Another Broken Bone….and an Unexpected Shock to the System
My love for my daughter is profound, an emotional connection forged through both time as a stay-at-home parent and the collective grieving we had to do when her mom died. She’s also one of the coolest human beings I know: funny, strong, kind, empathetic. The problem is that she has the confidence of a trapeze artist and her father’s coordination, a tragic combination that results in, shall we say, the occasional tumble.
I was hoping that last fall’s broken arm would be our only significant injury of the year, but she recently surpassed that feat by shattering her femur on the playground at school. For the record, I still can’t figure out the physics of how a routine tumble could break the body’s largest bone (my doctor friends tell me it was a million-to-one shot), but the result was a couple of hours in the ER, an ambulance transport, and a multi-day hospital stay with a surgical intervention. She’s fine now, but it was a scary couple of days, the height of which occurred when they rolled her in for surgery.
She was crying, obviously scared about someone cutting into her body, and I had to let her go so that the medical staff (who were, and are, amazing) could do their important work. But I was terrified letting go of her hand, watching the fear in her eyes as they wheeled her away. I immediately went upstairs to our room in the Pediatric wing and had a good cry.
Clearly, watching your young child have their first surgery is a heavy thing, but it took about an hour to realize that the intensity of my emotions had links to Chelsea, and my fear of loss: I can still remember the last time I saw her alive, and I think subconsciously, part of me was scared that this might be the last time I ever saw my daughter alive.
Of course, my rational side had a different interpretation: my best friend is a surgeon who does dozens of procedures a month, so my brain was telling me that this was a routine procedure and that my daughter would be fine. Heavy as our experience was, our surgeon’s experience was a typical Tuesday. But my emotions went in a different direction and ‘the thing the thing represents’ was a fear of losing my daughter because of what happened to her mother.
Early on in my grieving process, I would often become frustrated by this tension between my emotions and my rational side: why was I getting upset over something I knew was ‘wrong’? I realized, with time, help, and counseling, that your emotions are never wrong; they speak a different language than your intellect, and you have to work a little harder to sort out what those emotions are trying to communicate to you. Thankfully, this situation was easy to read: I’m scared as hell of losing my daughter, especially after losing her mother and it was a pretty big shock to the system to experience that raw emotion. When I went up to my room after they took her in for surgery, I felt raw, vulnerable, unprotected in a way in which I haven’t felt in a couple of years. That fear of loss was visceral, driving me to shake, collapse, and cry in a way that, again, I haven’t experienced since Chelsea passed.
However…such powerful feelings create significant opportunities for learning, growth, and perspective. In this case, these feelings reveal tremendous growth in my relationship with my daughter: we’re in a much stronger place than we were a few years ago, precisely because we’ve grown together through adversity. And, as I’ve said before, my daughter really helped me have a sense of purpose during those first days, so I attribute a lot of my recovery to her, adding another layer of emotional depth to our relationship.
Suffice to say, the week was a reminder about what matters in life, a blast of perspective that I probably needed after getting a little too mired in the minutiae of life — funny that, even after losing one’s spouse, you can still find your way back to caring too much about stuff that doesn’t really matter that much. I guess such perspective on life isn’t static: it’s a dynamic state requiring cultivation, work, and renewal over time.
I opened by describing how much I love my daughter. I’ll end by describing how proud I was while watching her navigate such a difficult situation. This kid is all day tough and the day of the break she exhibited a Joel Berry-esque toughness (shoutout to all the UNC basketball fans) that left me in awe. The ER docs even commented that they wished more of their adult patients acted like she did, which is high praise for a 5 year old. I almost passed out when I saw the X-Ray, given the extent of the break, and then marveled at how she’d tolerated that much pain for as long as she did.
She really is a special kid, and it seems as if these repeated challenges only make her stronger. I feel incredibly privileged to be with her on this wild life journey.
