What follows is a journal entry I wrote in 2003. In so many ways, this was written by a different person. Not only is it written in an obviously different voice than the one I use today, but the person who experienced these things was so much smaller and more easily troubled than the person who is now writing this introduction. I know Old Mike, and I love him, but I’m glad I’ve grown into Now Mike.
I’ve tried to revisit and revise this writing, but it’s proving to be an impossible task. It needs a better editor. Some things are hard to relive, and you can be too close to events even a dozen years later. I’ve changed some names to protect folks (and attorney-client confidentiality). But except for the last sentence, this is almost entirely the way it was written by a very distraught dad and weary lawyer back when it happened. Which is to say, this is raw, overly emotional, way too long, and hard to read for reasons other than the prose.
* * * * *
If there were some kind of cosmic order to the universe, the worst week of your life would begin on a Monday – the bleak day on which most of us abandon our fleeting recreation and shuffle back into another week of drudgery. Aside from good form and neat calendaring, it seems somehow in keeping with fair play for fate to schedule your worst week to start on Monday. After all, you have already braced yourself for an unpleasant day, and you would therefore be better prepared for the Hell that rains down upon you than you are on, say, a blissful Saturday morning.
Saturday, 9/27/03
10:00 A.M. – My two-year-old daughter (we’ll call her “R”) and I are in the dining room. My wife Erin is gone for yet another long weekend at work. I am eating my breakfast while R plays with her trains on the other side of the table. Though I miss my wife, I am relatively happy, and look forward to this day that I will spend with my girl. We are at the breakfast table, which is a picnic table with two long benches on either side. I am sitting on one side, eating. R is standing on the other bench, playing with her trains. She displays a deft command over the building of tracks and bridges, and is talking to Thomas and Percy and her other toy trains while she extends the length of her track. In all of our baby-proofing of the house, we stupidly never foresaw what would happen next.
While she reaches for more train track, R’s stomach presses against the table. Her stomach acts as a fulcrum, and her feet push the bench away from the table, leaving a gap between the table and the bench that I do not notice from my vantage point on the other side.
Whenever R concentrates, she always sticks out her tongue. She is concentrating on her trains when she steps into the gap.
She falls straight down and her chin hits the table.
I bolt around to get her, and the blood is already coming. I expect a bloody lip, or a cut on her chin. I hug her to me to comfort her, and I take her to the sink to clean her up. She has a cut on her lip, but as I wipe her face, I notice that the river of blood isn’t coming from the wound on her lip, but from inside her mouth.
Did she hurt her gums? Lose a tooth? I look in her mouth. Her teeth are bloody, but look intact. With a sinking feeling, I ask her to stick out her tongue.
It is lacerated and more than half of it is hanging off.
The terrifying image burns itself into my brain. Time slows to a crawl. I am suddenly faster than life, more efficient, more aware, more fully alive than any man has ever been. With my bloody child in my arms, I grab the cell phone and keys with one swipe while simultaneously stepping into my deck shoes. In two moments I am outside. In another three, she is in her car seat. As I fire the engine, I am aware that the house is unlocked and also aware that I don’t care about anything on the earth but getting to the emergency room NOW.
With one hand I steer while the other pecks out Erin’s pager number on my cell phone. I am super-humanly precise with my thumb to avoid slipping on the blood-covered face of the phone and wasting precious seconds. A neighbor waves to me as I gun the engine past her. I turn the corner onto Greenbriar and jet through a yellow light. My wheels screech in the faces of the people waiting for the bus on Holcombe.
“Daddy, I have blood,” cries my daughter from the backseat. She is touching her tongue as if it were a foreign object. “Daddy, I spit it out. I want spit it out!” she says, attempting to divest herself of the hanging chunk that used to be the last inch of her tongue.
“No baby. No, no. Don’t spit it out honey. You need that. You’ve got an owie and we’re gonna go see Mommy and get it all fixed up.” I try to keep the panic out of my voice. Could she tear or bite the rest of it off while I’m driving her to the hospital?
Somehow, my words work. She does no further damage to herself, but cries silently, tears streaming down her face as her tongue bleeds into her throat. The phone rings. In efficient, staccato bursts, I give Erin information, and she gives me instructions as to where to arrive in the vast labyrinth of the medical center.
I run red lights, daring any policeman to try to stop me. When I get to the ER entrance, Erin is there. She whisks R away and I am left to find parking.
Agonizing minutes later, I find them in the exam room. R is growing more frustrated with her tongue, and wants it out of her mouth. We wait for a doctor to come see us. Instead, we get forms to fill out. A nurse comes to collect our forms, but can offer little in the way of information, treatment, or comfort. An intern that knows Erin shows up, and discusses obscure terminology and sedative options with my wife.
Impossibly, the better part of an hour ticks away. A doctor has arrived and discussed our options: stitch it up now, or consult a plastic surgeon and see if they can see us today. We are emotional and unsure. The doctor seems to think he can fix it up without a problem. He is wrong, but we won’t know that for another thirty-six hours.
R has cried herself to sleep. An incompetent nurse comes in to stick her for an i.v. She cannot find a vein, and is nervous because she knows that Erin is a doctor. She suggests an injection of something which will achieve “conscious sedation.” Erin is dubious but distracted by R, who is now screaming again, both over her tongue and the new pain she feels from the multiple needles she has received from the nurse.
The nurse retreats to consult the doctor. I need to call my mom, and my cell phone gets no reception in the exam room. I walk outside and pass the nurse’s station. I overhear the doctor: “. . . with her tongue flapping around like that. Don’t worry – I’ll take care of the mother. Get the blah blah [drug that achieves conscious sedation] ready and we’ll do this as soon as it takes.” I am too shell-shocked to take umbrage at his insensitive tone, and instead call my mom for the fourth time to report our status.
