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Book: The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown
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Authors: Ian Brown
Tags: General, Family & Relationships, Social Science, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Handicapped, Parenting
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(blood disease); single mothers with four pallid, ill-nourished children from homes I could see in my mind, with too many extension cords in the bedroom (the youngest has been running a temperature of 102 for four days straight); huddled, well-dressed families unfamiliar with the drama of post-operative consultation (camping accident, knife in the head, narrowly missing the optical nerve, no damage to the sight or mind but some permanent impairment of movement in the left arm).
Who were the lucky ones this time? Who would stay, and who would breathe a sigh of relief and go?
My own worry ponged back and forth. Is it a cold? No, it’s cancer. No, it’s a cold. The doctors were always flummoxed by Walker’s condition, always asked the same questions, wanted the same details over and over again.
Yes, he eats entirely by stomach tube .
Yes, we’ve tried feeding him by mouth .
Chloral hydrate. Yes, by prescription .
It’s not his ears. I know it’s not his ears because I was here yesterday about his ears, and it’s not his ears, he doesn’t cry like this if it’s just his ears .
Yes, Doctor, I waited. I waited for five days, with him screaming all the time, before I even thought of bringing him here .
All those stuffed animals in the hospital store in the lobby of the brilliant children’s hospital in the middle of the downtown of the brilliant genius city! And yet the place was filled with doctors who couldn’t help my boy. I developed a degree of skepticism toward the medical profession that tended to show itself after the fourth doctor in a row told me something I already knew. Sometimes they saw my skepticism and agreed with it, quietly admitting their own helplessness, which made me like them again. Sometimes they spotted my frustration, and stayed away.
I learned an almost geological patience. I knew the hospital like I knew my own basement, all the tricks of the place: the most convenient end of the parking garage (the second level, before the first was even full, near the north elevator), where to validate parking, the best time to line up for the best coffee (before 7:45 in the morning, or after 11), how to work the prescription counter in the pharmacy to minimize the wait. I knew how to find Physio and MRI and Dentistry from memory. I knew what I would see roaming the floors of the place—the children themselves, with their strange afflictions, heads the size of watermelons with bright red newly stitched surgical gashes running from ear to ear, braces and casts, greyish-yellow skin, the resigned eyes, a resignation deeper and more profound than any adult’s could ever be.
I knew what to do in response. I knew to smile. Smile for every one of them. Nothing too obvious; I knew what it was like to have someone pander to Walker, I didn’t want that special treatment. But an openness, a lack of hostility and fear nonetheless, that was the trick. It was a form of meditation. But always I was looking, and silently asking: what happened there?
In some ways, for all the tension, Emergency was easy—because there was an ease to the department as well, a straightforward, fact-based calm devoid of worry. Here in Emerg, worry is beside the point: you’re in the maw of it now, it’s as bad as it gets, you have to get through it. I knew doctors who admitted privately to the secret appeal of emergency medicine: they were too busy to contemplate the sadness of it all. Their work profoundly unreflective, liberating in its mindlessness.
You can sit and wait in that calm for a long time as a parent, without minding. You look around. The technology, everywhere, on carts, an entire science on wheels, but also replicated at the bedhead in room after room, the same clean new tubes and bottles and valves over and over again, because of course our individual weaknesses are the same. Countless heavy-gauge yellow plastic waste-collection bags, for toxic bloods and spent dispensers, an entire industry (safe disposal!),
Who were the lucky ones this time? Who would stay, and who would breathe a sigh of relief and go?
My own worry ponged back and forth. Is it a cold? No, it’s cancer. No, it’s a cold. The doctors were always flummoxed by Walker’s condition, always asked the same questions, wanted the same details over and over again.
Yes, he eats entirely by stomach tube .
Yes, we’ve tried feeding him by mouth .
Chloral hydrate. Yes, by prescription .
It’s not his ears. I know it’s not his ears because I was here yesterday about his ears, and it’s not his ears, he doesn’t cry like this if it’s just his ears .
Yes, Doctor, I waited. I waited for five days, with him screaming all the time, before I even thought of bringing him here .
All those stuffed animals in the hospital store in the lobby of the brilliant children’s hospital in the middle of the downtown of the brilliant genius city! And yet the place was filled with doctors who couldn’t help my boy. I developed a degree of skepticism toward the medical profession that tended to show itself after the fourth doctor in a row told me something I already knew. Sometimes they saw my skepticism and agreed with it, quietly admitting their own helplessness, which made me like them again. Sometimes they spotted my frustration, and stayed away.
I learned an almost geological patience. I knew the hospital like I knew my own basement, all the tricks of the place: the most convenient end of the parking garage (the second level, before the first was even full, near the north elevator), where to validate parking, the best time to line up for the best coffee (before 7:45 in the morning, or after 11), how to work the prescription counter in the pharmacy to minimize the wait. I knew how to find Physio and MRI and Dentistry from memory. I knew what I would see roaming the floors of the place—the children themselves, with their strange afflictions, heads the size of watermelons with bright red newly stitched surgical gashes running from ear to ear, braces and casts, greyish-yellow skin, the resigned eyes, a resignation deeper and more profound than any adult’s could ever be.
I knew what to do in response. I knew to smile. Smile for every one of them. Nothing too obvious; I knew what it was like to have someone pander to Walker, I didn’t want that special treatment. But an openness, a lack of hostility and fear nonetheless, that was the trick. It was a form of meditation. But always I was looking, and silently asking: what happened there?
In some ways, for all the tension, Emergency was easy—because there was an ease to the department as well, a straightforward, fact-based calm devoid of worry. Here in Emerg, worry is beside the point: you’re in the maw of it now, it’s as bad as it gets, you have to get through it. I knew doctors who admitted privately to the secret appeal of emergency medicine: they were too busy to contemplate the sadness of it all. Their work profoundly unreflective, liberating in its mindlessness.
You can sit and wait in that calm for a long time as a parent, without minding. You look around. The technology, everywhere, on carts, an entire science on wheels, but also replicated at the bedhead in room after room, the same clean new tubes and bottles and valves over and over again, because of course our individual weaknesses are the same. Countless heavy-gauge yellow plastic waste-collection bags, for toxic bloods and spent dispensers, an entire industry (safe disposal!),
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