What If, Revisited

I sat in the large ballroom of the Westin Riverwalk Hotel, the site of this year’s Dad 2.0 Summit, simultaneously listening to the opening keynote address from fitness personality Shaun T and tweeting what I thought sounded like poignant quotes. He talked about being caught by surprise when his children were born – the surrogate carrying his twins went into labor early – and how he and his partner reacted when they received the news. He spoke about being privileged enough to be home with his brand new babies during their first few months of life and how he dealt with the feelings of anxiety and self-doubt that often threatened to overwhelm him. He brought up the emotions he experienced as his children grew, the advice he had been given and the lessons he had learned.

I was mid-tweet when my phone began buzzing furiously. The Twitter app disappeared and the screen went black as the call came in, leaving only the red and green circles at the bottom and my wife’s name at the top. I swiped to answer the call and ducked out of the ballroom as quickly as I could.

She was calling from the hospital.

We’ve known that S was going to need surgery since she began walking. It was then that we first became aware of the hernia in her stomach, the small but noticeable bump that her pediatrician told us would need to be repaired in order to prevent complications as she grew. He had told us that the best time to have the procedure done was when S was between the ages of three and five and T had followed up with the surgical team at the local children’s hospital periodically to monitor the hernia’s size. We were still caught off guard, though, when the surgeon said at our last appointment in February, “Okay, let’s do it in March.”

The date was barely three weeks away.

The procedure, which had been lurking in the background of our minds for over a year, had suddenly burst back onto the scene and T and I were not prepared. On a rational level, of course, we knew that the date was going to come eventually. We knew that we would have to come to grips with the idea of our daughter being put under anesthesia and a surgeon slicing into her stomach. But emotionally, we just weren’t ready. We had told ourselves that we still had over a year before having to face this next step in taking care of our daughter’s well-being. Hearing that a full year had suddenly been cut sharply to under a month was a shock, to say the least.

T relayed the details of the pre-surgical tests that the nurses and physicians assistants ran through with S and explained what we were going to need to do during the few days leading up to the surgery. S was going to need extra medication to get rid of any bacteria or viruses that might be lingering, courtesy of her preschool friends or, of course, her older brother. She was going to need to some breathing treatments to clear out her airways and we needed to make sure that she slept on clean sheets after coming home from the hospital.

I forced myself to pay attention to what T was saying, grabbing a nearby pen and pad to scribble down some quick notes. I felt my anxiety starting to creep up through my spine, creating tension in my lower back and shoulders like the Devil’s Snare vines in Harry Potter that tightened their grip as their victims struggled but I managed to get the details down. T and I spoke for a few more minutes about plans for the day of the procedure and the arrangements we needed to make for E before we got off the phone so T could drive the kids home.

I laid the phone down on the phone and stared at the note pad. I had managed to seal off most thoughts about S’s surgery for the past week or two so I could focus on work and preparing for the conference but I was having trouble getting back to that point. Words like “steroids,” “nebulizer” and “anesthesia,” seemed to be mocking me for feeling rooted to the floor. My hasty chicken-scratch clearly had not affected the words’ abilities to trigger my apprehension about S’s upcoming procedure.

I closed my eyes for a moment, shutting out the sounds of the vendors still setting up their booths and the muffled applause coming from behind the closed doors of the ballroom. I even blocked out thoughts of the slow-moving San Antonio river below me, which, under any other circumstances, would have served as a welcome escape from reality. My mind started to venture into the awful world of “What if” questions for a moment before I shook my head vigorously, opened my eyes and uttered a single word:

“No.”

I willed my muscles to relax and slowed my breathing. I focused on the river, moving silently along as it snaked its way past the hotel, brushing up gently against the rock walls on either side. I released the pen from the vice grip that my fingers had wound around it and laid it on the table next to the phone. I refused to allow myself to go any further down the path of uncertainty that would bring nothing but the paralysis of additional questions. I decided that S was going to be fine and rejected any alternative outcomes as even remote possibilities.

One of the vendor reps smiled at me as she walked past toward the elevators. “Are you all right?” she asked kindly.

“Fine,” I said with a smile. “Everything will be fine.”

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