Back in the room now, R is given the injection. Erin holds her and waits. I don’t know what to expect, but when the drug hits, I know it instantly. R’s eyes lose focus, and she becomes distraught. “Mommy? Mommy?!?” she asks, unable to recognize that her mother is right in front of her.
Erin answers R several times, but is unable to reassure her. “Michael, you probably don’t want to see this,” Erin says as the nurse and the intern help to move an increasingly agitated R onto the bed. The doctor is called and I am ushered into the hallway.
Lost, and alone, and completely bewildered at how my whole life has been reduced to only these moments, I make my way outside and past the smokers to an less populated side of the building. Wedged between a hedge and an unused cement stair, I call my mother again and break down. She will be here in half an hour. She hangs up and I squat down to cry by myself, hidden from observers by a beat-up navy blue Honda Civic.
After a few minutes, I collect myself and, zombie-like, wander back into the ER. I check back at the room, the door of which is cracked open. I see that my daughter is surrounded by two nurses, the doctor, the intern, and Erin. My daughter is being held down while the doctor works. A tube sucks blood and spit from her mouth periodically, and splashes it into a receptacle on the wall.
Erin notices that I am watching, and instructs someone I can’t see to shut the door. I am hurt by this, and offended, but too dazed to protest. I will have words with her later, but I know she is only trying to protect me. And in truth, some part of me doesn’t want to see.
There is a window into the room that has closed blinds. I pathetically press my face to the window and try to see through the tiny cracks in the blinds and the holes through which the strings are fitted.
When the procedure is completed, Erin comes out and cries into my neck. The doctor steps out and is about to say something to Erin when he notices she is weeping. He awkwardly says, “well, uh, thanks,” and walks down the hall. My reaction is equally awkward, and I inexplicably say “no problem,” as if I had done something to deserve his misplaced thanks in the first place.
Erin goes to the bathroom, and the nurse comes out and tells me that R can hear me if I want to talk to her. I step up to the bed where my daughter looks sweaty and exhausted. With a shaky voice, I sing “Pee Pie Poe,” which is a made up song that she has adopted as her nickname. She literally introduces herself as Pee Pie Poe to strangers, and corrects my mother when she calls her “Turkey” or any other pet name. “I not ‘Turkey’. I Pee Pie Poe.”
Over the next fifteen or twenty minutes, R slowly wakes up. She seems drunk, but when my mother arrives, she fights the drug and focuses on her. “That . . . that . . . that Wo Wo,” she says in slurred speech, pointing to my mom. Wo Wo is the name that R invented when she was too young to say “Grandma” or “Connie.” It comes from a sound my mother made in one of R’s first memories of her, when my mother stood in front of an oil painting of a Native American with the infant R in her arms and repeatedly patted her hand over her mouth in a mock “war cry.” Of all the things to say or do with an infant, this act always struck me as a strange one to choose. R, however, latched onto it, dubbed my mother “Wo Wo,” and required my mother to repeat the routine every time she visited for the next six months. For R, the sound was not a Native American was cry, but ironically became a grandma cry instead.
My brother has parked Mom’s car, and has arrived now too. He reeks of cigarettes, and the smell instills in me a confusing desire to push him away at the same time that I want desperately to hug him.
Instructions are soon being rattled off to me by the nurse as more forms are produced. R is showing Wo Wo her stitched tongue, and a range of emotions play across the little girl’s face, from fear and pain to something strangely close to a cautious pride at having this new item to show off to people. Wo Wo and Patrick are duly impressed.
Erin had been on call, and now has to go to talk to her boss to see if she can get out of work. She takes the still sedated R with her, while Patrick and I go to get the trucks. The nurses want to get the exam room ready for another patient, so my mother has to go to the waiting room. As if I am talking to a ten year old, I give my mom explicit instructions as to where to watch for Erin’s return, so that she’s not wandering around looking for us. Predictably though, she takes her eyes off the mark for a few minutes during a cell phone call and Erin unknowingly walks right by her and wanders around looking for us for fifteen unnecessary minutes.
Meanwhile, Patrick and I cannot find my truck. I was a distraught madman when I parked, and I have no idea what level I was on. We paid for our parking at a machine, and our validation will expire in ten minutes. We race around each level in Patrick’s truck, hoping to find it before I am forced to pay another ten dollars.
Truck located, I take a moment in the cab to collect myself. Music, or no? I turn on the radio and it is on the Sports talk station. Disgusted at how absurd sports talk seems to me at this moment, I slam the radio back off and drive in silence.
I eventually collect my wife, child and mother at the ER entrance and begin the drive home. I am dazed, but momentarily reflect that, just as the sedative is slowly wearing off for R, so too is my razor keen awareness of my surroundings fading. I feel a strange and fleeting whisper of loss as I realize that my brain is returning to its normal, dull state. Remembering why though, I shudder and relive the scene in the kitchen. My mother drones in the background and I welcome it.
At home that night, R eats well, to our delight. Her tongue looks bad though, and I ask Erin if it will really heal well given how crooked it seems. She doesn’t know, but tells me that the procedure was a hard one, and that the stitches were as good as the doctor could do. Her eyes go distant as she remembers holding her child during the suturing, and I don’t ask any more questions.
