faithful even though she didn't want to be.

Except it didn't. And her spinal curve progressed six more degrees in six months (from 41 to 48) while wearing that brace that was supposed to correct it. Her orthopedist grimly informed us that she would need spinal fusion surgery to stop it. The x-rays were truly alarming; my stomach dropped when he pulled them up onto the screen. It was clear that something needed to be done. Since the surgery he was suggesting is major and would take her out of school for up to a month, I asked, "Can we wait until summer?" With a grave look, the doctor shook his head and said, "I wouldn't." That look conveyed volumes and so we began preparing for the worst, gathering information, speaking to others who had gone through this drastic surgical correction, and generally girding ourselves for the inevitable.

Part of the process of gathering information involved seeking a second opinion. I liked and trusted her first doctor, but you just do that for something this big. You just do. I had seen those alarming x-rays and I didn't believe that the diagnosis would be different in terms of recommending surgery, but I thought the methods might vary and that any and all information was valuable. So we researched the Shriner's Children's Hospitals and found that they do some of the most cutting edge work in children's orthopedics, with scoliosis at the top of the list. And, they only take you on as a patient if they believe that surgery will help you--plus there is never any charge for procedures that Shriner's doctors do to help children. It's a charitable institution. It's what they do.

Our appointment yesterday was with the Erie, Pennsylvania Shriner's Hospital chief-of-staff (Doctor #2) and he did all new x-rays and measurements. He also asked her a bunch of questions about her scoliosis (not us, although we were in the room--she's 14, so this was a good move on his part). He asked her if she had pain, numbness, bladder problems, etc. Her answers were all nos. Then he asked her why she had come for a second opinion. She faltered and turned to me but I encouraged her to answer. She said, "Because surgery is kind of a big deal and we wanted to be sure."

Then, God bless the doctor, he asked, "How about the appearance? Does that bother you?" (A funny aside: I thought he had asked her if her "parents" bothered her, and I was all ready for her to say, "Duh!") She seemed confused by the question, though; she looked at him for a moment and double-checked. "The appearance?" she asked.

(Let me just say here that this young woman is tall and gorgeous and very self-assured, and frankly couldn't care less if one of her shoulder blades sticks out more than the other, or if her back rises up higher on one side than on the other when she bends forward. From the front you can't even tell--her body has fully "compensated.")

The doctor nodded and said, "Yes, the appearance. Does it bother you?"

She gave him a withering look and said, "No." (Her teenaged disdain for the vanity of the question made me so proud of her at that moment.)

Then the intern brought the x-ray in and put it on the screen and I thought there had been some mistake. I looked at my daughter to see if she was as confused as I was, but she was staring at the x-ray. I would swear that the curve on the screen was much milder than the one we had seen in the other doctor's office. And doctor #2 proceeded to tell her that he didn't think she needed surgery. He said she's almost at the end of her growth (thank goodness, she already looks me in the eye) and she is functioning fine. He said he would only recommend surgery if she was very self-conscious about the appearance, and even if we eventually decided to do surgery for that reason, there was no rush. She's only 14 and if we waited a year it wouldn't make any difference. He said get another x-ray in six months, but he doubts it will have changed. Oh, and he measured her thoracic curve as 46, not 48, and the lumbar (compensating) curve was almost gone.

So...(choirs of angels sing)...no surgery! We are still going to go back to doctor #1 with the results and the new films, but I doubt we'll do anything before the six month recheck no matter what he says....I keep trying to figure out how this could have happened...Her braces (on her teeth) were clearly visible on this recent x-ray, and neither she nor I remember seeing them on the older x-ray. Could we have been looking at someone else's x-rays in December when we got that bad news...? Or had wearing the brace actually made it worse and now that she's not wearing it it has gotten better? Did all the prayers work a miracle cure? It's really a puzzle, but a happy, happy puzzle. I can't tell you the weight that has been lifted! Doctor #2 basically told her, "Go have a normal life, honey. No restrictions."

And when she asked him what she should do about the brace--keep wearing it or what?--he said, "You're too old for that brace. Take it out behind the house and shoot it."

Since she's recently been taking a gun safety course and learning to shoot skeet, I think we just might do that.

