I was coaching the 6:30 PM class Monday night when the door to the lobby opened and The Great Bearded One (my husband) began frantically waving and calling for me. Considering I had fourteen athletes back squatting in the gym and he was calling me away, I knew something was wrong. I walked into the lobby to see Captain Awesome (my son) trying to stand up and starting to cry. There was a large wet spot on the floor. Captain Awesome reached for his shorts, confused, then began to cry harder. His nose was bleeding. There was a woman sitting on the sofa in the lobby that I didn't know. A client of The Great Bearded One. She looked at Captain Awesome and then at me with a sympathetic "Bless his heart!" expression.
Captain Awesome had face-planted. He had passed out while in a seated position, slumped and then slid forward onto his stomach, and lost control of his bladder. The Great Bearded One and his client witnessed the whole thing and said Captain Awesome was out cold for about fifteen seconds. At first The Great Bearded One thought his son was fooling around but quickly realized that was not the case. By the time I joined them in the lobby, Captain Awesome was coming around but was very confused and more than a little embarrassed.
The Great Bearded One and I are getting pretty good at tag teaming our way through crisis mode. All the while taking turns, we: usher Captain Awesome into the bathroom, try to navigate the clothing situation, clean the floor in the lobby, figure out who will be taking the kid where and who will finish coaching class, try to calm the kid and stop the crying while reassuring him that no one is upset and none of this is his fault, keep managing to eyeball the athletes in the gym most of the time, convey a brief synopsis of the situation to a couple of key athletes who can help us mediate the situation, discover his nose was not bleeding from the inside but from rug burn on the outside, find a temporary solution to the clothing situation, finalize roles and out the door to urgent care Captain Awesome and I go. At this point Captain Awesome's only concern is a change of shorts...he has let go of the confusion and most of the embarrassment. Pit stop at the Dollar General on the way to urgent care for a $7 pair of athletic shorts and a $5 three-pack of underwear in his size (Who knew?) and we arrive at urgent care right at 7:15 PM. The intake nurse sends us directly to the ER, just a few miles down the road.
By 7:45 PM we were in a room and had told the story at least five times. By the time The Great Bearded One joined us the doctors had ordered an EKG, CT scan, chest x-ray, and urine and blood work. Captain Awesome is a seasoned pro when it comes to EKGs. Everything else seemed to be making him quite nervous. The Great Bearded One coached him through the urine collection and I held his hand when they drew blood and went with him for the CT and x-rays. He was very brave through all of it. On the way back to the room I overheard the conversation at the nurses' station. They were transferring us to Brenner's, the local children's hospital attached to Wake Forest Baptist Hospital. It was going to be a long night.
We agreed that I would go home and take care of the dogs and pack a bag for the three of us. I left home for Brenner's around 11:30 PM and met my family in the ER there right around midnight. After telling the story another five times, another EKG, and having the nursing staff scrounge for anything Captain Awesome might be able to eat (he totally missed dinner), we landed in a room on the sixth floor somewhere between 2:30 and 3:00 AM. After getting Captain Awesome all wired for sound and telling the story yet again to two residents that were strangely reminiscent of Doogie Howser, we were told to expect Captain Awesome's cardiologist in the morning and The Great Bearded One caught an Uber back to his car and went home to care for the dogs and handle the late morning classes at the gym.
Captain Awesome and I tried to finally get some rest. The hospital's helipad was basically right outside our window. A flurry of noise and activity when a helicopter landed there prevented sleep before 4 AM, but I must admit it did add a whole different perspective to the situation.
The cardiologist woke us up around 8:30 AM and went over a whole bunch of worst-case, best-case stuff with me while Captain Awesome appeared to be absorbed in a video game. I knew better. That kid hears EVERYTHING. Always has.
So now I'm going to skip ahead an echocardiogram, a collaboration between doctors, and a few hours and land us one floor up in the hospital's outpatient cardiac care unit, a place we've been a couple of times before for routine exams. Captain Awesome suddenly had to go to the bathroom "really badly" right before the nurse was going to put a telemetry patch on him that he would wear for the next two weeks. He was in the bathroom quite a long time. Finally he emerged, the nurse put the patch on his chest, and we were homeward bound.
We were all home and all exhausted before 3 PM. Captain Awesome kept touching the button on his telemetry patch as if checking to be sure it was still there. He complained that he would have to wear it for the first day of school because you could see it through his shirt. He fidgeted and paced and whined and complained. I contributed his behavior to lack of sleep. I offered to watch a movie with him in my bedroom with the hope that he would relax and we could both take a nap. He agreed and we settled down and found something to watch.
There was no rest for the weary. Captain Awesome went to the bathroom five times in thirty minutes. He paced. He cried. I tried very hard to remain patient. Finally I more or less told him to stop moving around and go to sleep. He looked right at me through his tears and said: "I CAN'T! I don't want anything bad to happen! Why did this have to happen to ME?" Those words might as well have been a Mack truck rolling over my rib cage and squashing every bit of air out of my lungs. Oh, no. He finally gets it.
Captain Awesome was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect. He had open-heart surgery when he was just five months old to repair three of the four defects present in his infant heart. He has always known he had a special heart and needed to see special doctors regularly to monitor his progress. He has always known he gets tired a little faster than most other kids and that that's okay. His pale white "zipper" scar on his chest has always made him stand out as a Heart Warrior. He has heard us talk to other adults about the definite surgery and possible additional procedures at some point in his future. He has always known, I just don't think he fully understood until now.
I learned when he was five months old that the only way I would make it as the mother of a Heart Warrior was to pray and to trust. Oddly enough, in that moment in my bedroom, I realized we were four days shy of the ten year anniversary of his open heart surgery. For ten years prayer and trust have pulled me through. Surely it would help Captain Awesome as well. I told him that the only reason I could figure this was all happening to him was because God had big plans for him. I asked him if he thought praying might help him feel better. He said he thought it would. He came and sat cross-legged on the bed next to me and obediently closed his eyes and bowed his head, his hands clasped in his lap.
[Side note: I am habitually silent when I pray. For as much as I talk, my prayers are typically private. I am always happy to defer to my friends who are "prayer professionals" whenever a prayer is to be spoken aloud. I admittedly said a silent prayer asking for the right words before I actually said anything.]
Captain Awesome was very patient with me as I paused and reached and fumbled for the just right things to ask. We prayed for guidance for us and the doctors. We prayed for as strong a heart as possible. We prayed for total healing when the time was right. We prayed for Captain Awesome to have the courage to ask the questions he wanted to ask and the means to understand the answers. We prayed that he would always know how loved he was and that none of this was his fault. We prayed for acceptance. I added a last silent prayer of my own that I could accept that things would never be the same and that I could find the words to help him put one foot in front of the other when necessary.
It didn't happen immediately, but gradually Captain Awesome did calm down. He slowly got still, his eyes got heavy, and then with one hand touching his telemetry patch and the other holding one of my hands tight up under his chin, he drifted off into a deep sleep.