We pick up the prescription for antibiotics. We have to give her a dose four times a day. Over the next ten days, this will be a source of great anxiety for us, as she will frequently refuse to take the medicine, and we will be forced to use all manner of psychological games to get her to drink the stuff. “Look, Mr. Troll is trying to drink R’s medicine. Don’t drink it all Mr. Troll. That is for R!” During this process, my mother will advocate holding her head back and her mouth open and pouring the medicine into her mouth, effectively force feeding her the teaspoon and a half of antibiotics. This will shake my faith in my mother, and I will steadily become convinced, rightly or wrongly, that I am the only person truly qualified to administer the medicine.
8:00 p.m. – The hours after the hospital are a blur. With my wife and my mother at home, I bitterly depart for the office. I have what I think is only about ten minutes of work to do, but my boss wants it first thing Monday morning and I want to get it done now while there are two people caring for my daughter. I drive to the office, shaking my head that anything could take me away from her at a time like this, but thinking also that the immediate crisis has passed, and that things will return to normal soon.
At work, I learn that my boss is wrong, and the Motion to Quash he wants me to draft won’t work because the opposing counsel did in fact give us the requisite thirty days notice (thirty two to be exact) when they served their subpoena duces tecum. I have wasted my time. I leave my boss a voicemail telling him that we can’t do what he wants to do, but I go ahead and draft something that I think will work for other reasons and stick it in his chair. I return home and the rest of the night is a blur.
Sunday, 9/28/03
6:00 a.m. – Erin goes to work, and whispers something into my ear as I sleep. This always simultaneously irritates me and makes me grin. The idea of leaving without saying goodbye and she loves me is more awful to Erin than the idea of disturbing my rare R.E.M. sleep.
8:00 a.m. – R wakes beside me and asks for Mommy. I tell her that Mommy is at work. This upsets her greatly, and she cries and refuses to sit on the toilet. She wants her drinkable yogurt, but won’t let me put the straw into the top, demanding instead that she get to do it. When she tries though, she bends the straw and is too frustrated to accomplish her objective, which makes her cry more.
I eventually get her to drink a few sips of yogurt. Her tongue is more swollen today, and she is in pain. She won’t drink her antibiotics or her Motrin. I have to go through an elaborate game where I pretend that a stuffed lion is going to drink all of R’s special medicine, and I scold the lion. “That’s R’s medicine Simba! You have to share!” This peaks R’s interest, and she drinks the medicine. I wonder if my mother will be creative enough to accomplish the same task later this afternoon.
10:45 a.m. – My father arrives to pick up R. My parents will care for her while I take M.H., a potential client and K.J., a friend, to the Texans game. After the trauma of Saturday, and the hard couple of weeks I’ve had at work, the game sounds like a perfect escape. We meet my buddy T there, and by the end of the first quarter I am drunk. I feel like I’m in college again as M.H. orders and pays for round after round, despite the fact that I am his host. Beer keep arriving before I’m halfway done with the one I’m holding. At one point I am so far behind that they compel me to chug a full bottle.
Whether it was the amazing last second win, the good company, my sheer need for escape, the volume of alcohol, or likely a vibrant stew of all of the above, the game turns out to be, beyond a doubt, the most glorious sporting event I have ever attended. By the end, I am utterly drunk from beer, excitement and the joy of carousing with my friends. My voice is hoarse from cheering, and we walk out of the stadium together laughing and slapping backs the whole way.
I get home to find my house empty. My wife has gotten off of work early and gone to my parents’ house on the north side to pick up R. All seems well, and I alternate between napping and watching football.
4:15 p.m. – My dozing is disturbed when my boss calls. He wants me to edit the Motion to Quash, and he has left his ideas in my chair at work. I am way too intoxicated to do any work, so I resolve to wait until the evening to return to work.
9:30 p.m. – After spending about two hours up at the office finishing my boss’ edits, I return home to horrible news. Erin has examined R’s tongue. One of the sutures is completely out, and two look loose. We page R’s doctor Steve, who recommends consulting a plastic surgeon first thing in the morning.
In the span of a few moments, the weight of the world is once again on my shoulders, and I feel more anxiety than I did in the emergency room. What happens now? Have we waited too long? Will there be lasting damage from this ordeal? Isn’t there some risk associated with general anesthesia? What surgeon are we going to see? Has Erin heard of any that she trusts? Isn’t R going to have to abstain from eating or drinking for twelve hours or something?
Erin begins sifting through our insurance papers to find surgeons that are covered by our plan. Steve will fax her a list of referrals when he gets into his office in the morning, and we will call them to see which of them can perform the surgery immediately.
I call my mom, who was already planning to babysit on Monday, and tell her the bad news. I feel like I’m going to be sick, but manage to keep my shit together. I surf the web to try to find something, anything, that will distract me from the image of my daughter’s tongue hanging off, or the new fears I have regarding the unknown perils she will face once we meet the surgeon. I am up until some time past 1:30 a.m.
Monday, 9/29/03
6:00 a.m. – Erin leaves for work. She whispers into my sleepy ears that she will call me when she hears from Steve and knows something. I am too nervous and hungry for information about the impending surgery to be irked that she has woken me for the twenty ninth consecutive day this month.
7:45 a.m. – In a weird déjà vu experience that seems to be my whole life these days, R wakes beside me and asks for Mommy. I tell her that Mommy is at work. This upsets her greatly, and she cries. I stumble to the kitchen for drinkable yogurt and antibiotics. R refuses to sit on the toilet. She doesn’t want her drinkable yogurt, and I welcome the change, which convinces my still sleepy brain that I’m not living Sunday all over again.
