My Hero

Doctors have come
from distant cities
just to see me
stand over my bed
disbelieving what they’re seeing

they say I must be one of the wonders
of God’s own creation
and as far as they see they can offer
no explanation

I believe
fate smiled and destiny
laughed as she came to my cradle
“know this child will be able”
laughed as my body she lifted
“know this child will be gifted
with love, with patience
and with faith
she’ll make her way”

I’m sitting at the airport in Las Vegas waiting for a flight home, and this song came on and it’s all I can do not to cry. I’ve been up for 36 hours. I gave a talk at a seminar in Utah and although they seemed pleased, I don’t think I brought my “A” game. The airline broke my CPAP machine, so I’ve had no restful sleep, and it doesn’t look like that will change until Monday when I can get a new machine.

And all that I can tolerate. Just another day in the life of an ambulance driver. But I haven’t held my kid in six days, and work and travel virtually assure I won’t see her until next weekend. I don’t know if I can take it.

Back a few years ago, me and The Missus decided to have a baby. We tried hard, and eventually she got pregnant. When I got the news, I pulled out the waistband of my shorts in front of 20 people at the hospital ER and whooped, “Way to go boys, you do work after all!”

And we did all the things expectant couples do. I was a good deal more excited than The Missus, but it took her a while to get past the intimidation of impending motherhood. I, on the other hand, have always wanted to be a Dad. When my friends were terrified at the prospect of fathering a child, I was the one secretly wishing I’d find the right girl and do just that. Kids and I get along.

Methinks it’s because they instinctively recognize the fact that I’m stuck at their level.

But it wasn’t long before The Missus began to suffer complications. I had long teased her that she’d have ten pound twins. Big babies and twins run on both sides of the family. I’m a twin, and my sister (The Goblin) and I weighed eight pounds each. The Missus and her siblings all weighed 10+ pounds, as did my siblings. Heck, my brother weighed just over 13 pounds, and her brother weighed close to fourteen. And nary a Caesarean section to be found between either of our mothers. Big, sturdy wimmen with child-bearin‘ hips were those two. My frame of reference lumped six pound babies into the “scrawny” category.


My perspective changed with a 1 pound, 14 ounce baby. In the space of two weeks, we went from excited and eager prospective parents to the most unimaginable terror of our lives. It made it a little easier that most of the nurses and a few of the doctors at the local NICU were folks I worked with on the local transport team. I had even taught most of them a class or two, so I felt confident in their abilities.

What I didn’t feel confident in was my ability to handle it. I had talked our OB Doc into letting me actually do the delivery with him looking on. I had pointed out the fact that it wasn’t my first delivery under much less controlled conditions, and that I had also taught neonatal life support to a number of his staff. So he said, “Fine with me AD, as long as you’re willing to step out of the way if something goes wrong.”

Well, something went wrong, to the tune of fetal distress and an emergency C-section. I went from anticipating the singular honor of bringing my own child into the world, to being a frightened spectator at her resuscitation.

28-week-old babies don’t breath real well, if at all. They don’t have fingernails, or nipples, or the ability to suckle. Their nervous systems are literally raw and unfinished. The slightest noise or stimulus can cause them harm.

Knowing all these things just worsens the fear, and believe me, we were scared. At the time, she didn’t know I was scared, because I was doing The Man Thing and putting on a brave face. I had a wife to comfort and protect.

But in those dark hours between signing the consent forms and prepping The Missus for surgery, I slipped down to the hospital chapel, locked the door and laid myself bare.

I’ve been shot at and narrowly missed. I’ve been in more than a few situations when the feces have struck the thermal agitator and everyone else was lost in the fog of panic, and I like to think that I rarely lose my cool. I’ve always thought of it as my gift.

But I found out I can be paralyzed by fear. And so on that night, I laid my head on that communion rail and I wept and I made bargains with God and I promised that if He would let my kid live, I’d do anything that He asked.

