Another Leap

Seventy-one months. 

That’s how long our stunt-man of a son, Crashy McBumperton, went before finding his way into our local E.R. Mere weeks shy of his sixth birthday, he leapt into the sky from our backyard swing.  Despite days of practice he couldn’t quite stick the landing, and instead ended up snapping his ulna and dislocating his elbow. 

My wife was supervising or else we both would have been in the hospital.  About to begin the evening dishes, I stopped when the shouting began.  Soon the two of us were stumbling around the house while passing Annaka back and forth, gathering bottles, medicine, diaper bags, trying to convince him to just keep his arm straight and “whatever you do don’t look at it!”

Before long we were huddled around a bed in St. Anthony’s emergency room.  Soon an I.V. was put into his unbroken arm to start getting him pain relief.  Annaka watched, curious and relieved, perhaps, that for the first time in her life she wasn’t the one getting poked.  X-rays confirmed the significance of the break, and within an hour Crashy and mom were on their way to St. Louis Children’s Hospital to put the arm back into place.

There’s always something, isn’t there?

That was about three weeks ago.  He’s healing well, and soon, before much of the summer has been used up, he’ll hopefully have the cast off and will be able to swim and throw and do much of the other things that little kids do when school is out and the weather is warm.

Annaka, also, is healing.  She and her mother and grandma returned from Pittsburgh on April 1^st.  Three months after her surgery, Annaka’s medical team decided she was where she needed to be and was “fixed,” so to speak, from a surgical standpoint.  Nancy’s gift was working and the liver team had figured out the right mix of anti-rejection drugs to keep her safe.  In fact, a new test—developed by one of Pittsburgh’s own doctors—suggested that Annaka, after all her pitfalls, fell into a sub-group of transplant recipients that had a higher than average likelihood of NOT rejecting an organ.  In her time back at home, Annaka has learned to crawl and pull up and should be toddling like the toddler she is by the end of summer, catching up on so many of the milestones that alluded her during her recovery out east.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is, she’s dangerously allergic to all dairy products.  (As an aside, do you have any idea how many grocery items have at least some smidgeon of cow’s milk?  If they get a union we’re doomed.) She’s also very allergic to a host of other culinary staples, such as eggs, bananas, strawberries and apples, as well as squash, peas, coconut, and perhaps even beef.

We carry an Epi-pen with her at all times and have to be super-vigilant about potential cross-contamination, having already returned to the E.R. since Crashy’s break to deal with a vomiting spell instigated by an unknown (but most likely avocado) allergen.  Dealing with the food allergy issue after the broken liver issue was kind of like climbing a mountain, getting to the top, and then being told, “Oh, yeah, this is actually an active volcano.  Watch your step on the way down.”

There’s always something, though, isn’t there?

            Speaking of always something, graduation Sunday was this past week, a time perhaps a little heavier on nostalgia than other days out of the year.  Although I wasn’t able to attend the ceremony and I know school teachers aren’t supposed to say things like this, the class of 2017 will always have a special place in my memory.  This was my last group of 7^th graders before I headed over to the high school in 2012, and a fraction of them made up the 8^th grade scholastic bowl team that went to state a year later.  Many of these students were in my sophomore English class during the 2014-15 school year, and about a baker’s dozen of this crew made it a point to visit my classroom door on occasion to fill me in on their lives as upperclassmen.

            I will miss these students, and it would be in bad taste to not use this forum now to offer the fraction of them that read newspaper columns one last lesson:  there really is always something.

            This is life, the world we’ve partially made, a world of food allergies and splintered arms, of drowning polar bears and world leaders who just cannot put down their smartphones. 

That’s the way it is, though, and the way it’s always been, and avoiding those “somethings” is not really the point.  We have those mountains, the caves, the jungles and the swamps, seasons and events in our lives that are difficult to traverse.  Sometimes they seem put in our way to bring us closer to God, and sometime they are just there because we live on a planet full of, well, mountains and caves and jungles and swamps.

Trying to find success in life, or happiness or comfort, or whatever it is that young people try to find these days, by avoiding all the “somethings,” isn’t a good idea.  Your comfort zone will get so tight it will start to feel like a jail. 

Returning, then, to our hero, Crashy moped around the house a few days after the break.  He played more IPAD than he should have and watched a lot of TV.  He wore a sling for about a week, too skittish about the weight of the cast to even walk without it.

Soon, though, the sling came off.  Soon he was back outside, sliding down slides, swinging on swings, running from his sister after telling her not to sing.

            And although we’ll recommend he stay seated, it’s probably only a matter of time before he takes another leap.