I manage to soothe her with Sesame Street, and then I e-mail my work to tell the powers that be what has happened, and that I will not be in to work until my mom arrives, and that I will be leaving work as soon as we get to see the surgeon.
My mom arrives and I get showered, dressed and leave for work. At work, I am worthless. I try to get some things done, but end up mostly talking to people about the accident. I page Erin, but she knows nothing. Later I page her again, and the surgeons that were recommended are all too busy to see us on short notice. Shit! Now she is asking around the hospital for referrals.
11:30 A.M. – I am talking to our paralegal about how cranky our boss has been lately when Erin calls and tells me that the surgeon will see us immediately. I am to meet her at the Hermann Professional Building. She will collect R. I frantically assign the paralegal about half a dozen tasks to accomplish in my absence and bolt to the elevators.
11:40 a.m. – Erin calls me on my cell. She can’t raise my mother by phone, and is frantic because the surgeon said he could see us either before noon or after one o’clock. I tell her that my mother had told me she was planning to go to Target. Erin drives there to try and find them.
11:55 a.m. – Erin locates Mom and R, but we are too late to make the appointment until after one o’clock. I proceed home to eat a hasty lunch. We all drive to the appointment around 12:30.
1:30 p.m. – After more forms and a good bit of waiting, we are ushered in to see our surgeon, a stiff Indian man with a poker face. He examines the tongue and, despite his poker face, evidences surprise and dismay that the E.R. doctor did not refer the procedure to him or some other Pediatric E.N.T. surgeon. He shakes his head that the stitching was done through conscious sedation. He wants to get a better look at the tongue to “asses the full damage” once he has R unconscious.
The E.N.T. surgeon tells us that he is technically going to list our surgery as an “add on” to his schedule (which technically means it will get done once the rest of his surgeries are accomplished), but that he will actually do it before his other surgeries in the morning. We are greatly relieved by this apparent favoritism, and justify it to ourselves because the actual surgery is supposed to be simple and mercifully brief. The other two surgeries the E.N.T. has scheduled are ironically both patients of Erin’s, and they are both intubated premature babies that are getting tracheostomies.
The surgeon calls in his resident, a confident Asian man, introduces him, and instructs him that we will be done as an “add on,” but done before the other two surgeries. He nods in understanding, and the two depart. They tell us as they leave that a nurse will call us with information about where to be and when. A nurse escorts us out, and writes down our phone number.
We will never be called.
3:00 p.m. – We return home, and my mother leaves. R requests a visit to see the butterflies, and Erin takes her while I collapse into an afternoon nap. I sleep like a dead man.
6:00 p.m. – I realize that in all the commotion, we somehow haven’t told my in-laws what happened. Can that be possible? Jesus! I wonder at Erin’s steely independence, remembering that my mother was the first person I called on Saturday. I dial the phone number and blab everything in my head to my mother-in-law. My brother-in-law is there visiting, and I speak to him as well.
10:00 p.m. – Concerned that a nurse hasn’t given us instructions for the morning yet, Erin makes some phone calls. She talks to a night nurse on duty, who sees that there is a tongue laceration scheduled for surgery, but is unable to give us further information or tell us when to show up. She says that someone will call.
Again, nobody calls.
Tuesday, 9/30/03
7:00 a.m. – I wake with a start, realizing that we haven’t been called by the hospital. I roll over and ask Erin what we should do. She gets up and makes a phone call. She speaks with some cranky nurse who indicates that if the doctor had really intended to do our surgery first, then we should have been there half an hour ago to be ready for the 8:30 start time. She tells us that the doctors know that they have to give instructions about when to show up when they do a last minute add on. We scramble about, packing R’s bag and getting dressed.
7:30 a.m. – We are at the hospital. R has refused to take off her Little Mermaid pajamas, but is alert and jovial as we walk through the hospital, which she describes as being “like a big castle where Mommy work.” We arrive at the waiting room and are handed forms to fill out. I feel my concerns about patient rights and medical privacy slowly erode in the face of the copious documents I am constantly compelled to complete, and I find myself longing for a database that would easily tell these doctors all of the information that their damn forms request.
8:45 a.m. – We are in the waiting room, and my parents have arrived now too. Erin and I did not eat, and we are hungry, but conscious of the fact that our daughter has not eaten, and won’t be able to eat for the next hour or so while she waits for surgery. There is a television in our cramped room, and R watches Barney. Still no word on when we will be called, but we expect it any minute and are anxious to get through this. While Mom, Erin and R play with stickers on the bed, my dad stands in silence and I thumb through a Time magazine “special report” on the administration’s failures in Iraq. Though my eyes read several of the articles, I retain no memory of their contents.
9:45 a.m. – Still no word from anyone on our schedule, and no visit from any doctors. We have run out of books and toys, and R is bored with the television. We are forced to walk the halls with her to keep her distracted from her hunger, thirst, and desire to mess with her tongue.
10:30 a.m. – This is Hell. The nurses can tell us nothing. Erin takes it upon herself to call her staff and has discovered that one of her patients has been called down for the tracheostomy. So we are behind one surgery now at least. My mom’s presence is beginning to vex me.
11:00 a.m. – Our surgeon comes and tells us we’re “on hold.” He mentions something to Erin about how frustrating “block time” can be. I don’t know what this means, but he indicates that when they can get another room, they will do the second tracheostomy and then take care of R. He hopes it will be another couple of hours.
I am beside myself with anguish. So far, R hasn’t complained about hunger, but it could happen any moment, and with her pain and discomfort, she is much more emotional about these things. This could become a very ugly time very quickly.
