Disappointment

As a writer, I'm supposed to have a firm grasp of the language.  I use words to recreate reality, or I'm supposed to anyway.  I remember being young.  I saw the world in terms I understood.  I created reality from firm definitions, words I knew, but I didn't realize my own ignorance.  So, I'll begin in a way I tell my students not to, with a definition.

Disappointment is defined as the state or feeling of being disappointed.  It's a vague definition that uses the root word in its own definition.  It tells us nothing.  I thought I knew what the word meant.  


In my youth the word represented moments when expectations went unfulfilled.  The movie "Daredevil" disappointed me.  My GPA disappointed me.  The fact that I rarely got laid disappointed me.  These were major concerns to a young man, but they are minor concerns to an older man.


It's an issue of scale.  As a young man, life revolves around the self.  I didn't get laid.  The movie disappointed me.  As an older man, I've run into a new level of disappointment.  I've run into the disappointment of my parenting skills.  Classrooms haven't ignited with new learning.  My wife has been disappointed in preventable ways.  And, finally, my daughter's life has been harder than I could have ever wanted.


Today was a rough day.  It was the day where my daughter could have been "healed".  She has kidney reflux.  It's an issue dealing with the bladder, but effects her kidneys.  Today was the day when a procedure could have ended all that, if every thing went according to plan.  It didn't.


Tracy and I sat in the family waiting room of the day surgery ward while my daughter went into the surgery bay today.  We knew that there were two ways the day would go.  The first was that the doctor would insert a camera and a needle through her urethra.  This way described a procedure where they would inject a small amount of fluid into the tube draining from her kidney to her bladder.  This fluid would constrict the opening of the tube and prevent her urine from backing up to her kidney.  This would, in turn, prevent her urine from scarring her kidney and allow it to grow.  


The other version involved a level of deformity in her valves that wouldn't allow the procedure to move forward.  The doctor told us that this level of deformity was an unlikely thing, but that it would be known within minutes of Shea's entrance into the surgical bay.


Well, after Shea went into surgery, I went to the gift shop.  I bought a copy of Rolling Stone for myself and an issue of Real Simple for Tracy.  The whole walk, which was an excuse to escape the waiting room in the first place, took about 15 minutes.  When I returned to the waiting room, I passed Tracy's magazine to her.  She set it on her lap.  She thanked me for it.  She knew it was a distraction I needed.  I hadn't even gotten past the sections of the magazine that are basically quips on photographs when I looked up and saw the surgeon.


It.  Was.  Disappointment.  I had promised myself that I wouldn't hope.  I promised myself I wouldn't set mental expectations for the day, but what can you do?  I'm a father.  I'm a father to a wonderful three year old girl with persistent health issues.  I hoped.


When I saw the doctor standing at the end of the row, I heard Tracy gasp, or say something, or sob, I'm ashamed to say that I don't know which.  I saw the doctor and I saw him acknowledge us and then turn to the private consulting room.  He turned his back to my wife and I as we gathered up our backpack full of child-sized snow boots, our travel coffee mugs, and, yes, our copies of Rolling Stone and followed him into the private room.  The bad news room.  


I had already pinpointed the room when I walked into the waiting room.  It lurked on the corner of my vision like a specter, like THE specter everyone in that room was avoiding, and I had to enter it.  I knew what lie inside that room and so nothing in that room mattered.  My reaction, my wife's reaction, the doctor's tact and sensitivity, his personal anecdotes about children with the same issue, none of it mattered because I knew what it was before I ever set foot in that room.


As a parent, when you get this kind of news, it requires you to reconstruct your reality bit by bit.  I know I said I tried not to have expectations, but who's kidding who?  I had to rebuild my reality again in that moment.   It was a moment where I doubted my potential.


I hurt for Shea.  I want her to have an easy life.  I want two fully functional kidneys.  I want no more anesthesia.  I want no more catheters, scans, probes, low dose antibiotics, therapy days, etc.  I don't want this for me.  I want this for her.  I wish she wasn't so good with doctors because she hadn't seen them all her life.  I wish she was wary of nurses and that she didn't ask them to hold their stethoscopes up to her chest.  


But, none of that wishing does anything.  My daughter IS trusting of doctors and nurses.   She thinks blood pressure tests are "arm hugs."  She thinks stethoscopes are cool and she even knows how to deep breaths when the nurses press the cold metal the smooth pink flesh of her back.  She's used to going to hospital bookshelves and pulling out the shared books.  She thinks the portable console with the Nintendo inside is awesome.  Notice how none of these words are negative.  This is exactly what I mean.  This is normal for her.  She's used to it.  The fallout comes from my expectations, my hopes, dreams, aspirations.


So, I play Nintendo on hospital wheelie carts.  I read books with the printed label "Property of Legacy Emmanuel Hospital" inside.  She doesn't care.  I do.  And therein lies the problem.


This is my new disappointment.  I don't think my younger self would even have a word for this.  I don't think my younger self would have hung out this long to understand it.  I like being an older man.  I like being here.  My life is here.  My loves are here.  I will know disappointment on new levels as the days pass.  I will know new levels of complexity, of maturity, of emotion, of love.  There are moments where I want my youth back. Today, even after all of this, isn't one of those days.  I've lived with myself for 34 years and I'm sick of myself as a subject.  If I get Shea, I'll live with disappointment.