Tomorrow my youngest son goes into surgery for a tonsillectomy. I'm a little freaked out.
Like his older brother, he's battled chronic strep for a
while. They were both born with huge
tonsils that just love to incubate
streptococcus. He was supposed to have
this procedure done over the summer but came down with strep the night before
surgery. (Of course he did!) So now we're having to pull him out of school
for a couple of weeks, in the hope that we get these golf-ball-sized tonsils out
well ahead of strep season.
And I'm not worried about the procedure, per se. We have a great ENT, who actually put my son's second set of tubes in five years ago—the same day he performed my older son's tonsillectomy. He has an excellent staff, and I'm sure everything will go as smoothly as possible.
But it is nerve-wracking at best to have your child away from you, under anesthesia and under the proverbial knife (in this case, a laser), where you absolutely cannot see or touch or hear them, where you can't be near them at all. They're going through a mildly traumatizing procedure that has a painful, nasty recovery for the next two weeks. You want to be there, to hold their hand and sing to them and comfort them through every moment of it, but you just can't.
It sucks. Really.
I know I should be thankful that it's not something worse. I am, truly. I am thankful every day that my children are healthy and strong and generally happy little boys, who've never had to experience the pain and suffering that so many others have. Like every parent, I am afraid of terrible things happening to my child. Every night, as I fall asleep, I am relieved to have survived another day with my beautiful babies, oblivious to the first-hand knowledge of agony that so many others regularly endure.
Almost from the moment your children come into your life, you have horrible, dreadful thoughts of the wretched things that could befall your most precious gifts. When they're infants, you're overwhelmed by the task of just keeping the freakin' baby alive for the first few days and weeks. But then these terrible images creep into your mind of what could go wrong. Sickness. Injury. Madmen and psychopaths. It can be paralyzing. You don't mean to think these things, but it's unavoidable. It's your brain's way of running through the endless list of possibilities to determine what is plausibility.
So I've spent the last few hours freaking out because my baby is going to be where I can't reach him, where it's not plausible, but totally possible, that something could go wrong. And he will be in pain, and he will cry, and I'm the one who chose to bring him to this place to have this thing done to him.
In those moments of utter dread and tearful guilt, it doesn't matter that I know it's for the best. The heartstrings that attach him to me are straining painfully in their tautness. My baby will be in pain, and I made that happen.
This sucks, too.
I have to remind myself to breathe deeply around the pounding constriction that squeezes my heart into my throat and my gut. I have to remind myself that it's worse for him to constantly be sick and on antibiotics. I have to remind myself that he won't blame me for this later.
So tomorrow we'll go into the surgery center, and I will sit with him and sing to him and hold his hand under his favorite blanket until it's time to walk him to the doors of the operating suite. Then I will kiss him and remind him that I'll be waiting patiently in the recovery room for him, ready to hold his hand and tuck his blanket around him as soon as he wakes up.
And then I will freak the fuck out. Just for a moment.
'Cause I have to get it together again before they wheel him back to me. I have to be the smiling calm one that he sees when he wakes, cranky and in pain. I have to be the one who patiently holds his popsicle while he eats it.
That's my job. That's what I signed up to do when I decided to have my babies. I promised to be the calm one, to be the steadfast one, to be the parent, even when it makes me want to freak out and hide under a blanket with my own popsicle.
Tomorrow night, I will go to sleep just a few feet from my baby, relieved that we survived this, that we are home and on our way to healthy again. And I will be thankful that we have the opportunity for at least one more day, happy and oblivious to what else there could be.
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