Tackling the Bonus Question

6. When have you felt that you transcended time and space?

Well, there are times when I cultivate such a feeling, and times when it happens without trying. Since the ones that happen on their own are more interesting, I'll mention one of those.

Most recently I think it was when I was in Dominica in February. I was there with my 13 year old daughter, visiting a longtime friend and his wife. They had a new baby who was a little over a month old. She was adorable, and I felt we had an immediate connection. I held her and talked to her and loved on her every chance I had.

Late one night, about a week into the visit, I woke to the sound of someone screaming my name. I knew instantly from the awful despair in the voice that something was wrong with the baby. In the next second, I was upstairs seeing my friend howling with grief over his daughter's limp body, yelling her name over and over. As soon as I touched her, I knew she was not breathing and that life was leaving her body. I said something stupid like, "Give her breath." Then I started to tell him, "Put your mouth over her nose and mouth..." but the first mention had been enough to move him to action and he initiated CPR. With one breath she stirred. With two breaths, she opened her eyes and we started crooning, "Good girl, Amela, good girl. That's right, stay here." We rubbed her limbs which were quite cold and she looked at us with surprise in her eyes. Soon she was alert and nursing at her mother's breast again.

The part that was transcending time and space, though, was how I got upstairs so fast. No one could understand it. His wife, who had run downstairs to get me, was already downstairs when I was upstairs calling, "Where are you?" So, I somehow got out from under my mosquito netting, ran out the door of the room, down the hall, out the front door, left the porch, then took the outside steps two at time (I think) and was inside their apartment before she even had time to call through my window. We must have passed on the stairs, but neither one of us thinks we did. (They weren't wide stairs.) She said to me later, "How did you get up there so fast. Did you fly?" And I wasn't sure. But I do know that I woke instantly from a dead sleep and hit the ground running. (My daughter was in the room with me and she said she was just rubbing her eyes wondering who was yelling when she looked over and saw my empty bed.) Did I fly? Maybe. But somewhere in my brain I knew I was needed immediately and so I arrived just in time.

I've found that I am good at a moment of a crisis. I often take the emergency exit in an airplane because I've learned that when a crisis happens, I'm right there, somehow doing the right thing, without conscious thought. Something overtakes me and it's almost like I'm watching myself act, but not in conscious control of my actions. And the really funny thing is, about an hour after the crisis is over, Mary-the-rock crumbles. I become a bowl of jelly, useless and freaking out with a delayed reaction to the stress of everything.

But at that moment of crisis, I'm your woman.

Okay, I'm tagged

I've been resisting this for several reasons, mostly because I can't think of ten interesting things about myself that I want to share. But thanks to Cliff I'll try:

1. I am always hungry. I love food. It's one of my great pleasures. I will eat virtually anything... so long as it isn't flavored with licorice. I hate licorice. Can't bear it, even the smell of it. Fried baby eels? Yum. Brussel sprouts? You bet! Alligator? Sure! Licorice? Gag-a-maggot.

2. I am a funny person when you talk to me. I love to laugh and joke and I do--lots. But I write dark stuff, depressing stuff, occasionally twisted stuff. So don't use my writing to judge whether or not you want to hang out.

3. I love my children more than I can ever convey. Having said that, I am NOT afraid to be the parent and play the bad cop. Hate to be the bad guy...have to be the bad guy. It's my job. I really hope they understand this and we can be pals someday.

4. I plan to spoil my grandchildren so much it isn't even funny. I want to be called "Nana" and wear an apron and cook myself silly and read books until I'm blue in the face. Then I want to send them home and get on with my life of (whoo-hoo!) freedom.

5. I believe I will be a published author. I can see myself giving readings, answering questions. I can almost touch it. I will not be denied. (That doesn't mean I picture throngs of people hanging on my every word...maybe scads, but not throngs.)

6. I believe I have a purpose to fulfill in this life. Still trying to figure out what it is, but I really feel like there's something important I am meant to do before I die.

7. I believe that my grandmother and my father (both deceased) are still looking out for me in their own ways.

8. Animals in my house are very well treated. Adored, even. Held to normal standards of etiquette (get off that table!) but adored, nonetheless. I believe animals are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. They have talents and abilities that we will never understand.

