The Enormous Pressure of Impending Despair

Around a month ago, I found a lump on my son’s wrist. After his bath one night I was drying him off and we were having our usual post-bath giggles. I held his arms up to get him into his pajamas and stopped. A lump on his wrist - small, but big enough to notice. He has chubby wrists, so I suppose it kind of blended in.

It was weird noticing it, because I see him so much and hadn’t noticed it before. When I finally did, it was so sudden and abrupt it would have been like seeing a pimple on the Mona Lisa.

An Xray was ordered and an ultrasound swiftly after that. The speed with which all of this happened was alarming, but like those standing near the edge of a cliff who aren’t aware that it is about to break away, we didn’t think anything would come of it. We were nestled safely in our own ignorance, thinking that it won’t be that. It couldn’t be that. We’ve already had a hard enough year - tonsillitis six times, pneumonia, a broken leg and an assortment of other ailments for a kid that isn’t even two? Surely, it couldn’t be that.

The uncertainty only grew. Our pediatrician called us after the ultrasound and when he heard that the technician wanted him to get an MRI, he told us to go. Immediately.

Breath caught in chest. Oh Shit’s muttered repeatedly. Fear is not anything new when you have a child. I’ve heard it only gets worse as they get older, their independence deepening the feeling of helplessness that parents feel when they realise that they have less and less control over their child. So we were used to the fear, the anxiety at night staring into the darkness, trying not to wake him but wanting to see the rise and fall of his chest, that magical breath in that little magical life.

After that phone call, standing in some alleyway with the city moving all around us and the indifferent sky above us - it was then that I felt it around me - the hungry sadness. The waiting sadness. The impending despair. It had been summoned, called to action, mobilised, and I felt it in the air around me. Perhaps there is sadness all around us, discarded, shed like the skin of some invisible snake and lying in wait. Slumbering shades, lying dormant and waiting for their chance, floating through the air, tightening around my throat, lodging in my chest, running their sharp talons down my neck. It isn’t sadness’ fault, though. Sadness is just designed to do what it is supposed to do - it’s instinctual. But I felt it all around me. It was what happens when fear turns to something else, when it becomes actualised, a receptacle for the amorphous nothingness that lurks in all of us.

The more I think of it, the more I realise that sadness isn’t the right word. Sadness is what I think it is. Fear is what I think it is. That’s what we tell ourselves. But it is more than that - it is lead, it is ice, it is the abyss in front of you, one step and you fall and there is no bottom to it. It is the idea that everything can go away and that nothing is guaranteed.

And so we checked him into the Pediatric Short Stay unit and prepared ourselves for an MRI. If you have never had to watch a cannula put in a toddler, I would recommend avoiding it as far as possible. For one, their veins are tiny, so it takes a long time to find a good one. His screams. I hugged him tight, whispered into his ears but it didn’t work. At one point, he looked at me and his eyes asked why. I didn’t have an answer.

For my son, the cannula took over an hour. It just so happened that the sedative wore off and by the time he went into the MRI, he woke up. And so, a stay overnight. Another MRI was booked. A deeper descent into the labyrinth. The chorus of beeps was neverending, the tiny bed, his tiny mind uncomprehending what was happening and why he wasn’t tucked up in his cot at home and why we were so exhausted that we could barely think.

A note about MRIs: they are terrifying for anyone. But having to sit outside of one while your son is put onto a metal slab, fast asleep, with headphones on as the slab moves in with a buzzing sound and you have to sit and wait and pray to a God that you no longer believe in that he doesn’t wake up? Well, I guess there are degrees to everything.

They are gigantic metal tombs that make sounds more at home in a techno song or a surrealistic, art house horror film. They buzz, hum, thump and yaw in such a terrifying rhythm that I began to wonder if the people who invented them might have also been moonlight sadists with a penchant for altruism.

Now for the weird part: the strange sort of chanting that the machine made. I swear to all things I believe and don’t believe in that it was saying, “Tell me, tell me.” You might think I’m crazy or was in the throes of this colossal uncertainty and stress, but I promise you, it was. It wanted to know what was in him. It needed to know. And now that I think of it, I guess that’s a good thing.

After the MRI, we had a lot of time to spend in a new part of the hospital. It was named after a famous donor who had spent a lot of time there because of a sick kid. Walking around that ward was like walking through molasses. Every parent had the same mask on their face, the same frozen features, sculpted by some hand that knew only of pain, a real one-trick-pony of an artist that knew exactly how to do one thing and one thing only.

I’ll always remember one kid: he was young-ish, 11 or 12, and he went into one of the Chemo rooms with a bag of McDonald’s. A nurse followed him and the air was dense and silent. I’ll always remember how he walked. The writer in me knows the word - trudged. It reminds me of soldiers in WW1, moving through the mud, that old Wilfred Owen despair. His shoulders were slumped as if he carried it right around with him. That beast. ______. (You’ll have to forgive me for not wanting to write out the word. It doesn’t exactly make me a lionheart to say fuck ______. It’s not an unpopular opinion - kind of like saying The Beatles are great or that pizza is the best. It has affected my family enough, though never this closely. But still, I won’t give it the dignity of a word in this word count. It doesn’t deserve the letters. And I know this might be cowardly, that we must know our enemies, but I refuse to.)

