Gratitude Can Be Slippery

Same Walk, Different Shoes

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that

Ben Wakeman

organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

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Innocence is the moment, the one just before its predecessor. One moment you are safe, insulated from the potential tragedy that waits on each out-breath, the next you’re engaged in a life-and-death situation. 

 I’ve just tucked three of my four children into bed.  Complicated because I am traveling and it’s always harder when it’s not their bed.  But the three older boys are exhausted and surrender to sleep.  I pause my naive 31-year-old self over their sleeping bodies.  I feel immune from harm, oblivious to the possibility.  Looking at my husband of seven years we smile and tip-toe off to our bedroom.

Cuddling my youngest son, Christopher,  while I wipe the constant snot that threatens to leave his nose chaffed and sore I look down into his cherub face and see he has trouble breathing. His dark lashes are matted from his runny eyes.  It’s just a cold I tell myself as he begins the first of what will be many coughing spasms.  I nurse him, noticing how hard his breathing comes as he struggles to suckle.  Exhausted his eyelids close, lips go lax and I place him between us on the queen-sized bed at my in-law’s home.   I doze but my instincts don’t allow me to sleep deeply.  His labored breathing and deep coughing spasms wake me.  His little stomach goes very close to his spine as I change his diaper and he struggles to breathe. I hear a rattle in his lungs.  “It’s the croup,” my mother-in-law says.  “He’ll be fine.”

But a few hours later my husband and I wake his mother and tell her we’re taking Christopher to the ER.  We promise to keep her informed. By the time we arrive twenty minutes later, our infant son’s breathing is labored, his coughing is deep and spastic and his little chin quivers as he sobs his frustration to anyone who will listen.  This rural hospital wants to airlift him to Seattle, 70 miles away, to Children’s Hospital where they have the dedicated equipment and specialists to deal with his tiny trachea and diagnose what’s going on.  We stand back as the flight paramedics, the first of the compassionate, capable people who set about saving our son’s life, prepare him to travel. They are  Zach and Alyssa whose names I will never forget,  and I am one of those people who never remember names.  I board the helicopter with them on the landing pad at the hospital while my husband returns home to care for the other three boys.  I sit back and watch in disbelief as they administer oxygen and talk of getting to the hospital, calling ahead to set up surgery for an infant intubation.  I can hear their concern, almost like they forget I’m there.

Finally, we landed on the roof of Children’s Hospital.  Zach and Alyssa spring into motion and leave me behind as they run into the open doors and the medical staff waiting to take over.  The cold wet wind hits my face as the helicopter blades come to a gradual stop and I realize that I am standing on the roof of this hospital in my pajama top, jeans, and slippers all alone.  I am frozen in fear as the intensity, the fragility of my son’s life hit me for the first time.  

Eventually, I’ve no idea how long.  Time has ceased to exist.  I have forgotten to breathe as I enter the bright lights of the hospital corridor.  It is the wee hours of the morning and there is no one in sight and I don’t know where my child is or what is happening.  I begin walking faster toward voices in the distance.  Someone comes beside me, takes my arm, and leads me to an empty room where I am asked to wait.  I want my husband but I have forgotten my phone.  I am damp and it is cold and I am so very alone.  

It’s not so long and Christopher is wheeled out on a gurney.  He is sedated.  He has an IV going into his arm which is tied to the bed.  His throat has a breathing tube. I am shocked to see the tiny hole that allows air to bypass his throat and enter further down, past the swelling that keeps it nearly closed.  His breath is much easier and his rosiness has returned.  He is absolutely still and silent as I follow them, uninvited, to a pediatric ICU room.  I stand in the doorway while he is placed in a bed and hooked to a heart monitor.  

A man behind me touches my back.  I turn and stare into the face of a middle-aged doctor who tells me he just performed a tracheotomy on Christopher.  He leads me to a chair in the hallway and explains that Christopher has a virus that is keeping his trachea closed, Cytomegalic Inclusion.  His recovery may be quick or it could take several months.  We had to let the swollen cells caused by the virus run its course. I hear his words but I don’t really understand.  Don’t they know nothing really bad ever happens to us?

 Christopher could not make sounds around the trachea and watching the silent tears stream down his cherub cheeks breaks my heart.  He is weak but he’s a fighter.   A plexiglass cage is placed over his head and a vaporizer pumps condensation into the box which collects on the inside walls as Christopher takes his unrestrained hand, collects the moisture from the inside, and licks it.  Unable to ask for a drink I admire the resourcefulness of my infant boy.   He will not be easily restrained.  Kicking the blankets with ever-increasing veracity as I watch his frustration play out.  I sing to him with a voice that cracks, stare with a hopeful smile, recite limericks, and stroke his little foot.

The hospital has a room down the hall.  It is set up with six beds for parents of hospitalized infants.  I’m grateful for this place to rest my weary self and chat with other parents, even for the strange man snoring in the bed across from me.  My husband and I trade off and it’s almost as if the car can navigate itself the 70 miles back to his mom’s house.  I’m glad for her help but long to be home. Home where the four of us lead our routine lives.  I couldn’t leave at all the first five days and nursing made it especially difficult.  An old friend brought me homemade comfort food, a bag of toiletries, clean clothes, my phone, and a hairbrush.  I become the recipient of so much kindness.

I begin to know the nurses on a first-name basis.  In addition to their efficiency and knowledge, they are compassionate and caring.  Two of the physical therapists, who were a couple, actually took me to dinner and a movie one night.  They invited me home to their guest bed but I was feeling anxious to return to the hospital.  I got a few toys from the playroom down the hall.  Christopher could sit up in bed now, eight days later.  So resilient he was soundlessly laughing before long.  Then the IV came off and we could actually walk down the hall.  Sometimes the mucus would build in his lungs and it would have to be suctioned out. These were difficult moments.  Under any other conditions, it would be child abuse.  

One day my husband came with the three older boys.  Christopher was ecstatic to see his brothers.  My husband stayed and I went back with the boys.  They were all asleep in the back seat by the time we arrived home.  Still, that hour when we were all together when illness and danger were set aside, when we could just be us again, sat on my heart with such poignancy.  This precious way of being was just taken for granted for so long.  I vowed at that moment never to forever cherish this gift.  We take so much for granted when actually we are never far from despair.  

 Finally, the day, three weeks and four days later, when the trachea is removed arrives.  He is taken to surgery and all the old drama surfaces for me.  I wish I believed in some traditional form of prayer, wish we weren’t basically in this alone. Christopher emerges groggy but where the trachea once was is only a little row of neat stitches that will soon heal.  Christopher stays a few days longer, re-learning how to breathe.  His laughter, now heard, with the hole in his throat neatly stitched.  Sometimes he shrieks just to laugh at the sound of his own voice. We load up the car and travel home.  All the way home to our house.

Home where I hold my children closer, tighter, longer than usual, where I contemplate the kindness of strangers and friends and never succumb to the naïveté that lets me assume that I am immune to sorrow as gratitude wells up inside me and erupts in gladness.  

Christopher is four now.  He is fully recovered and a robust vibrant child.  He can be strong-willed and I remind myself that some of the behaviors that challenge us as parents make good qualities for survival and successful adults.  There is a woman at Christopher’s preschool whose baby recently died.  I watch her pick up her daughter and strap her into her car seat, watch as she goes through the motions of carrying on, of mothering her other child.  I would like to comfort her, to acknowledge her pain.  She could so easily have been me.  I feel so inadequate.  I feel ashamed that I can’t go there.  I’m so cozy all wrapped in my profound gratitude.  So easy for me to say.