9. I am a manly girl. I love to fix things, cook outdoors, get dirty, be tough. I am also a terrible softy. I cry at the drop of a hat over silly things like Hallmark commercials and touchy-feely notes from my kids and It's a Wonderful Life.

10. I don't know myself as well as I thought I did...or maybe I know myself better than I thought, because here I've come up with ten things in no time.

I'll tag Chris Duncan.

Home

I am home after nine days in the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness Area. We spent three days backpacking in remote areas, where we met maybe ten people (and one huge black bear). The streams were beautiful and ice cold, the trees sang, and I worshiped at the altar of those huge boulders left behind when the ancient glaciers receded, huge, moss-covered boulders that only the Adirondacks can claim, wrapped by the encircling roots of trees that began their lives as seedlings way up high, not knowing that the real ground lay much farther below.

I love the mountains. They restore my soul.

At the summit of Whiteface Mountain (New York's 5th highest peak), sweaty and exultant, I found cell phone service and phoned to briefly check on my children (yes, I know, technology in nature and all of that horrible stuff, but we have five kids between us, one of whom is about to deliver a baby--we need to check-in occasionally). At that summit, on my first phone call out in days, I learned that my grandmother had died the day before. The news was not delivered gently, as family had been trying to reach me for a full day and my mother assumed I knew.

I didn't.

Mountain climbing and hiking require a certain amount of focus and attention to be done well. I am not sure how I managed to descend those 4,000 plus feet safely, wiping tears and snot and sweat on my bandanna every step of the way, but I did.

I lost a lot of salt that day.

My grandmother was 94. On August 28th, she would be 95, but on my last visit to her in July she told me she hoped she didn't live to see that birthday and some part of me knew then that she wouldn't. Still, it was hard. I loved that woman with a fierce, irrational, passionate love. She was cantankerous and outspoken and immovable. She was born in 1910, saw the end of WWI, WWII, and most of the 20th century. She lived in such places as India, Ethiopia, New Zealand and had friends all over the world. She took one of the first transatlantic flights ever, on a double-decker sleeper plane. She drove a VW bug across the African desert surrounded by extra jugs of petrol and water and floated the car across the Nile on a raft of sticks. She kept the home front going as a mother of two young children while my grandfather landed on Iwo Jima and wrote home to "My Beloved Minnow..." Minnow because she swam in Minnesota's frigid lakes year round, and was always the last to exit the water.

I will miss my grandmother more than I can articulate. I know there was a certain "rightness" to finding out about her death after I had scaled a massive mountain. I know that she lived a full life and didn't suffer and died on her own terms. I know all of that. But I still feel like that tree that started as a seedling on top of a rock, grew to a sapling and then found that there wasn't enough soil after all and so grabbed the rock with encircling roots trying desperately to hang on, to make it to the ground, to become a freestanding tree, a tree in its own right.

Would you rather?

I have a nine-year-old son and his latest obsession (we have many, frequently, at our house) is weighing decisions. He will be sitting, calmly eating breakfast, when a pensive look will come over his face and he'll say, "Would you rather..."

If one of his older sisters is anywhere around, this will immediately be interrupted with, "No! Oh, my God, not again!" or "Will you stop it??" or "You are such a freak!"

But me, I like his questions. I always take the time to consider them. He asks good questions. It's a special stage in his cognitive and moral development that I cherish.

The would-you-rather questions always involve some sort of tough dilemma. For instance, he might ask, "Would you rather burn to death, or freeze to death?"

Even though I hate the cold and love a good fire, I say, "Freeze, because I've heard you get really warm before you die." (I make a mental note to find him The Call of the Wild at our next library visit. He's familiar with The Little Match Girl and I mention that as proof.) Then I say, "But if I could die in my sleep from smoke inhalation first, I might choose fire. You know I want to be cremated anyway, and that would save a step in the process." He laughs.

"Would you rather be pretty or smart?"

"Smart," I say, in a voice that conveys duh! "Smart, because it never goes away."

"Yeah," he says, "and you just keep getting smarter."

"True."

"But some people get prettier, too."

"You think?"

"Yeah. Like you." (See why I like these discussions?)

"Thanks, honey. So do you. Handsome, I mean."

