Read Online Tales from the Dad Side by Steve Doocy - Free Book Online

abruptly ended when she recognized us as the people who had sent her into the back room where those strangers in surgical masks had done things to her eyes. As she screeched I saw something I’d never witnessed in forty years on this earth. There was blood running down her face. She had bloody tears .
    She looked like she’d just been punched in the eyes. This was easily the most pitiful thing I’d ever seen. We felt helpless. I held her tight on my lap as my wife caressed her hair. Late in the afternoon Sally’s doctor released her, so we took her home, where she crawled over to her brother and sister and put her face next to theirs because she wanted no part of her parents.
    At some point in the ordeal I thought back to my father, who’d said he’d change places with my sister who’d been run over, and I wondered, would I do the same? Would I trade places with Sally? My heart said yes, but as I thought of having a highly trained specialist prop my eyelids open with surgical toothpicks and then, using a razor-sharp scalpel, slice into the muscles behind the eyeball to make them an iota longer, I equivocated. Would I trade places with my child if it meant a doctor would poke me in the eye with a knife? The answer was swift and blunt—I would…but I just can’t.
    I had a really good reason: because it was impossible. Hiring a stand-in for surgery didn’t make the sick one any better. In reality, all parents can do is hold our kids and stay with them until the pain or the scare goes away. Would I donate a kidney to my kid? Absolutely.
    Retina, part of my liver? Yes and yes. If I’ve got some spare part, it’s here for the taking, and that is a pledge that will stand as long as I’m standing.
    On the day of Sally’s brain operation there was some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the bump behind her ear was an unexplainable growth that had no effect whatsoever on her, so the brain surgeon simply removed it, and then vacuumed clean our insurance company.
    â€œThank goodness,” my wife said to me while we were gathering our belongings in the waiting room. Then I noticed an important business bulletin had interrupted Wheel of Fortune . We watched live as Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, signed papers to buy the television network where I worked. How would that affect me? They would clean house, and I would be fired tomorrow because my week hadn’t been quite lousy enough.
    I was so numb and bone-grindingly tired that I really didn’t care. My father had taught me that jobs were simply places to go to make money for our families. My daughter was going to recover, and that was all that mattered. As for Bill Gates, if I ever saw his car in the parking lot I would probably steal his NERDMOGUL license plate and put it in Sally’s room.
    I am a father who would do anything for his family, and while Bill Gates is probably also a good dad who has made trillions with Microsoft, the truth is, I can shred his high score on Tetris.

5
Legacy
    Should I Follow Tom or Diane Sawyer?
    T om Sawyer was the Million Dollar Movie my dad and I were watching when he pointed to the star’s raft and revealed, “I built one of those.” My father had chronicled much of his childhood, but the raft thing was tantalizingly new information. My immediate reaction was that if my father had done it, I should do it too. Some families from one generation to the next hand down heirloom jewelry, odd parcels of real estate, or gravy recipes; I would follow in my father’s footsteps and make raft building our family tradition. Additionally, the idea of my own personal watercraft would put me on par with Ari Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who was at that time married to Jackie Kennedy, the former first lady, and pictures of the two of them gallivanting on his yacht seemed to make the covers of every supermarket tabloid my mother bought.
    Why’d