Fear Factor: Hospital Edition

Somewhere right now, Joe Rogan is busting a nut watching a videotape of the last 24 hours of my life. If he were to include this in his next show, I can imagine the commentary would go something like this:

“Contestants, for your next challenge you will be sealed inside a 20′ x 30′ room with no windows for a 24 hour period. There is a functioning door, but you will not be allowed to leave. The only food available to you, should you choose to ingest it, will be eggs that taste like Roseanne Barr’s old shoes or a sandwich that looks like it has been run over by a truck. You will be given access to a washroom, but be advised that it is a shared facility that serves three other rooms besides your own and that many sick people will be trying to get in. They will not go on their own time; they will wait until you decide to go and then hammer on the door persistently and yell at you. You will share the room with two sick children. One is your own, who you will have to care for. To make this more interesting we have put together a team of 34 doctors, nurses, interns, and observers, who will enter periodically and stick your child with a needle or do something else he won’t like in order to ensure that we maintain a constant atmosphere of agitation. Neither you or your child will be allowed to sleep. The other child in the room will be a five year old special needs child who will test your sanity by screaming incessantly at the top of his lungs. There is a TV and a DVD player in the room, but again these are shared items and the special needs child does not understand this. If you attempt to change the channel or turn the TV off at any time, you will be screamed at. In fact, if you do so much as get within ten feet of the TV, you will be screamed at. Even if you wait until the middle of the night when you think everyone else is asleep and try to turn the TV off, the special needs child will somehow sense your intentions and will wake up and you will be screamed at in a manner you have never experienced before. The nurses will run to the room and give you dirty looks for attempting something so foolish, then will stick your child with another needle as punishment for you. For the privilege of remaining in the room, you will be forced to pay an exhorbitant hourly rate to leave your car in a dingy parkage that smells like rotting garbage. If at any time you are unable to remain in the room, you will be eliminated.

Who am I kidding. No 50 grand is worth this. And there’s more. What Joe didn’t tell you is that the one thing; the only thing that will stop the special needs child from screaming is a Barney DVD on continuous loop. The choice is yours: 24 hours of non-stop, ear-splitting screaming, or 24 hours of non-stop Barney. I have been to Hell and met the devil, and he is a man in a purple dinosaur suit. That sadistic grin will forever haunt my dreams.
Moosie has been diagnosed with asthma. The doctors told us that he suffered a serious attack and now has a partially collapsed lung as a result. Apparently this will correct itself, but in the meantime he has to stay at the hospital and be pumped full of ventolin every two hours. He seems to be doing a little better today so here’s hoping he continues to improve.
My mother is here watching the kids, which makes her an angel in my books because sleep is really high on my want list right now. So high, in fact, that I’m not sure why I’m writing this instead of enjoying the bliss of a soft pillow right now, so I’m going upstairs to bed.
Pray for me; I’ll be dreaming of dancing purple dinasaurs.

Moosie part II

At about 3 am this morning, they admitted Moosie to the children’s hospital. My wife has been with him all night, and in about a half an hour I’ll be leaving my work (which I have been at for the past 12 hours) and heading to the hospital to take my turn watching the Moose. The doctors are saying that he is asthmatic, which would have come as no surprise if they hadn’t told us last time he was sick that he wasn’t. Still, we expected as much. Now we have to maintain a bedside vigil for the poor kid. He only knows how to say about a dozen words, and something tells me that “tv”, “ball”, and “bubbles” won’t get him very far in the complicated world of medical terminology.
Today should prove to be an interesting one. In the glory days of my youth I wouldn’t have hesitated to pull a 24-hour marathon, but the demands of age and responsibility have taken their toll and I can forsee that I will be praying heavily to the caffeine gods this morning. May they have mercy on my soul.