The next time I saw him, everyone in the ward was ecstatic - what I had seen was his last treatment. He was finished. They rang a bell and he high-fived everyone in the ward - his smile ran from ear-to-ear. It occurred to me then that I might have been getting a glimpse into my own future. A mirror image of what might be waiting for me. Or what if my son’s future looked different? What if no bell was rung for him? I saw the boy’s mother and she looked like she had gone 12 rounds with the Grim Reaper himself. But the look of relief on her face was real. Somewhere in there was the fear, too. The fear that they weren’t out of the woods. That they might not ever be out of the woods.

I digress. We saw the doctors heading towards us and knew they had something to say. In a display of supremely ironic timing, the hospital therapy dog had been brought in at that exact moment to visit. My son was ecstatic. He fed it treats, stroked it, hugged it. A cute dog is about as close to God that an almost 2-year old can get. And so the doctors waited.

When the time was right, they spoke to us. Not many words have stuck from that conversation but some will never go away: “Unsure” and “experts”. “”Potentially invasive” and “muscle and bone”. Finally, my wife had the courage to just ask her point-blank: “Was it ______?”

And the doctor said she wasn’t sure but couldn’t rule anything out. We would need to prepare ourselves for every outcome. A team of experts at a local specialty hospital was meeting the next evening to look over the MRI and we would be informed.

There were tears, of course. We tried our best to be brave but it just didn’t work. It just hurt too much.

*

The doctors were kind and sympathetic and we were eventually sent home. He wasn’t sick sick, so there was no reason for us to be there.

That night, he slept well. He was all messed up from two rounds of sedative and the craziness of the hospital. We, on the other hand, didn’t. The shadows were close now. I drank red wine and watched silly comedies, trying not to think about the elephant in the room.

*

The next morning, I tried to go to work. I had it in my head that if I could work, it would take my mind off everything going on. I didn’t realise this was about as futile as saying if you chose not to look up at the sky after a nuclear bomb falls then it wouldn’t hurt you. Nevertheless, I emailed my school and tried to get ready. In the shower, the dam burst. Later on, my wife genuinely asked me if I had heard something weird. She said it sounded like a wounded animal.

After I told my school I wouldn’t actually be coming in, I took him to daycare. The mind - oh, the mind. How it plays tricks. Invasive tricks, like telling me that this might be one of the last times I ever walk him there, so I had better cherish that moment. One of the kind women there asked me how he was doing and I broke down. I couldn’t even respond to a question like that. How could I tell her that this little life we loved more than anything might not be there? That he might… go away? I couldn’t.

We spent the day off work, flitting anxiously around the house and trying to nap. It was useless. The phone call loomed over our heads like a black cloud blocking out the sun. It was pain and despair and sadness waiting for us, waiting for a chance to fall, to stain us. Chris Cornell’s Black Hole Sun took on a whole new meaning for me.

I went to get him from daycare and felt like I was wading through mud. We expected the call at six and it was just after six by the time I got him home.

He was oblivious on the way home. Painfully oblivious, blissfully ignorant, happily unaware. He admired the cars and trees and when I asked him what he could see, I could barely get the words out. (I wonder, now, after all of this, if some part of this will have rubbed off on him. If, subconsciously, he would have soaked up all of the pain and fear and somewhere deep inside of him where memories are stored, this time will live on him - his own moment of staring into the abyss. I hope it doesn’t. I hope he never knows.)

In the door. Stop the buggy. Look around - I knew that if the call had been received, I would know by the look on her face. She turned the corner and had tears in her eyes. She hugged me and told me, “It’s not.” And she repeated that again and again and we hugged and cried and he looked at us and was confused, eventually getting angry that we had left him in the buggy for so long. Oh, what a blessing it was that all of that pain and fear had escaped him.

We brought him into the living room and let him play with his toys and have whatever snack he wanted. The room felt lighter, my chest felt lighter, the world felt lighter. Outside, it started to rain. I watched it for a second and thought about all of the pain in the world falling from the sky. I thought about the enormous pressure of impending despair. I thought about love. I thought about how lucky we were. How unlucky some people were and how unfair that was. Tiny caskets and baby clothes that will never be grown into. Funerals that are silent. Communities destroyed. Eulogies left unwritten because what can you say about a life that had barely begun?

But we had missed it. Narrowly avoided it. Had been scraped by it. But we made it through.

As the rain fell, I knew that our pain had gone back to wherever the pain and sadness of the world lived.

Our pain was real but it left us and evaporated into the sky, waiting for someone else to find it.

All that was left to do was hug the boy tighter than ever before and breathe. Try to smile.

And so we did.