Ever by My Side (26 page)

We decided to subject Emily to one more test and waited for the results. In private, I already knew the answer. Though I had not and could not process this answer, why else would I insist the pulmonologist call me on my cell phone with the results? I needed to be the one to break the news to Kathy and when the call eventually came, I was driving home from work. Even before I flipped the phone open I pulled over to the side of the road. Like I said, subconsciously, I already knew. The doctor’s words crawled inside me
and as they did, the prospect of seeing my two-year-old daughter lead an average, ordinary life came to an end. Struck hollow and breathless, I felt like I had been told my child had gone missing, left to wonder whether she had simply wandered off or been abducted, never to return.

I should have been cruising home—smiling with relief, one hand on the wheel, windows down, feeling the bass from the stereo resonating in my bones. Instead, all I could do was envy the normal people walking the streets or driving home to their uncomplicated lives. Men who would get to see their daughter go to the prom. Women who would grow old enough to get married. Fathers who would get to walk their daughter down the aisle.

By the time I walked into the house and Kathy saw the look on my face, there was no need to speak, the test result written in the tears running down my cheeks. Her knees buckled and she fell to the floor before I could reach her. For the longest time we just held each other, trembling, fighting down the screams we so desperately wanted to scream for fear of waking Emily as she napped in the next room.

Kathy finally managed to string some words together.

“Now what do we do?”

Between gasps I managed to reply, “The doctor says she wants to meet with us next week to talk about the disease.”

“But did she say … I mean, how long does she …?”

And with this thought I lost her to another round of grief and fear. No amount of crying has ever or will ever rid me of this fear, but on that day it was raw and fierce and just getting started.

“Will we lose her?” said Kathy.

Suddenly, dropped into this frightening new reality, all I could offer was one of the most painful yet honest statements any father will ever have to make.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Meanwhile our innocent little girl slept peacefully in her crib as a curious tomcat cruised by, a tomcat who never knew that the culture results for one Reginald C. Cat reside near the very top of Emily’s permanent medical record to this day.

E
veryone knows that mothers and fathers the world over possess an innate unwavering desire to protect their off-spring. Though this instinct remained strong and intact, Emily’s diagnosis had effectively crushed my ability to stop all harm at any cost. Only now did I understand how I had been denied this parental right from the moment she took her first breath.

Pain can manifest itself in many forms, but our reaction is fundamentally the same—a desire to escape, to make it go away. As a veterinarian, I was familiar with a certain look, the one an animal gives to its owner when it has to be restrained for a shot or has to have a bandage changed or an intravenous catheter placed. This look is directed upward, eyes wet and sorrowful, a look that whispers, “Why are you letting them hurt me?” How many times did Emily floor me with the exact same look? When Emily was sick and in the hospital, getting stuck with needles and being restrained for X-rays, how many times did I scream inside my head when she added, “Please, Daddy, make them stop!”

I suppose there are plenty of parents out there who when told that their daughter has a terminal disease will try to carry on as normal, apply a smile, and force themselves to engage with the
world. My hat goes off to them. They are better parents than I because all I could hear was a ticking clock, time passing by, a death closing in, until the only thing I knew for sure was that something quiet and peaceful had crawled inside of me, curled up, and lay down to die—hope.

I knew I was in trouble when I owned up to a shocking knee-jerk response to one of my more difficult cases.

His name was Buster, a big, brawny white American bulldog, capable of winning hearts with his goofy grin. He lived with his owner, I’ll call her Doris, in a beat-up VW Beetle and together the two of them would cruise around town, panhandling, raiding trash cans for recyclable aluminum cans, and hopping from soup kitchens to food pantries as part of the daily grind of the abandoned, ignored, and homeless.

Doris may have had some mental health and personal hygiene issues, but when you saw her around Buster all that hit you was the unabashed love of a beleaguered, forgotten member of our society for the one genuine, nonjudgmental beacon in her life, the dog who always called shotgun.