And He kept His part of the bargain. When they removed her from my wife’s womb, she was about the size of a 20 ounce Coke bottle and blue as a Smurf. Within a few seconds, she began to wail. I kissed The Missus on the forehead and gave her a play-by-play of the resuscitation. I whispered to her that she had turned pink within just a few moments and was breathing on her own. Apparently, The Kid hadn’t gotten the memo about what she was or was not capable of doing at that gestational age.

She thrived. She was Wonder Baby. She was so strong and vigorous that were were able to hold her within a week – still the longest week of my life. We humans, being social critters, seem to develop better if we have some physical contact. Usually, the mothers get the honor of doing most of the baby cuddling when they’re that young, but I was not to be denied. I shaved my chest hair so I could hold her close to my skin, and I spent many an hour rocking her in that NICU. I’d get off after a night on the bolance, and I’d let myself in to the NICU and badger a nurse until they let me hold her, and I’d rock her we both went to sleep. After a bad night, holding The Kid centered me. It kept the demons at bay. Eventually, the nurse would wake me up, shoo me home for a few hours, and I’d pick up The Missus to go back and visit again the next morning. We thought the worst had passed.

Alas, then we got the news that she had suffered a severe intracranial bleed in the womb. Grade IV- the worst kind. They used words like cerebral palsy, seizures, severe mental retardation and blindness. “Take heart,” the Docs pointed out. “She looks great, and we treat babies here, not test results.”

The Missus was a little hard to convince, but I wasn’t worried. I’d gotten my assurances that night in the chapel. We were fully expecting to see better news from the results of the CT scan a few weeks later.

But better news was not to come. If you look at The Kid’s films, virtually the entire right side of her brain is one big cavity, filled with blood. Now they assured us that eventually her body would absorb that blood, but we both picked up on the fact that they quit using words like “possibility” and “might” when they talked about cerebral palsy,
retardation, seizures and blindness. The Missus was a wreck. I stayed strong for her.

But on the drive home by myself that night, I laid it all out again. I laid my head on the steering wheel and bellowed my rage impotently into the night. I cursed God. I blamed Him for punishing my child for my sins. I questioned His very existence. And I challenged Him to show me that there was a purpose to this pain, and to give me some sign that The Kid would be okay.

And at that very moment, the song at the beginning of this post appeared on the radio.

I can be a bit obtuse at times, but even I got that hint.

And since that day, I’ve come to realize that along with the blessing of fatherhood, I was entrusted with the task of raising a special child. I could have been a good Dad to a healthy child, but God apparently expected more of me.

And that is something I have kept in mind since that day. On the days when I push her to try harder, I remind myself that taking it easy on her isn’t helping her become the woman she is destined to be. On the endless nights when I stretched her stiff little legs while she screamed in pain, I cried as I did it, but I held in my mind’s eye the image of her walking down the aisle in her wedding gown. In heels, not braces.

And in the four years since, she has taught me life lessons about hard work, perseverance and determination. She worships her Daddy, but she doesn’t understand yet that she is my hero, and my teacher in more ways than one.

And on that night over four years ago, while The Missus was recovering from the anesthesia and The Kid was getting settled in the NICU, I wrote a letter to my child, to be delivered on her eighteenth birthday. I told her how scared I was the night she was born, and the bargain I had made with God, and what a special person her Mommy was, and all of my hopes, dreams and aspirations for her. I promised to chase the monsters from under her bed, to kiss her boo boos when she got them, to pick her up when she fell, but also how to find the strength to stand on her own. I promised I’d try not to be overprotective, and I’d let her fight her own battles. I told her that parents sometimes screw up, and that sometimes I’d do things that she wouldn’t like or understand, but that I would always love her. I wanted her to know how honored I was to be her Daddy.

You know, just in case I screw it up and she winds up being a clock tower sniper or something.


And right now, while I’m trying to get home, Daddy is trying really hard to be as brave as you, but I could really use some snuggles to keep the demons at bay.

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