Moosie

The phone rang about an hour ago. It was my wife, with an update from the hospital. She took our 18 month old second son in earlier this evening when he starting showing signs of respiratory distress. 4 hours, 3 ventolin treatments, an one round of steroids later, he is showing little improvement and it looks like he may be spending the night. I’m not quite sure how that is going to work out, as I’m sure she won’t want to leave him there alone, and I’m currently in the middle of a 12-hour shift. I’m starting to get a sinking feeling that instead of going home to bed this morning, I’ll be either going home to babysit the other two kids while my wife sleeps, or will be going to the hospital to stay with number two. Either way, it’s looking like it’s going to be a very long day.
Moosie, as he is commonly known, came to us five weeks early and spent the first ten days of his life in the Neonatal ICU unit learning how to breathe. He wasn’t so hot with eating, either, and had to have everything pumped into his stomach via a feeding tube. I can’t think of many things more distressing to a parent than watching your five-minute-old baby be rushed away with sensors strapped all over his body and an oxygen dome over his head, knowing that he is struggling to do something as basic as breathe. Meanwhile your wife, who has just accomplished the biological equivalent of passing a thanksgiving turkey, is lying on the bed, bleeding, concerned that the tiny life she just introduced into this world will not be long for it. You learn to put on a pretty brave face in a situation like that, even though secretly you fear the worst.
Luckily, our fears were unfounded. Aided by a healthy seven pound birth weight, Moosie pulled through admirably. It was actually quite comical to see him in the NICU next to all those four pound preemies; he looked like he had helped himself to a few of them for breakfast. This is when the nickname Moosie came into play, and since he now weighs over 30 pounds and is nearly as tall as his three year old brother, it looks like he’ll be keeping it for a while. Unfortunately, in addition to the nickname he has also retained the respiratory difficulties that plagued him as a newborn. It seems that every time he catches a cold, his lungs pack up solid and his breathing becomes heavy and laboured. Hot steam doesn’t help, a humidifier doesn’t help, and even the time-honoured Vicks vapo-rub doesn’t improve his condition. It’s scary watching him having to work so hard for his oxygen and feeling his little body shake when he breathes. It makes you appreciate your health, and hope above all else that his improves rapidly.
It also carries a sobering “what if” factor. My wife has been following the news of the possible influenza pandemic and is terrified that it will be the monstrous second coming of the plague that the media are predicting. As usual, I have refused to take it seriously and have brushed it off as the fear-fuelled product of a media in search of a big story. Relax, I told her. It probably won’t even happen. Besides, even if it does become as widespread as they are predicting, the only people who would die would be the sick and elderly. Then it hit me. The sick and elderly. Our little Moose could be a casualty. That hits pretty close to home. It’s easy to ignore significant events when we feel that they do not or will not impact us personally. It is another thing entirely to come to the realization that one of your children could die in one of those events. On some levels, it’s hard to not want to pull back on everything that is near & dear to you in the hopes that somehow you can find a way to keep them out of the world’s firing line. Yet as I am so fond of telling my wife, you can’t live your life in a bubble. Each day you open your eyes and hope for the best, making the most of the cards you are dealt. Still, sometimes I can’t help but be shocked at the frailty of human life, and the razor fine edge of balance that is present in so many of our lives. To be presented with even a remote possibility that you may lose something or someone important to you makes you that much more appreciative of what you do have. I hope my little boy is OK.

Azure Assurance

The kids have been uncommonly difficult for the past few days. One is sick, another is teething, and the third one is just extremely high maintenance. We are exhausted, and our reserves of patience are minimal. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we’re sitting on a tinderbox here.
Parenthood is without a doubt the most difficult thing I have ever undertaken. It is absolutely exhaustive in every aspect of your life; emotionally, psychologically, physically, and financially. I remain convinced that children are born cute as a measure of protection, because after fathering three of the little squirts within a four year period, I have begun to understand why there are so many occurrences in nature of parents eating their young. Still, nothing in this life can bring you as much joy as a child. It truly is a study in extremes; a child can drive you to a point of frustration you never imagined possible, only to have that frustration evaporate as they look up and give you one of their goofy, semi-toothless grins. Lately, however, frustration has been taking a heavy toll and those grins aren’t getting as much mileage as they used to.
I think that one of the reasons parenthood is so difficult is that there are literally no breaks. Even if you somehow manage to get a night or (heaven forbid) weekend away from the little monsters, you spend the whole time wondering if they have burned your house down in your absence or having nightmares about them tying up the sitter and bungee jumping from the second floor windows. From the moment they come screaming into the world until the moment your tired body gives out and you exit it, they are ever-present. It makes me tired just writing about it.
Perspective usually comes to me with the subtlety of a brick to the head, and this time was no exception. On the way to work tonight, the sky to the northeast was impossibly blue. Not the typical grim announcement of encroaching nightfall, but a deep, vibrant cerulean that I can’t recall ever seeing in a winter sky before. It got my attention in a big way. I stood there for a minute just gawking, and suddenly it all just seemed to fall into place. I’m not the first person to do this, I won’t be the last, and I’m not the only one doing it now. There will be good days and bad days, but the important thing is that one way or another, I’ll get through them. As surely as the sun went down tonight, it will rise again in the morning, and will bring with it another day of new experiences, frustrations, and discoveries.
Everything is going to be alright.

To blog or not to blog….what was the question?

