Meet the Family… My Mother, Anita

My mom is a trooper and I say that for two reasons.  First, she is, in fact, a trooper, though not of the law enforcement variety as I will make clear in a moment.  Second, calling someone a trooper is the highest compliment that you can get from my mom, so it is fitting that I give it to her. 

A trooper, in my mom’s eyes, is someone who faces a great deal of adversity, but nonetheless soldiers forward and does so, importantly, without complaint.  A trooper hopes for better luck next time, but does not not expect it.  A trooper puts his or her own best interests aside in order to better serve the interests of others. 

As I said, my mom is a trooper.

She married my dad when she was just 18 years old and spent the next seven years trying to get pregnant.  After giving up virtually all hope, she became pregnant with my sister.  Two years later, when she was 27, my mom’s father (my grandfather) died.  The next year, she became pregnant with me.  When she was 29, and I about a year old, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.  She endured radiation treatments and a radical mastectomy — rough stuff even now,  but especially so back then.  She did not even have the strength to pick me up and hold me for quite some time.

Later in life, she would watch her older sister die from cancer in her 50s and see her daughter (my sister) diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 35.  Not long after that, my mom’s first grandchild (my daughter) was diagnosed with a heart defect that would require open heart surgery to repair shortly after her first birthday.  Three years ago, my mom spent Christmas in the hospital with a baseball-sized aneurysm in the area between her neck and collarbone.  When the intern at the hospital first saw it, he literally backed away in fear.  The surgery performed to fix it was so new and so rare, the doctors asked my mom if they could write her case up in a medical journal.  (Being a trooper, she said yes.)

The idea of being a trooper has been and continues to be a powerful one in my life — sometimes in good ways, sometimes less so.  Most everybody likes a trooper and I like to be liked as much as the next guy.  The challenge I have encountered is in taking trooper-dom to the extreme — or, perhaps more accurately, only halfway.  For example, I am not very good at telling people what I want or need, which is classic trooper.  But then I tend to get angry and disappointed when no one seems to be giving me what I want or need, which is not very trooper-like at all.  Like my mom, I often hope for the best, but expect the worst.  I also understand, however, that this is a fairly shitty way to go through life and have found, as well, that there is a fine line between hoping for the best and believing that you somehow do not DESERVE the best. 

My mom had a colonoscopy today and my dad sent my sister and me an e-mail this afternoon letting us know that everything had gone well.  “She handled it just like the trooper she is,” he wrote.     

Best Lines… “Your daughter needs open heart surgery.”

OK, this should actually go into the category of “Worst Lines,” but, fortunately, there haven’t been enough of those in my life to justify a category by that name (unless you survey all the women I’ve tried to pick up over the years).  Let me start at the end of the story.  Everything worked out just fine.  So, then, to the beginning…

I wrote some months ago about my daughter’s birth by emergency c-section.  Madeleine was full term, but only weighed in at four pounds, ten ounces.  We were told that she had “intrauterine growth retardation,” which basically means she was not receiving sufficient nutrition in utero.  (It does not mean that she is mentally retarded.  The fetus is smart enough to feed its brain first and fully, though that means there is even less left to go around for the rest of the body.) 

There is this hilarious picture of my wife and me bringing our daughter home from the hospital.  We are posed in front of our house, proudly holding Madeleine in her car seat.  You can barely see her in there.  Some years later, my mom confessed to being scared to hold our daughter, her first grandchild, because she was so tiny. 

Despite all of the early drama, everything was proceeding normally for the first few weeks.  Madeleine wasn’t eating much and wasn’t sleeping well, but nothing that seemed all that extraordinary for first-time parents to deal with.  Then my wife took Madeleine to the pediatrician for her one-month check-up.  She called me in tears to say that the doctor had picked up a heart murmur and had sent them immediately to a pediatric cardiologist at Overlook Hospital, near our home. 

I was working in New York City at the time, more than an hour from the hospital.  My secretary ordered me a car service to speed my trip.  The driver was a Russian fellow, maybe 50 years old.  He asked me where we were headed, and I told him and then told him why in the way that people share very significant things with complete strangers.  He said he had teenage girls and that being a parent could be hard.  “It will work out,” he said and it brought me an odd measure of comfort.