I take a walk. I sit in a different part of the waiting room and thumb through a USA Today. I loathe that paper, but it is the only reading material available. I read an article on the investigation of the White House leak of a CIA operative’s identity. I feel strangely alienated by the story, like a foreigner in my own country. The meat of the story eludes me – I am unable to see the point.
It is while staring at the sports page – not reading, but literally staring at the pictures numbly – that I am interrupted by my father. “They’re taking her in,” he says.
I am effused with adrenaline. I begin fast walking down the hall. Where did all these people suddenly come from? This place wasn’t this crowded when I came down here was it? Jesus, could you people move like you’re going somewhere!?
Back in the room, R has already taken some preparatory elixir. Erin holds her and walks around the hallways waiting for the drug to take effect. Erin has already negotiated with the anesthesiologist, and will be present and holding her when they put her under. This makes things better for me.
The intern arrives with a nurse and the four of them depart. Mom, Dad and I return to the exam room to see R’s chart sitting on the counter. I grab it and try to find them, but there is no sign of the group in the maze of hallways. I return to the room, and shove the chart in the bin that is affixed to our door. I shut the door.
Moments later, the intern shows up again, asking for the chart. I explain that I put it in the door, but it is no longer there. We each assume that a nurse has collected it. I am not impressed.
12:00 – Erin returns. She is hungry, and she and my parents leave for the café. As they leave, I ask her to hurry, and make a joke about how I’m liable to “freak out” at any minute. I am left to wait for news. Minutes later, I remember that the nurse had said that once the surgery begins, there must always be a parent in the waiting room, as opposed to the exam room in which I sit. I look for the nurse, and confirm that I am in fact in the wrong room.
I pack R’s many toys, books, and other items into her bag. As I leave, I hear the nurse pick up a phone and order a cleaning of the room I am exiting. I go to the crowded waiting room. I try again to read the USA Today. I am anxious for Erin to return. I want to talk to her, to someone.
Thirty minutes pass. What the Hell could be keeping them? I have called my father’s cell phone three times and have gotten voice mail every time. I concentrate on being frustrated with my family’s long stay in the café to keep from thinking about my daughter’s surgery.
Over a speaker, I hear a nurse say “Hamilton family to the front please, Hamilton family.” I panic. They have news, and I’m going to have to hear it alone!
I grab R’s bag and the newspaper, try to stuff the newspaper in the bag, pull it out again, then drop the newspaper altogether and run to the front of the room. The doctor is standing there, and seems surprised to see me alone. “H-how did it go?” I ask.
“It went well,” he says. I study his face, and convince myself that he’s telling the truth. “It stitched up nicely. Part of the problem was that there were no stitches on the bottom side of her tongue.” The doctor looks at me intently, conveying his incredulity with his eyes.
Later on, when I am conveying the surgeon’s words, Erin will tell me that she had suggested suturing the bottom of R’s tongue to the E.R. doctor on Saturday after he had completed the top, but he had assured her that the bottom would heal up fine. She had doubts, but her judgment was clouded by emotion and she did not protest. I am left deeply shaken and horrified by the news of this glaring malpractice, and wonder how many times this sort of thing happens every day to thousands of kids across the nation.
“Give her Tylenol for pain-”
“Or Motrin?” I interrupt.
“Motrin is fine. And I would like to see her back again in one week.” I shake the man’s hands and thank him sincerely. “She’s just waking up, and they will come get you in a few minutes.” I have a panicked thought of R waking up alone in a strange environment after surgery and something in me screams.
“So her tongue should heal up fine?” I ask.
“Yes, her tongue should heal well.” He says. As he says goodbye, I wonder if there’s a distinction in his mind between a wound that heals “well,” and one that “heals up fine.”
I call my father’s cell again and this time he answers. “Where are you?”
“We’re in the waiting room.”
“No you’re not.” I check over my shoulder to make sure. He is actually in the pediatric waiting room, and I instruct him to bring Erin and Mom to the adult waiting room.
They get lost on the way over. Finally we are reunited and I make a brief fuss about what took so goddamned long. Then I offload what I know and dispatch Erin, equipped with her hospital doctor I.D. card, to find and comfort our daughter.
Ten minutes pass, and I can no longer stand it, so I go out in search of her myself. My cell phone works, and my parents are instructed to call me if the nurse comes for me while I am gone. I stride with purpose down the halls as if I know where I’m going. After a few minutes of wandering, I see a sign that says “pediatric recovery center.” I open the door to see an intimidating number of strange machines, a collection of surly looking doctors and nurses . . . and my wife and daughter in a corner of the room.
R looks like she’s been beaten with a wet mop. Her hair is matted and sweaty, and though she is sleeping, her expression is pained. A nurse writes cryptic notes on a clipboard while Erin holds R. I am anxious and useless. The anesthesiologist tells Erin that R vomited and choked during the procedure, and that they had to give her oxygen. Also, they had to give her much more general anesthesia than they had planned because she kept gagging during the suturing. For some reason, despite the fact that these events are now over, hearing about them drives me wild with fear and pain.
I fetch a rocking chair for Erin. R cries out in pain and discomfort every three to four minutes, and then falls back into a fitful sleep. I make sure that Erin can reach the water bottle, and then go to give my parents the report. This activity makes me feel full of purpose, right up until I am done telling them what has happened, and then I must return to the room and feel useless again.
R wakes, and is unhappy. The chief source of this unhappiness is the electrode taped to her big toe, which must, must, MUST come off immediately! Unfortunately, the electrode tells the nurse whether or not she is getting oxygen, and must stay on. This fact is lost on R, who becomes more furious by the minute, and tugs at the cord furiously.
