Little bald kids don't make me cry

Copyright Leader Publications 2006

Due to the recent Colorado shooting tragedy, and my son’s recent seizure, I think it’s time for a “Count our blessings” column.  My heart goes out to the victims and their families of the tragedy, including the shooter, who must have had a mental problem to do such a thing.

(My son mentioned here is now 28)

I don’t know why I cried when I saw him. I usually didn’t cry at the little bald kids attached to IV poles.

            These kids are always present in the waiting room of our son’s hematologist.

            Our son has a mild blood disease requiring infrequent visits to a hematologist. The doctor is also an oncologist, or cancer specialist, which explains the little bald kids attached to IV poles who are always there.

            Our son, now 22, was born with other health problems. He is deaf and as a baby was diagnosed as hypotonic; his muscles were weak. Add to the list chronic asthma he developed by the age of four, and you can probably imagine my son and I spend our share of time in the waiting rooms of many specialists.

            A neighbor of mine used to tell me that whenever she found herself feeling down, she would just think of me. Considering the health concerns of our one son alone, on top of the fact that we had four other children, I could kind of understand her feelings.

            Once, however, when she said it, I began to feel rather down myself.  If I really had it so bad, I wondered, why didn’t I see it?

            And then I realized.

            My neighbor had two children, both of them healthy. Therefore, she never saw what I saw in the waiting rooms of some of our son’s doctors and hospitals.

            My neighbor never saw the parents of the 6-week old baby as they were being told their son would suffer brain damage, if not from the meningitis that was swelling his brain, then from the medications he was being given to fight it. That was, if he survived at all.

            My neighbor also never saw the mother of the 17 month-old baby-sitting next to me in the pulmonology clinic. She held her chubby baby on her lap, his oxygen tube attached to a tank behind his stroller. The mother’s face was beaming.

            She told me that she took her baby home form the hospital just the day before for the first time in his life. She explained he was born prematurely and his lungs were so severely damaged that doctors were afraid to let her take him home even then, and only allowed it on the condition she bring him back to the doctor’s office every day for at least the first two weeks.

            And she was just beaming.

            My neighbor also never saw the 14-year-old girl, head shaved with a big, black X marking the spot for the radiation that was supposed to attack her inoperable brain tumor.

            I still remember her parents, who were divorced, standing apart from each other, trying to comfort their daughter while steadfastly ignoring one another. The tension was palpable. I remember thinking how funny it seemed that the father’s girlfriend, who was with him, looked remarkably like his ex-wife.

            In most of these cases, I felt sorry for the parents. With this one, I felt sorry for the girl.

            As far as the bald kids hooked to IV poles, they usually didn’t move me to tears because they gave me no reason to cry. Those kids knew how to live life for the moment. They were in a doctor’s waiting room and there were new toys to be played with, and, by golly, they were going to play.

            As far as the boy mentioned earlier who did make me cry, well, it wasn’t the boy, really, who caused my tears, it was his little sister. The boy was about 8, his sister, maybe 5. The little girl was thoroughly berating her brother for something he had done wrong during their play.

            The scene caused me to think of the times when well-meaning people told me that by having a disabled child, our other children would learn compassion.

            “Compassion!” I would think to myself. “How I wished they would show their brother some compassion.”

            No, siblings of the disabled, or even, as in the boy’s case, of the seriously or terminally ill, don’t necessarily learn compassion. What they do learn, however, is that the disabled and the ill are really no different from anybody else, and that brings a sense of normalcy into their lives.

            And watching such a normal scene occurring in a day in the life of a little bald kid attached to an IV pole is, I think, what made me cry.