By the time I got to the hospital, the doctor was already doing an ultrasound on Madeleine’s heart.  He provided no running commentary about what we were seeing on the monitor.  Holy shit, I thought, that’s my daughter’s HEART we’re looking at.  The doctor finished the exam and brought us into his office.

Madeleine had four holes between the chambers of her heart, he told us.  Rather than flowing efficiently from chamber to chamber, some of her blood was, in layman’s terms, leaking back and forth between the chambers.  Kids with this condition are often very small and sluggish.  Their hearts must work extra hard to get the right amount of blood pumping through their bodies.  As a result, they burn a lot of calories and they’re always tired because, even at rest, their hearts are working overtime.  Madeleine wasn’t in immediate danger, the doctor said, but her heart WOULD need to be repaired at some point and the repair would need to be done via open heart surgery.

Open WHAT?

My wife recalls it as the single worst moment in her life.  I felt like Wile E. Coyoterunning off a cliff.  For a few seconds, you keep running, not realizing there isn’t ground under you anymore.  Then you look down.  Then you look helplessly straight ahead.  Then you fall, with your eyebrows perhaps staying suspended in middair for a few more seconds before plummenting to the ground with the rest of your body.

We waited until Madeleine was 13 months old before going ahead with the surgery.  The man who did it, Dr. Jan Quaegebeur at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, is widely considered to be the best in his field and is known simply as “Q.”  We were warned ahead of time that his bedside manner might leave something to be desired.   We scheduled several meetings with him prior to the surgery and he canceled on us everytime.  “You’re not trying to make a friend,” a co-worker told me, whose own daughter’s heart had been repaired by Q.

We had two false starts leading up to the surgery.  The first time it was scheduled, our daughter came down with a cold and the surgery was canceled.  The second time, my wife and I had on our surgical scrubs and were minutes away from bringing Madeleine into the operating room when there was a sudden flurry of activity on the ward.  “A heart has just become available,” one of the nurses said to us as she hurried by.  “We’re going to do a transplant.  You should probably just go home.”  (The child who received the heart was only a few weeks old and occupied the bed next to Madeleine’s in the ICU.  He was still there when we left.  As I recall, we either bought him a balloon when we left or gave him Madeleine’s balloons.)

The third time’s a charm, as they say, and it was for us.  My wife and I brought Madeleine into the operating room.  There were lots of people and lots of machines.  I laid Madeleine down on the operating table and gave her a kiss.  She started to cry as they put the mask over her face.  She fell asleep almost immediately. 

“OK, Mom and Dad,” someone said.  “Don’t touch anything on your way out.”

A few hours later, Q walked up to us in the waiting room.  “Everything went fine,” he said.  He’d repaired three of the four holes; the fourth wasn’t big enough to justify the effort.  We shook his hand and he walked away.  It was the first time we’d ever met him.

Young children recover from major surgery remarkably quickly.  Within a day, Madeleine came off the ventilator.  Another day passed and she was sitting up in bed.  By the third day, she was up and about, playing with toys in the hospital playroom. 

We desperately wanted to go home.  I was terrified that something awful was going to happen to Madeleine in the hospital, that she would get an infection or something and everything would come crashing down. 

There’s that great scene in “Jaws” where Quint, played by Robert Shaw, tells Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss about being one of the crew of the USS Indianapolis, the boat that delivered the A-bomb, but was then sunk by a torpedo.  Nine hundred men went into the water and nearly 600 were killed by sharks over the next five days before another ship arrived on the scene.  Quint says it was THEN that he was the most scared, waiting his turn to be plucked out of the water, and that’s just what it felt like.  Madeleine had survived open heart surgery, now let’s GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

We went home on the fifth day after surgery.  As we walked down 165th Street toward the parking lot, I let out a triumphant yell.  We made it.

Today, Madeleine is a healthy and happy seven year old.  You can still see a thin scar about three inches long running down her chest — her “zipper” as we called it when she was younger.  She doesn’t remember the surgery, of course, but we’ve talked to her about it a lot over the years.  We tell her that when the doctors fixed her heart, they put extra love in it.        