The nurse offers her Sprite (a forbidden treat) in a cup without a lid, which she clutches angrily and continues to periodically spill on Erin for the next twenty minutes.
Eventually, we are allowed to move her to a recovery room. The room is offensively bright, and I rush to adjust the blinds. Convinced that my daughter will live, I return to fetch my parents. We wait in the recovery room to be released by the anesthesia resident. She takes a long time to see us. R is pissed off whenever anyone tries to touch her Sprite. A cup of ice with a lid and a straw is located, and a fresh bottle of Sprite is procured.
I almost can’t bear to look at her tongue, but when she shows it to my mother, who is fearless with regard to such things, I see that it already looks much better. Sticking it out however, distresses R, and she is crying again.
Eventually, the resident shows up, and discovers that R’s blood pressure has not been taken. The leads to more trauma, as R must be jostled and the Sprite must be touched. Her blood pressure is taken, and we are ejected from that awful place.
I tell my mom that I will see her back at my house, and see a shadow on Dad’s face that tells me this does not meet with his plan. Minutes later, I get a call on my cell from mom telling me that they need to go home. Whatever.
At home, I am shaken and weary. R is not herself at all, and I am greatly vexed. Only later would I learn that it takes a full twenty-four hours for the effects of the anesthesia to fully wear off. I endure twenty three pained hours of ignorance, thinking I have somehow broken my child’s spirit, and will now raise a zombie.
Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003
If I were not so woefully distracted by my daughter, and if I were to actually go into the office today, I would see on my calendar that today is the deadline by which I must serve requests for production and interrogatories in one of my federal trademark infringement suits. However, I AM distracted, and I do NOT go into the office. I miss the deadline, but will not discover that fact until after it is too late.
My mom shows up to babysit. My daughter is so clingy and generally uncomfortable however, that I decide to stay home too. To be honest, I am worthless anyway, and can’t really concentrate. Plus, I mistakenly think that I have given all of my pressing matters to other attorneys or paralegals to handle in my absence, and hope to get a few things done from home.
The morning is spent trying to get my time cards done, unsuccessfully. Eventually, I give up, and we depart for Humble. We are going to visit my Uncle Nick. I make my mom drive so that I can work on my time cards in the front seat.
Once there, R is happy to play with her cousin Parker. I discuss the work I am doing for my Uncle Nick. He is a defendant in a bankruptcy preference action. A bankrupt company that still owes him over $100,000 is trying to get back another $47,000 in commissions that it paid him within the ninety day “preference period” prior to filing bankruptcy. I know it is the law, and I understand the principle behind preference actions, but it still pisses me off. I tell him that I have filed an answer for him, and it contained the best defenses I could find. One of my arguments is bullshit, but one of them is pretty damn good. Now we must gear up to conduct discovery and go to trial, with the hope that the other side will choose instead to pursue the low hanging fruit and avoid a fight with a client represented by competent counsel at a big law firm. “No, no, don’t be ridiculous – I’m not taking your money. But I may need you to cover costs of me flying back and forth to the Pennsylvania federal court.” We argue for several minutes about whether I am going to be paid for the work I’m doing for him. I refuse to tell him my hourly rate, or the number of hours I have spent on this work. When I was a child, if anything had happened to my parents, this man would have become my adoptive father, and he is still a sort of father figure. So it is painfully difficult to stand up to him on this point, but necessary.
Unbeknownst to both of us, I will get a call next Monday from the opposing counsel, who will tell me that he read my answer and has decided to withdraw his lawsuit against my uncle. (A bright bit of news that would wait to be delivered until the end of the worst week ever).
I take R swimming in the hot tub, as the pool is a bit too chilly for comfort. She has great fun, and is already acting like she’s has forgotten about the tongue. At least one of us feels better.
We go inside to get her something to eat. When we arrive, my mother suffers temporary brain death. That’s the only thing that can explain the fact that she has put orange juice into a sippy cup for my daughter to drink. As the citric acid burns its way into my daughter’s lacerated tongue and she begins to howl in pain, it takes everything I have not to shoot fire from my eyes and incinerate my mom.
She now has cold water running from the kitchen sink. “Here, you want to put your tongue under the faucet like a little doggie? Here, come be a little doggie.” R sticks her tongue under the water, but that doesn’t seem to help.
I get some ice water for her. She won’t drink it, but instead has her tongue hanging out and is pointing at it in distress. “Okay, let’s be a little doggie again!” says my mom, returning to the kitchen sink and holding R’s face to the faucet again.
“Enough with the ‘little doggie’ Mom,” I say, irritated. “Give me my daughter!” I am flushed with anger and fear at R’s pain, and am unable to get her to calm down. We take her to sit in front of the Bear in the Big Blue House with Parker. This quiets her, but she keeps her tongue hanging out of her mouth . . . like a little doggie.
Later that afternoon, a junior partner calls me on my cell and asks me if I am going to come in before the hearing tomorrow. My boss is off in San Francisco, and in his absence, I was supposed to cover a hearing in Federal Court. His jaunt to California in the middle of the week was foiled however when R had her accident, and now we are scrambling to cover all the work that I was supposed to do for both myself and him this week. The task of preparing for and attending the hearing has now fallen to this junior partner, but I am going in to be his wing man in case the judge asks him a question he can’t answer. I tell him that I’ll be in at 8:00 am tomorrow, an hour before the hearing. This is not the answer he wants, but it’s all I’m willing to give. As I hang up, I reflect on how far I’ve come in two years. A few days after R was born, this same partner called me to insist that I come in to help him with a response to a motion to dismiss. I had just joined the group, and was also under budget for billable hours that year, and didn’t feel I had the latitude to refuse him. By contrast, this year I am well over my budget, and have been working my ass off. What’s more, I may be coming to the conclusion that I am going to quit my job.
