The Gift of Long Hours

There is something powerful about watching your first-born child's chest rise and fall.  Listening to the air pass through his lungs, his small pursed lips.  I didn't think I was going to be this kind of parent...The one with the pocket mirror.  The one who wakes him only to put him back to sleep.

I move my face close to his to feel the fever.  His skin aglow in blue monitor lights.  Memorizing every fold, each crease, the way his brows arch.  I try to catch the movements in his eyes as they roll through another deep cycle of REM.

His face twitches as he stretches his neck.  He's not in pain, it's just the expressions of a new born, the jerky movements as he tries out his new parts. The faces only we see and think they are funny.  The face we fell in love with for the first time and then all over again.

When I need to check his temperature I don't feel it with my hand.  I take advantage of this opportunity to get close to him.  His breathe is warm on my ear.

I gently, barely touch my cheek to his.  Then I realize I don't know which razor stubble is his, and which is mine.

It's been more than 16 years since I've had the chance to spend so much time watching him sleep.  How long had it been since I checked on him.  Sure I give him a thorough smell test when he gets home late on a Saturday night. Do I detect smoke?  Drink?

When have I cared for him in this way.  So completely.  He doesn't cry when he hurts.  Instead, he tells the doctor about the pain.  Rates it a one to ten. He can walk, when he has the strength, getting himself to the bathroom and pees in a special plastic container so the medical team can examine everything that goes in and out of his body.

It's a staph infection in his chest. There have been tense moments. Especially at first when we weren't sure if we could get him home from the coastal Spanish town where he'd been studying.  Scarier yet when the hospital didn't know what it was.  A mysterious bite under his arm our only clue.

But after a few days in the hospital, a host of treatments, doctor visits and endless blood-taking and pee-examining he seems better.  More alert, his color is back, fever is down, swelling is receding.

And then it becomes a gift.  When the marrow-shattering fear subsides and the parental nightmare fades, it is our time.  This isn't about a near-death experience re-shaping my world-view where I come out the other side stopping to watch rainbows.

It's about a parents' awareness that our children are with us, if we are lucky, for 18 years.  And then if it all goes according to plan they are swept off into the world and leave us to our life if we can only leave them to theirs. 

I desperately want to feel close to him.  Adolescence now an obstacle. Tensions rise over school, friends, curfew, cars, money, homework, Facebook, phones, computers.  But none of those matter here in the dark of the hospital room.  At night we watch ESPN.  He in his hospital bed hooked up to monitors and IVs.  I rest in a recliner.  We talk about the games. The slowness of the baseball season.  How will the Redskins do?  He asks about things at home. He tells me about his trip to Spain without me asking.  It won't be this way next week, but it is tonight.

And with a scant two years left it's on our minds a lot.  What life lesson can we still impart?  What final factoid can we squeeze into him hoping it becomes part of his philosophy?  

We are in his presence for periods of time that we haven't had since before pre-school.  Interrupted by doctors and family and visitors and bouts of sleep. In our normal lives there are no long hours. just times together before we have something else to do.

Tonight he and I had dinner in the hospital cafeteria.  We sat there well after our tasteless food was picked over.  We laughed at how he couldn't tell if his last bite was a piece of chicken or a carrot.  At home the meal would have been a short segue.  Tonight it was a destination.

The hum and wheeze of the machines that clean his system and fight the poison, rouses and confuses me.  Is that his breathing?  Are those strained noises his body trying to do something it can't?  I check his fever.  Its four o'clock in the morning.  He moves his head and squints in the early light.

"Did you just put your cheek up against my face?" he asks in a whisper, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.

"I did," I said smiling, feeling like a teenager caught sneaking in past curfew.

"That's just weird dad," he says, before fading off to sleep.