It was the fire that caught the local media’s attention—homeless woman falls asleep while smoking a cigarette—classic scenario in a peculiar domicile, glowing nicotine stick fueled by fast-food wrappers littering the car. Doris managed to wake up in time and escape the VW unscathed. Buster, asleep in his trash nest in the front passenger seat, wasn’t so lucky, succumbing to second- and third-degree burns over about 30 percent of his body as his homestead turned into an inferno.

Buster was presented to me for burn wound management and reconstructive surgery, and I was happy to do the work given his situation and knowing full well that Doris, now completely homeless, would never be able to pay me back.

At the time, I was heavily involved in fund-raising for the CF
Foundation, convinced that this was my best hope for my daughter, a way I could make a difference and help in the quest for a cure. There is nothing pleasant about begging for money. There are too many deserving causes, Doris and Buster in-your-face reminders of untold suffering, of people with far bigger problems, facing hurdles that would make them grateful for my daughter’s situation. There I was busting my hump, trawling for a few dollars here and there, pleading with the intensity of a father who would do anything to help his sick child, and then just one day after the story of Doris and Buster’s plight, money had poured into the fund set up by a local newspaper, to the tune of nearly ten thousand dollars.

Of course I should have realized that you cannot trump a sad injured-animal story. There’s a reason why the final segment of the news is more often than not given over to a touchy-feely tale regarding a lost cat or the heroism of a dog. But I wasn’t in a good place. However open-minded I tried to be my new reality pared Buster’s story down to a simple choice—a sick dog or a sick child, and the world had voted unanimously for the animal. My sickened heart was convinced that if Emily had been the one pulled from that burning VW she would never have won over the public’s sympathy in the same way as poor Buster.

The well-deserved slap across my face came weeks later at Buster’s discharge. Even if we have never experienced severe burns all of us seem to understand that they are synonymous with unremitting pain. The application of every dressing, attention to the wounds, daily bandage changes compounded this dog’s agony, but throughout it all, Buster was tolerant and forgiving, his goofy grin letting me know the real Buster still resided somewhere below the black and seeping scabs and the thick shellac of creams. It took several surgeries to put him back together and, given his short white fur, Buster would always have to be cautious to avoid exposing his fleshy
pink scars to the powerful desert sun, but seeing this patchwork quilt of a dog melting with delight in the arms of Doris after his last suture was removed brought the reality of my former resentment into focus in an uncomfortable way. Since when did helping sick animals and restoring happiness in the lives of their owners make me unfaithful to my daughter? What had I become now that I no longer recognized myself? Here was a woman with nothing to offer this dog other than herself. She had distilled their bond to its bare minimum and what was left was joy and a future that opened up all kinds of possibilities so long as they had each other. Wasn’t this precisely what I owed my daughter? Strip away the negativity, forget about the grim reality of her medical statistics and the daily burdens of what she endured, and see a sick child who wants to be happy and make others happy. Who knows what the future will hold for any of us. What kind of happiness could she possibly achieve, what kind of memories could she build, burdened by a father selfishly consumed by his own fear and grief? Doris and Buster had nothing but the joy of living with each other and by the looks on their faces they were the wealthiest couple on the planet.

A clinical success like Buster’s might lead me away from unfocused heartache for a time, but it felt like little more than a balm—calming, soothing, helping the pain abate but not go away altogether. I was consumed by the uncertainty of my daughter’s future. I couldn’t see a happy ending. How could I enjoy a story that ends when it has hardly begun?

I tried forcing my brain to appreciate how lucky I was simply to have this child in my life. I would think about Kathy’s amniocentesis, wonder what might have happened if Emily’s mutation had been detected. To this day the possibility of not having her, of aborting the pregnancy had we known, hits me like a sucker punch, leaving me light-headed and with a lingering dull ache in my gut. It took
two more difficult cases to let me know that I was finally on the right track to finding a new equilibrium that I could live with.

Arizona is home to a variety of unusual wildlife, and where suburban sprawl meets unspoiled desert, animals such as jackrabbits, tortoises, packrats, and javelina can be forced into unnatural interactions with man, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

The call for help came from a wildlife rescue volunteer who had discovered a young female bobcat lying on the side of the road, alive but only just. She had obviously been hit by a car and was unable to stand, and her breathing was erratic.