L Is for Lost

The one thing in the world that I hate more than just about anything else is being lost.  I also happen to get lost with startling frequency. 

My sense of direction is so hideous that, for a while, my approach was simply to head in the opposite direction of whatever way I thought was correct.  If I thought I should make a right turn, I actually forced myself to make a left.  Then I started to overanalyze it.  “I think I should turn right, which probably means that left is correct, but since I now think that left is probably correct, that probably means I should go right.”  Wrong.

For Christmas this year, I gave myself a Garmin, an amazing little GPS system for my car.  Since then, the Garmin has been out of my car on two occasions and I managed to get lost both times.  The first time, I brought the Garmin into my office to show it off to my co-workers, left it on my desk, headed to an off-site meeting, and promptly got lost.  The second time, I let my wife borrow the Garmin, headed to dinner with a friend, and, again, got lost.  Neither the off-site meeting nor the dinner were in out-of-the-way locations, by the way, but it really doesn’t matter.  Near, far, the end result is almost always the same. 

A few months ago, for example, I drove about 50 miles in the wrong direction, convinced with every fiber of my being that the NJ Turnpike is the same thing as I-95 — this despite the fact that I had printed directions in hand clearly telling me otherwise.  I even have found myself trying to outthink the Garmin.  “Turn right?  What are you, crazy?”  (They have yet to come out with a Garmin smart enough to respond, “Just turn, asshole.”  All in good time.)

My deep hatred for being lost stems from an even deeper desire to be in control of every situation I find myself in.  Some people can laugh off being lost, or even treat it as a little adventure.  “Is that the Canadian border?  Neat!”  I, on the other hand, literally can feel my heart begin to race and my body temperature start to rise the moment I sense that I am lost or, more broadly stated, the moment I feel things starting to slip from my control.  (I drove the last few blocks to the dinner mentioned above with my window all the way down even though it was about 30 degrees outside that night.)

A good sense of direction is something you either have or you don’t.  I don’t, and that’s pretty much the end of that.  What am I supposed to do, sit around and study maps?

Fatigue Over Perfection/Curate My World

One of the nice things about my job — I work in corporate communications for a Fortune 50 healthcare company — is that I get to meet lots of advertising and PR agencies that have lots of ideas about the state of play in our society these days.  

I met a few weeks ago with one such agency, which put forward the interesting notion that Americans are suffering from “fatigue over perfection.”  Using television as an example, we used to watch shows like Dynasty and The Cosby Show that depicted perfect people (or at least people more perfect than you and me) living perfect lives.  We now watch shows like American Idol, the Amazing Race, and Survivior that depict real, authentic people dropped into unreal situations — which somehow serves to highlight their real-ness.  I like this idea a lot and predict that it may play a role in who earns the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.  Quick, who is more authentic, Clinton or Obama?  Huckabee or Romney?  Pretty easy, actually.   

The agency I met with also talked about companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods that “curate the world” for their customers according to a certain philosophy that is understood and bought into by all concerned.   Starbucks, for example, offers coffee to its customers, of course, but also now music and books, which makes sense in a way that it would not at, say, Dunkin’ Donuts. 

I put this idea into practice with the recent purchase of several bottles of Champagne for New Year’s Eve.  I know a lot about beer, a little about wine, and absolutely nothing about Champagne.  We were hosting about 12 couples at our house.   I wanted our choice of Champagne to say, “Hey, we give a shit about you.  No one is getting engaged tonight, but it’s a special evening nonetheless and we’re treating it (and you) accordingly.” 

My typical approach would have been to go to my local liquor store with a price point in mind and pick based solely on name recognition — Veuve Clicquout, Moet & Chandon, Korbel – all the while pretending as if I knew what the hell I was doing.  This time, I pleaded total ignorance, gave the owner of the store my price point (about $40), and asked him to pick for me, which he did — Gaston Chiquet and A. Margaine.  I drank both and both were fabulous. 

Happy New Year, dear readers.  Now can someone please curate the rest of my world?