Blogging, it seems, is taking the world by storm. I have been fascinated with the phenomenon ever since I discovered that one of my favourite musicians had completely changed the format of his web page, to the point that it is actually difficult to find out anything about his music by visiting there. Where I used to go to find information on concert schedules and CD releases, I now find daily postings on world events, political movements, and human rights lobbying. All of this is accompanied by an open access forum which provides a dizzying barrage of opinions, most of which are extremely left-leaning and some of which are extremely well thought-out. Others, not so much. Still, I suppose that the great and terrible thing about an opinion is that everyone is allowed to have one.
At first I was just caught up in it, and was actually quite unsure of what a “blog” actually was. I eventually learned that “blog” was short for “web log”, and meant an on-line diary of sorts. I am still mystified as to why the powers that create modern language chose to preserve the b in the term. Electronic mail became e-mail, so shouldn’t an electronic diary be an e-journal, or an e-log? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The medium is intriguing. After centuries of people keeping secret diaries full of deep, dark, personal secrets, suddenly it is in vogue to write them down and publish them in a place where anyone intrepid enough to locate your entries can read them. Talk about a psychological quantum shift.
The number of blogs on the web increases daily, and they run the spectrum from “Jenny’s blog of boys I like” to elaborate travelogues and descriptions of late-night activities that I don’t personally care to know about. The beauty of the internet is that you can find pretty much anything you are looking for if you search long enough. The purpose of this blog is twofold. First, I am terrible at keeping a journal. For those of you who share this problem, you can probably identify with the below excerpts from my most recent autobiography:

May 22, 1999: OK, here we go. I have finally decided to pull things together and start writing down some of the details of this thing I call a life. We are all given a seemingly infinite number of moments to live, and it seems only fitting that I start recording where they go. Unfortunately, today was somewhat uneventful and I am tired, what with it being 3 am and all. Still, I wanted to start this now. Even if I only write a little bit each day, eventually it will all add up to something. See you tomorrow.

January 30, 2001: Well, that didn’t work so well.

I have tried on numerous occasions to set the habit but just can’t seem to stick with it. I don’t know what it is. Many people, my wife included, have kept very successful journals. They even read fairly well, even though the pages are not always adorned with earth-shattering accounts of great and glorious events. Still, as I force myself to sit and write about how I was so tired this morning that I had to tie my shoe four times before the damn bunny would go through the hole, I can’t help feeling that someone would get more excitement out of kicking back with a bowl full of popcorn watching the paint dry on their living room walls than reading this. Enter the blog. It’s fresh, exciting, and different. Somehow, it doesn’t feel as much like work to me. Most of all, there is a strange irony about it: even though every entry is posted publicly for the world to scrutinize, the web is so impossibly huge that nobody will ever read this unless I tell them exactly where it is. It allows me to keep a journal without feeling like I’m keeping a journal.
Reason two is a little more egotistical. As I grow older, I seem to be shedding the desire to keep my thoughts to myself. A lot of things are happening in our world that I think deserve some commentary. Right or wrong, on this blog I can provide it. You may agree or you may think I am a raving lunatic, or you may get halfway through these posts and suddenly realize: “Wait a minute here. This isn’t girlsgonewild.com!” Chances are, the only eyes that will ever see these words are my own, or maybe those of some lonely blogspot moderator who will stumble upon this site and shake his head. In any case, the words will be here. I haven’t fully decided what the focus of these entries will be, or if they will even be focused at all. Chances are they will follow whatever motivates me on the day of their writing, and may or may not be informative or insightful. There are already four posts here, which I think for me is a personal record. I have added a hit counter so I can track the number of poor unfortunate souls whose journey through cyberspace happens to have them land here. As of this morning there were two; which leads me to the real question: who reads this crap?

We are the youth…..