In any event, it is empowering to tell him that I’ll be in to the office on my terms.
Dad is out of town, and Mom hates to drive in the rush hour traffic to my house to babysit R. Since we know that Mom will need to babysit tomorrow as well, she has decided to spend the night at my house. We don’t want to send R to school with her tongue like this, and with her being more emotional than usual. Plus, I am keenly aware that the teachers will likely not have the patience (or the acting talent) when it comes time to put on the one act play required to get R to swallow her antibiotics. By contrast, though I am still the antibiotics actor of choice, Mom has taken to the process, and has also innovated by employing a straw to give R the medicine.
The three of us return to the house for the night. My wife is gone on call, as usual. We go through our nightly routine, but when I would normally watch about fifteen minutes of a movie in our bedroom with R after her bath, prior to retiring to her bedroom for the night, I discover Mom on the bed. She is watching West Wing, and asks if I wouldn’t mind watching R’s movie on the tiny television in R’s room. This irks me, but Mom is doing me a huge favor by taking care of my daughter, so I consent without objection.
In R’s room, the movie is a disaster. Normally, we watch in my room and then, when she gets sleepy, we make the transition to her dark bedroom. Now though, the television is in her bedroom, and when I try to turn it off, she protests. I end up having to watch the entirety of Sleeping Beauty with her, and she still won’t go to sleep. I rock her and she screams in protest, even though it is almost 11:00 P.M. Finally I get her down, and come to my bedroom to find my mom still in front of the television over two hours later.
Frustrated beyond belief that it is almost midnight before I can clock out on my responsibilities and actually have a moment to myself, I put my mom in the guest bed and proceed to stay up until 1:00 A.M. emptily playing a video game. R wakes at that time, and I fetch her and bring her to my bed.
Thursday, October 2, 2003
I cannot find my wallet in the morning. This is particularly bad because since September 11, the federal courthouse will not admit you into the building without some kind of official photo ID. My boss and I tested the marshals once, when he didn’t have his wallet, and the marshal made me go up and ask Federal Judge Lee Rosenthal’s staff to call down and ask the marshal to let him come up and argue the hearing she was to preside over.
I don’t find my wallet, and due to the time I spent searching (as well as various other distractions, including the story of how Muphasa tried to drink all of R’s and Simba’s antibiotics), I do not get to work one hour before the hearing as I promised. Instead, I am there twenty minutes before hand, and the junior partner is clearly anxious when I arrive. He asks me several questions, and we talk through the analysis in a couple of cases he has found. Then it’s time to go to the courthouse. I tell him he will have to call down to the marshals to get me in. Instead, he somehow smooth talks them, and I show them my business card to “prove” that I am with Bracewell.
Inside, we are held to the end of the docket because some asshole from Oregon, who is only tangentially involved with the case and is not actually licensed to appear before the court, has asked to participate in the hearing via phone. I sit from 9:00 A.M. until 11:00 A.M. listening to boring status reports in other boring cases and trying to come up with a secret hideaway in my mind to make my stay somewhat less unpleasant.
We are called, and it is totally uneventful. My presence was not required, and we return home to the office. I have a stack of crap to do, none of which am I the least bit interested in doing. I can’t concentrate, and mostly talk to people about Riley and her tongue. Eventually, I get some responses to discovery out before I give up and leave around 2:00 P.M. I return home and relieve my mom. Erin has gotten home, and is sleepy, but too anxious to be with Riley to retire.
It is a gorgeous day, and we sit out in the front yard. October is one of the best reasons to live in Houston. I grab my laptop and begin drafting this journal of what I consider to be the worst week of my life. The words pour out of me, and instead of worrying over each sentence, I barely look back at them.
I have a beer or two in our lawn chair, while Erin and Riley begin drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalk. Our neighbor D and her daughter A wander over. D has learned that she is officially pregnant with a healthy baby. This is good news, as a week ago, she thought that there were complications. She glows with relief and excitement, and slinks down to sit on the sidewalk at my feet. As she does so, her black pants slip down her ass a bit and a full two inches of her thong becomes visible. It is black with a triangle of pink silk at the top, and looks expensive, like the rest of her clothes. For the next forty-five minutes, I will be unable to think of much of anything else. I put the computer to sleep.
Time slips by, and D’s husband arrives. He is hungry, and is quietly hinting that he wants D to decide on a meal and then prepare it. Erin suggests Southwell’s hamburgers though, and D lobbies to join us. Shoes are located and donned, and fifteen minutes later the six of us are walking half a block to some of the most delightful burgers in Houston.
I drink more beer at Southwell’s. D starts to sit on the far end of the table, but then asks her husband to switch seats with her, placing her right next to me. As she speaks, I stare at her full, vampiric lips. She is wearing open toe sandals, and as she crosses her legs beneath the table, her painted toenails brush my shin.
R is demanding to be held upside down, and Erin’s refusal to do so while she tries to finish her own dinner has started a two year-old tantrum. R will not be consoled, and dinner breaks up shortly thereafter.
Later that night, I return to this journal, and for reasons that aren’t clear to me at the time, I e-mail the partial draft to myself at the office.
