Doing the Right Thing Gets Difficult

My son had a thing, a minor routine medical procedure that the surgeon told me they do hundreds of times a year. "Routine" and "general anesthetic" don't usually go hand in hand in my imagination, and, just in case you weren't aware: general anesthetic means getting knocked out and fully unconscious.

It's way better to do this now, we were told, because it gets dangerous later in life, both for the procedure and for the chances that things develop poorly in the meantime.

This was the right thing to do.

But damn it if it didn't feel like the right thing in he moment.

He looked cute and happy and chilling and all once he relented and agreed to put on the hospital issue scrubs:

Which made what I knew was about to be happening all the more difficult and heartrending.

General anesthetic is the IV drip of sleepy knockout drugs that keep you under for the duration of the procedure, but they always have to start a person out with gas---knock out gas, nitrous oxide, AKA hippie crack.

My son is already recovering nicely, having refused pain meds (mostly) and ice (completely), and is happy to talk with anybody listening about his privates. And this is a great thing. It was the right thing.

And that's what I have to tell myself, since my experience was vastly different than his.

My son loves me and trusts me and, even as we battle often, I don't mind having a headstrong and confident boy. But, in my last moments being able to be with him in the OR, in my last moments before they shooed me out to go wait in a lobby where I could follow the progress by color coded numbers on a screen, those last moments were spent holding him down and forcing a mask of gas over his face.

He fought and fought, and held his breath like a champ. Eventually his eyes rolled back into his head and he sounded like he was hiccuping. It's always like that, dad, they told me as they walked me through the doors. I couldn't form thoughts.

They made me drop of the scrubs they'd given me, and I couldn't even talk. As I waited, a wreck, for the color code to change on the screen for over an hour, the only thoughts I had were: If this turns catastrophic, my last moments with him were gassing him out.

I nervously read a book (with the faraway monitor in my field of vision, keenly watching the color block) to keep from sobbing.

He won't remember. Won't remember any of it.

And me...I'll never forget.