"Yeah." (We're still waiting for his modesty to develop.) "Would you rather be blind or deaf?"

When he asks this, I suddenly remember going through this stage myself. Asking these tough questions, and really thinking about making a choice between two difficult things.

"Deaf," I say. "You?"

"Deaf. Because you could still read and play sports and stuff."

"You can still read when you're blind."

"Yeah, I know. Braille. And you could listen to books on tape."

"And you'd still have music." Something we both love. We sit and think about this in silence for a minute.

"Would you still get a song stuck in your head if you were deaf?" he asks.

"I don't know. I guess. If you'd heard it before you went deaf. But Beethoven lost his hearing and he still made really beautiful new music. I bet it stays with you."

"Maybe if I could see and hear first and then lost it, it would be better."

"Maybe. But it might be worse. Then you would know what you were missing. I knew someone once who lost his sense of smell and he said he couldn't taste food after that unless it was really salty or sour. He didn't even really like to eat anymore, and when he did, it was because of the texture of food in his mouth, not the taste."

"I've heard people who lose one thing get better at another. Maybe if you were blind you would start to hear lots better."

"Maybe. I hope we never have to find out."

"Me, too. I guess we're pretty lucky."

"Yeah, buddy, we are." Thanks for reminding me.

Glass

It's not the glass;
but the shattered world
and its elections
and the wars
and your father's suffering
and the long days of
waiting to grieve
and the way he reached up
with his shaking hands
after days of nothing
and said Thank you
to the nurse
for his morphine
and the way your face broke
in reply
and not these shards
at my feet.
They are just
what was once,
once a glass.

Hardening off

It's a gardening term that is used to describe the period of time during which tender indoor-grown plants are slowly acclimated to the harsher (windier, colder, sunnier) conditions they will face when they are transplanted into the great outdoors.

It's also a term that occurred to me today when thinking about how I am raising my children. If you asked my children, I'm sure they would tell you the ways in which their lives have been difficult: the many moves of a military family, a divorce, a new family to adjust to, and a cranky, often distracted mother who believes in the value of chores, discipline, telling the truth, and keeping your word.

But the truth of the matter is, my children's lives have been easy when measured against children in the rest of the world. They have never known real hunger, never been homeless or unwanted or unloved.

And yet, I don't shield them from the realities of life. We have had many discussions on many, varied topics--politics, abortion, gay marriage, women's rights, to name a few. They know I will never shy away from a question or give them a non-answer like, "I'll tell you when you're older." I don't believe in that. In fact, sometimes they have to stop me from giving Too Much Information ("T.M.I., Mom, T.M.I.!"), so strongly do I believe in being open and truthful with them. Granted, the answers vary according to age. The youngest can't begin to fathom the things I might tell the oldest, and so I answer accordingly.

Recently, though, I've been thinking about this attitude of mine. Reassessing, if you will. Mostly from an innocent comment made by a friend who suggested that children shouldn't have to be exposed to hospitals and sickness and death. That seems to be the prevailing feeling in America: Let them be children a little longer.

Here is where my gardener's knowledge kicks in. (Yes, I am far too prone to attributing the traits of the natural world to humans--a sort of reverse anthropomorphism, if you will, but bear with me.) Even the healthiest hothouse plant needs time to adjust to the natural world. Too much sun too suddenly will burn its tender leaves. Too much wind will flatten its fragile stems. Too much cold, too soon, will cause it to shrivel and suffer.

So it is for a child, raised in an idyllic cocoon, who is suddenly launched into the world alone. So, like the attentive gardener, nurturing and strengthening his prize plants, I am hardening off my children. Last week I took the children to the nursing home to visit my husband's ailing father. Before we got there we talked about what they would see and smell and hear: legless people in wheelchairs, people aimlessly wandering the halls, people talking to themselves or crying out, and a smell unlike any other smell. But we also told them that they had no reason to be afraid, that these were all just people, people who had lived long lives, had children and grandchildren, and even though they looked different on the outside, inside they were all just people. And we warned them that Grandpa would look very different from what they remembered, that he might moan or cough, but that it was okay, that he was still Grandpa underneath and he could hear them and if they talked to him or touched him, it would make him very happy.