Friday, October 3, 2003
7:15 A.M. – My morning is not going well. Riley sees the school uniform I have brought into the bedroom during Sesame Street, and makes the connection that she will be taken to school. This does not meet with her approval, and she throws the worst fit I have ever witnessed. She kicks and squirms so hard that I am physically unable to dress her. Time ticks by as I struggle with my tiny tempest of a daughter, and I quickly realize that she shouldn’t go to school, if only because she will command all of the teacher’s attention with her emotion.
I page Erin. There is no way that I can stay home today, so I’m going to ask her to do it. We have taken five straight days of my mother’s time, and I am reluctant to call her unless Erin absolutely can’t come.
Erin begs off work. At the end of the day, when her supervisors finish making the schedule for the month, she will be told that her half day at work today is going to be considered as one of her unbelievably precious four days off a month. Now she will get only three more days off over the next thirty. Tonight, after a miserable day at the office, this news will crush me.
Erin comes and I can then dress and leave for work. I get in to the office late, maybe around 10:00 A.M. Everyone wants to talk about Riley and her recovery. Everyone that is except my boss, who is in an absolutely shitty mood, and my recent absence in the face of his own is the chief reason. He is an asshole all day, and barks his instructions at me. He does ask about R, but it’s almost an after thought. He huffily rattles off a list of projects that are behind.
In the face of overwhelming amounts of work, I spitefully open my email and return to this journal, realizing that I had intended to do this all along. I sit at my desk and the words pour forth.
It is not until late in the day that I discover that I missed the previously referenced discovery deadline. I am instantly sick to my stomach, and call the opposing counsel about extending the deadline due to my recent tragedy. I get her voice mail. I leave her a message, and then send her an email. Unsatisfied with both of these attempts, I draft up and fax a letter to her. I get no reply. I call and talk to her secretary, hounding her about where her boss is. Finally, I get through to her, and she is a total bitch about it. Any self-respecting attorney will extend a deadline in the face of such things. This one is a worm though, and she references my client’s unreasonable demands during settlement negotiations as justification for not agreeing to a brief (three day) extension of the deadline. As if the two issues are in any way related.
I am livid, but have little choice in the matter. I frantically draft a Motion to Extend Discovery Deadline, and file it with the federal court.
Every associate, no matter how good or on top of the game, fucks up. It’s why you’re called “associate.” The term is almost a synonym for “smart dude who nevertheless fucks up.” The real key though, is how you handle your fuck ups. As a fifth year, I am starting to be considered a bit of a sage among the younger associates, and they come to me for advice. If any associate came to me with the above story, I would tell them to follow the cardinal rule of being an associate: always tell your boss. There are a thousand reasons to follow this rule. Those reasons include, but are not limited to the following: (1) it’s your boss’ client, and he’s the guy that has to ultimately answer for your mistakes, (2) your boss may know of a better way to fix the problem than you do (he is a partner for a reason after all), and (3) if you hide a fuck up and your boss discovers it later, he’s going to be even more pissed off, and he’ll also wonder what else you’re hiding (conversely, if your boss knows you are always open about screw ups, he will be comfortable that everything is fine until you tell him otherwise).
I ignore my own advice. All of the reasons to tell my boss about the fact that I missed the deadline are in the forefront of my mind during the very hours that I am taking steps to hide the fact that I missed the deadline. I delete his name and the client’s name from the distribution list for the filing letter, so that the only people that get copied on this motion to extend the deadline are the other side and the clerk of the court. I prepare written discovery and have it hand delivered to the other side, so that they will have it in the event that the judge grants my motion. (I will win eventually the motion, but I won’t know that for several miserable days.)
This entire episode exhausts me. While I have been working trying to fix my mess, I have gotten several phone calls from opposing counsel and folks inside the firm asking about my daughter. I have to be polite, especially to the opposing counsel that have postponed depositions, mediations and whatnot in the face of this episode, but all I want is to get off the phone, get my deadline problem fixed as best I can, and go home to see my family.
I don’t get home until around 7:00 P.M. Erin has taken Riley to her pediatrician, as well as the zoo. They have had a large time in my absence.
Erin was never big on staying up late. She has always simply surrendered to sleep. We used to joke about her being narcoleptic. But now, because my wife gets up so early every day, and because twice a week she is called on to work for 36 hours straight without sleep, Erin is usually ready to pass out at 9:00 P.M. every night. Frequently, Riley is NOT ready to do so, and Erin will fall asleep while she is trying to get Riley to bed, or immediately afterwards.
I am more of a night owl, mostly because if I tried to lay down at 9:00 P.M. to sleep, my brain would go over all of the things that I have to do at work, or some other vexing and painful topic, over and over again until I screamed aloud. So instead, I pick the most engrossing video game I can find (television or reading just isn’t enough to push anxiety causing thoughts out of my head), and play it until 2:00 A.M., when I literally pass out from exhaustion, and fall into the dreamless sleep of the dead.
So it comes as no surprise to me when, at 9:10 P.M. that night, after Riley has gone to bed and while Erin and I are trying to watch a movie we have rented, I turn to see that she is fast asleep. We were talking, and I had asked her a question, but she had fallen asleep in mid-conversation. I sit up on my elbows and find the remote, turning the movie off. As I rise to find NCAA College Football 2004, I have a few moments to reflect. In the silence of my dark bedroom, I try to remember a time in my life that I was this lonely or anxious.
I can’t.
Disturbed by the thoughts that are now bursting to the surface, I flip on the Playstation. The sickly blue glow of the television pushes these and all other thoughts back down into the murky waters of my mind.
A few hours later, as I’m turning out the lights, the words come unbidden from my mouth. “I’ve gotta get a different job.”
* * * * * *
And a few months later, I did. And it was the first and most important step I took in becoming the happiest dude I know.