The news tonight featured a very distressing segment on kids who strangle themselves for fun. Apparently the sensation of depriving oneself of air provides an addictive rush that kids are literally willing to die for. The situation has escalated to the point that children are making a game of this, and doing it with alarming regularity. Unfortunately, some of them have not been smart enough to realize that when you cut off your air supply, it’s lights out in fairly short order. It is widely known that it is impossible to strangle oneself using one’s own hands; ultimately the body will fall unconscious due to lack of air and when it does, the muscles will relax and the hands will release their grip, enabling the process of breathing to resume. In their inventive glory, these children have even figured out a way around this primal survival mechanism. In their desire to attain the rush, they will use anything available to them to stop themselves from breathing; computer cords, ropes, even their own belts. Tragically, some of these kids have become so addicted to the feeling that they are trying it at home, alone. Sadly, they do not live to see the person who removes these makeshift nooses and tries to revive them.
This is absolutely baffling to me. We did a lot of stupid things as children, but usually it involved ringing people’s doorbells in the middle of the night or at worst, jumping off the neighbors’ roofs onto their trampolines while they were out of town for the weekend. Never in a hundred years would it have occurred to us that hey, maybe it would be fun to strangle ourselves. As a parent, I can only imagine the horror and the anguish that must result from losing a child in this manner. As a bystander, I can only watch and wonder if this is really a reflection of what society has come to. Why are these kids doing this? Can it really be attributed to nothing more than old fashioned childhood mischeif? I personally have a hard time believing that kids would go to this kind of an extreme out of their own misguided curiousity. I think these kids, sad as it sounds, are bored. I think that they have too much time on their hands and not a deep enough appreciation of what they have. At the risk of sounding old school and breaking out the stereotypes, we have all heard the phrase “Idle hands are the devil’s playground.” I was fortunate enough to be born to parents who made us work, and who cared enough to keep us busy with worthwhile pursuits. If we had nothing to do, they would find something for us to do. Something that usually involved cleaning, raking, or painting. We learned at a young age to make sure we always had something to keep us busy, or risk the loss of the afternoon to some backyard work detail designed to make us miserable. We hated it at the time. I can recall cursing my parents on many a summer afternoon as my friends sat at home playing video games while I weeded the garden or swept the driveway. Today, I see the method behind their madness. We learned the value of an hour, and learned to appreciate the free time we did have. Above all, we knew that our parents were always watching, and that we had to govern our actions accordingly.
This last bit is key, and I fear that it is one of the major causes of decline in the modern family and likely a contributing factor to these deaths. There seems to be a growing disconnect between parents and children today; an increasing trend towards a “kids will be kids, and bad behaviours will correct themselves” mentality. Every parent has the right to choose how they will raise their children, and ultimately how those children will be governed, cared for, taught, and disciplined. Unfortunately, many become too preoccupied with the demands of their own lives to be an effective example in the lives of their children.
I am not trying to point fingers at the parents of these kids or say that these tragedies are their faults. As a father of three, I fully understand how easy it is to be swept up by so many time requirements and simply lose track of what one child is doing. There is also an element of youthful inquisition that must be given credence. If a child truly wants to do something, they will find a way; even under the most watchful eye. The point I am trying to make is not that these families have failed, or even that the deaths of these children could have been prevented if the parents had been more vigilant or more present. Indeed, in these particular instances I know nothing of the background of these children or their family situations, and to pass judgement would be both cruel and injust. What I am saying, is that as parents we all have a responsibility to our children to ensure that we not only are aware of their activities, but that we police them accordingly. Many will argue with this stance, and they have that right; but my children will not become statistics because I was too busy to care. They will not be allowed to harm themselves because I did not involve myself enough to put a stop to a potentially dangerous activity. There seems to be a common misgiving among my generation that we need to raise our children as our friends, and should treat them as such. With all respect due to those who choose to follow that approach, it is a recipe for disaster. Our children will find their own friends. They need us to be parents. This may mean many hurtful discussions or heated arguments. No three words from a child can wound a parent more deeply than the time-honoured classic “I hate you”. Suck it up. If you are truly doing your due diligence as a parent, then there will be times that your child will hate you, and you likely won’t feel much better about them. There will be times that your views will be so far out of whack with your children that you will wonder how on earth they can possibly be a product of your own flesh. Please, don’t let this break you. Get involved with their lives and stay involved. Say no to the parties that sound suspicious. Know who your kids are spending time with, and what they are doing during that time. Be intrusive. Amid the ugliness, there will also be times that your children will bring you more joy than you can possibly imagine; and that is worth keeping them alive for. Who knows? Your child may be one of the perfect few that will never give you anything to worry about. On the other hand, that five minutes that you took from reading a magazine to go check on your kid because things just didn’t feel right may be just enough time to remove an extension cord from around their neck before that precious light in their eyes goes out completely.

Tick-tick-boom

Time, or the lack of it, just might be the defining element of all of our lives. The adages coined around this topic are in endless supply: time is money, time waits for no man, time heals all wounds, etc, etc, etc. It is the currency of experience, and the driving force behind innumerable decision. While struggling to free up enough hours to juggle two jobs, three children, and a wife, I voiced my frustrations to a friend. He shared the following advice, which I was told was given to him by a business associate: “The biggest problem with selling your time is that you are always running out of inventory”. Oh how that rings true.

Here is a challenge to anyone who may come across this. Starting today, make a point of finding 5 minutes each day for yourself. Spend it reading, thinking, or pursuing a hobby, but spend it on something that will satisfy and enrich you. The moments that you will be able to reserve for yourself will get more and more difficult to find as your life progresses, so make the most of what you have right now.

The end of the great beginning…..

So this is it. The new day dawns to the hopes that a Conservative minority government will find a way to fly before the axes of bureaucratic maneuvering hack away the tree it’s tiny nest is perched in. I don’t keep a conventional journal, and reading so many posts of outrage against the Conservatives, their policies, and seemingly anything else with any values has prompted me to make my voice heard, even if it is only to myself and a very select few. You will not find new meaning to your life here, but perhaps you will find a point of view that you had not previously considered, or something else that might make you stop and think, even if only for a moment. If that is the case, I will consider this project to be a success. Otherwise, only you can choose whether or not you will continue to visit this place and subject yourselves to the ramblings of a madman…..