Singing in the Pain
I kept calm by staying busy. Packed the diaper bag, dressed the boy, loaded the car, buckled the car seats. Took our daughters to the sitter. It was just precaution. Early morning breakfast, poured the coffee, ate the toast, sat in traffic, it was just a precaution. Everything was fine, really.
My husband dropped us off at the door and went to park the car. With one hand I completed the medical forms, and found the insurance cards. With the other, I kept my busy toddler entertained. Crazy, but expected crazy until the nurse called us to an exam room to put an IV into the small hand of our 16-month-old son. We did not know this would happen. “We need to inject dye into his veins,” the nurse explained. They would also have to catheterize him. Internally, I froze in fear. Externally, I followed the nurse's instructions.
My husband and I and two nurses held him down so that they could insert the IV. He loved to sing. His favorite song was Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I was by his head, and bent down to his ear to sing. He sang with me. Two nurses stood at his sides to hold him down. My husband was instructed to hold his ankles down. I wanted to vomit. Instead, I kept singing. And then the needle came, and I found myself praying, “Please God let there be a miracle. Let it go in the first time, please God.” I was looking into his eyes, but I knew the exact moment the needle punctured his skin. I could see it in the shocked expression in his eyes. I could hear it in the song that now came through tears. Yes, even more miraculous than the nurse actually hitting the vein in that pudgy hand, Sam didn’t stop singing even as he cried.
Who knew that you could cry and sing at the same time? My baby knew it. I did not. I learned it that day and have remembered it ever since. In the darkness of pain and fear, you can still sing about the stars of hope that twinkle above you, just out of reach, but nonetheless there. Singing through the darkness, it was how slaves endured the agony of the oppression and proclaimed freedom without their master’s knowledge. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who believed more in God’s love than human hatred, was known to sing when arrested for standing up for her rights. Reportedly, she sang “This Little Light of Mine,” while a sheriff and his deputies beat her for sitting at a lunch counter for whites only. The courage to sing in the darkness lights the path of hope for others and changes the world.
They taped the IV to my son’s hand and told us to sit and wait. Undaunted by the cumbersome splint on his arm to support the IV, Sam played happily in the waiting room while we just waited for what would come next. A test where he would lie still without sedation for more than an hour while a machine tracked the movement of radioactive dye through his kidneys. How in the world could they keep our toddler, who is normally in constant motion, still for an hour without drugs? We learned quickly. They strapped him down with something that looked very much like duct tape. It was not nearly as horrible as one might imagine. The X-ray tech gave Sam a Tootsie Pop, turned on a children’s TV show. Sam lay there happily distracted for more than an hour.
I had spent days worried about how we were going to keep him still for that long test. I had not worried about the catheter because I didn’t know it was going to happen. I’ve decided that not knowing was better since I couldn’t do anything about it. For the second time in one day, my husband and I were asked to help the nurses hold our baby down. For the second time that morning, I sang with my son and couldn’t watch what the nurse did. Nonetheless, I saw everything through the reaction in Sam’s eyes. As they inserted the catheter, he couldn’t keep singing, it was too painful. I sang for him. We got through it. It was awful.
There are moments in all our lives when other people need to sing for us -- and then there are times when it is our turn to sing for someone who is struggling. When life is too frightening and what we didn’t know is now painfully known, we need someone to sing for us, to show us a path of hope. Music is a powerful healer. It transports people from a sterile world of beeping monitors and crying children to a harmonious place of hope. Music transcends barriers and pulls us toward divine. I had to remind myself to sing that day when the doctor gave us the test results.
I happened to be standing up when the doctor entered the room with our test results. Sam was squirming in my arms while the doctor introduced himself. I am tall and the doctor was short, so I towered over him and he had to look up to me to meet my eyes. After a brief introduction, he bowed his head and wrung his hands as if I might just take him down for saying the wrong thing, he stammered, “I am very sorry to have to tell you this but... ”
In the millisecond before his next words formed, a stampede of fear surged out of me. Each horrific possibility was a different wild stallion racing ahead to finish the sentence the doctor obviously did not want to finish…
“…but your son will have to go on dialysis.
“…your son will never lead a normal life.
“…your son has kidney failure.
“…your son will die.”
“I am so sorry to tell you this, but your son can never play football, not even in high school or middle school.”
Seriously? That was it? That was the bad news that has you cowering before me? I am among an apparently infinitesimal minority of Americans who don’t care about football. I attended Auburn University back when Bo Jackson was thrilling the entire country. I once drove a room full of people into thundering apoplexy by expressing genuine indifference about having tickets on the 50 yard line to Saturday’s game. Sam couldn’t play football? Thank God. One less thing to worry about.
With the stampede of anxiety quietly corralled in the stable of my mind, I could then actually hear the doctor speak. Sam’s kidneys were joined together instead of separated, a condition commonly known as “horseshoe kidneys.” It is not a particularly unusual disorder -- about 1 in 400 people have the condition -- and most grow up without even knowing it. But Sam’s kidneys were joined together in such a way that his right side could not drain properly. Because of Sam’s condition, his kidneys were particularly vulnerable, and located exactly where football players are taught to hit when they tackle. One blow could devastate Sam’s system. His lower back is his Achilles heel.
“At this point we will just wait and see,” the doctor explained. “Sometimes in children this young, the problem can fix itself. They simply grow out of it. So we will just check him every six months to see if he is getting better or worse.”
I didn’t want to “just wait and see.” I wanted to know right then and there. As much as we might want that quick fix or the ready answer, there are times when life only gives us the option to wait and see. We don’t get to hurry the results. We have to live with what is, learn to accept it, and do what we can to go on with the business of living.
We left that day knowing that our son would not play football, and that he may or may not need major surgery in the future. But we also left with a lesson that has returned to me many times. You can sing and cry at the same time.
As we enter the 18th week of the pandemic with no end in sight, this lesson returns to me once again. Even in the midst of pain and uncertainty, fear and loss, we can still sing. As we continue to stay home to save lives, we can keep singing. We can remind one another that we are not alone. This time of suffering will pass.
Our son would end up having a series of corrective surgeries. I confess, there were days when we were so weary we did not feel like we would make it. We found it best not to think about what Sam had already been through, or what might happen to him next. Instead, we had to hyper focus on the present moment.
Sam is now a healthy, typical 19-year-old, and it is no surprise to me that he loves to sing. On the long road to recovery, Sam always reminded us to sing. When he faced needles and surgery, or bad news and major setbacks, he wanted music.
In the darkness of pain and fear, we can sing about the stars of hope that twinkle above us, just out of reach, but nonetheless there. In so doing, we light a path of divine possibility that changes the world.
No one knows how or when the story of this pandemic will end. For now, we have to wait and see. Tears of grief and frustration will fall, but we don’t have to stop singing. We can still turn up the music and let the light of hope shine through us.