“We think she’s broken her left front leg and her right hind leg. Do you think there’s any chance you might be able to fix her up?”

My mouth said, “Yes, bring her right over,” but my mind said, “Are you nuts? This is a wild animal. There can be no ‘nice kitty-kitty,’ no assertive grabbing by the scruff of her neck to make her behave. She’s got serious teeth and serious claws and as frightened as she is she’s going to want to use them. If she’s having problems breathing chances are she’s sustained some serious chest trauma—broken ribs, lacerated lungs, who knows what might be going on in there. How do you propose getting a listen with that stethoscope of yours? And let’s say you are able to repair the broken legs. How on earth are you going to convince a wildcat to take it easy, to go watch soap operas on TV and eat bonbons for a few weeks while everything heals up? As soon as this cat stands up it is going to have to use at least one of the broken legs you just put back together!”

When the cat arrived she was sedated, enough to take some X-rays of her chest. Though her ribs and her diaphragm were intact, normal lungs should be full of air, showing up black and empty on the image. The bobcat’s lungs were more of a murky gray with patches of dense whiteness, the signs of severe bruising from the trauma, the kind of lungs you don’t want to anesthetize.

“Taking her to surgery at this stage might be a disaster,” I said. “But I’m not sure we have much choice. Most domestic cats won’t tolerate a temporary cast or a bandage on one leg let alone two so I don’t hold out much hope for a wild bobcat.”

The volunteer was a woman in her forties, with kind eyes framed by the crow’s feet of an outdoorsy desert dweller. She wore a T-shirt with a logo touting her wildlife rescue group, like a uniform, to make sure I realized she was legitimate.

“Just do your best,” she said. “It’s all you can do. If she makes it we can do the rest. If she doesn’t … well, it’s got to be better than dying on the side of the road.”

Have you ever had that feeling you get when someone says something and their pitch and timing are so perfect that you can feel the words reaching inside your chest?

“Do you want to die, or do you want to die trying? Give up or give it a shot.”

This was what I was hearing, in the most candid, honest, and unemotional terms possible.

And so I decided to try, working on this magnificent anesthetized creature with the biggest paws I have ever had the privilege of squeezing, attaching all manner of stainless steel plates to bony shards with a liberal sprinkling of screws in an attempt to shore up the fractured humerus and the fractured femur.

I was about three hours into the surgery and things were not going well. The bobcat’s lung damage was catching up with her, the oxygen saturation of her blood on a steady decline, when an urgent phone call was piped into the operating room.

“Hi, this is Ms. Saunders, I’m a fifth-grade elementary teacher and my class of students heard about the injured bobcat and wanted to help raise money for her rehabilitation.”

In the background I could hear the shrill screams and laughter
of marauding children high on the possibility of rooting for a cause, of doing good, and for an instant I flashed back to my memory of rescuing a bagful of abandoned kittens as a kid.

To their delight, and not least because I needed to focus on a patient who was trying to die on me, I hastily agreed, the teacher thanking me, wishing me luck, informing me that the class had already named the bobcat Lucy.

What was I thinking? If this cat died in the OR or the repair went on to fail, it would mean I had just broken the hearts of thirty impressionable fledgling philanthropists.

But Lucy didn’t die. Call it the resiliency of the wild, a surplus of feline lives, or the power of positive thinking from a bunch of rowdy ten-year-olds. Whatever the reason, Lucy came through the surgery and the anesthesia and was safely transported to a rehabilitation center, where she remained for nearly three months.

The fifth-grade class painted pictures, sent her homemade cards, had bake sales and penny drives, rooting for Lucy to get well soon and, some six weeks after the surgery, I was invited to see how she was getting on. This was one of the few occasions in my professional life in which I was thrilled to receive a hostile reception. Though there was still some residual lameness in her front leg, she was strong on her back end, receiving me with the kind of wide-eyed animosity that makes you say, “My, what big teeth you have.”