The children were amazing. My youngest introduced himself to the legless man in the neighboring bed and the two of them ended up having quite a conversation and sharing a package of chocolate doughnut holes. All of the children spoke to Grandpa (no questions, only statements) and touched him in very tender ways, rubbing his feet or touching his hands. While we were there his blood pressure returned almost to normal and he slept peacefully without coughing, for the first time in days. It was obvious to everyone, especially the kids, how much they had helped. And when it was time to leave, every single one of them was reluctant to go and wanted to know when they could come back. I can't think of a better affirmation than that.

Feeling Fidgetty

With things so touch-and-go for my father-in-law, we've had a lot of trouble focusing around here. Each time the phone rings, my stomach drops. There's a sort of unsettledness that you feel when someone you love is slowly dying. Aside from the obvious emotional upheaval, there's a constant sense of unfinished business, of things left undone that should be done, of waiting to grieve. So I'm feeling (to borrow the word that my father-in-law kept using when asked how he was feeling) fidgetty. (Fortunately morphine has been administered for days now and now he is resting comfortably.)

To fight my own fidgets and yet keep the work coming (they don't offer morphine to the family), I've decided to write continually on a group of stories, one sentence at a time, advancing each one incrementally. I know a little bit about what I want them to be (they've been kicking around in my head for a while) and I'm not sure if this will be for another collection, or what, but at least it's helping to counteract my fidgets and giving me lots of things to focus on other than the dying.

Summer in January

I live roughly in the angle formed by Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in Western New York. But, okay, when I really want sympathy, I tell people that I live near Buffalo, city of infamy, when it comes to winter.

But today it's almost 65 degrees outside, a new record. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the scent of newly exposed wet ground is in the air. It feels, for all the world, like spring. (Sigh.) I would that it were so, but it's a cruel trick. Tomorrow is forecasted to be 20 degrees and snowy.

Part of me wants to go out in this glorious weather and enjoy it to the fullest. The other part of me doesn't care to be tempted into happiness by that which is merely fleeting. Maybe that's my nature, always looking ahead, preparing for what's yet to come.

I am reminded of the times when my military husband was deployed and he would find a way to return home for a weekend. Deliriously happy at the sight of him, I would nonetheless begin immediately to fight the melancholy knowledge that he would be gone again in a matter of hours. At times, parting after so brief a visit was painful enough to make me wish he hadn't come at all. Better to be consistently lonely than to have this roller coaster of joy and sadness, or so my thinking went.

In time, I learned that if I were to enjoy his visits I had to force myself to live in the moment--each and every moment, the here and now, without thinking too far ahead. It's a good lesson for someone like me: a plotter, a planner. I need to be reminded that tomorrow is never assured, but today is here, right before me, here to be savored.

Time to go sit in the sun.

Living and dying

"Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted
wrongly the first time." -Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist,
psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)

Attending to the dying gives one a glimpse into the great retrospective of a life. As time winds down for my father-in-law, his life unfolds before us in a long, slow parade: cards, phone calls, pictures, visits from friends and loved ones, fond reminiscences all pass through his room to remind us how much he has accomplished in his 79 years, how many people he has touched.

Those of us attending to him find ourselves privately taking stock of our own lives and wondering at the process of our own eventual deaths. It is in our basic human make-up to have some form of empathy, especially as it relates to the suffering of others. But it is also basic human nature to study how we are different from the suffering ones--how that suffering could never be ours, how we will be immune to that particular fate.

Some, although horrified by the earthquake and tsunami images, take comfort in knowing they are not near a coastline or a faultline and so will not meet that sort of terrifying end. When my own father died from the effects of years of alcoholism, even as I grieved, I reassured myself that my death at least would not echo his. Why are we compelled to think this way? Is it the brain's own form of self-preservation? Is it a mechanism whereby we are able to manage our daily functions despite the myriad hazards that could at any moment randomly consume us? It seems cruel, on some level, to have such "at least I am safe" thoughts, but as biological creatures perhaps that is the best we are capable of instinctively. As sentient, spiritual beings, though, perhaps we can manage better. Perhaps we can find in ourselves some form of compassion, some grateful acceptance, some version of There, but for the grace of God, go I.