My adult life has had its share of ups and downs. Our family has dealt with job loss and severe financial strain, autism and behavioral issues, difficult foster kids, and the joys of being self employed.  I have struggled at times with the isolation that comes as result staying home with a house full of kids and the social limitations of having a special needs child.  But, when I come up against a new trial in my life, there is one event that puts everything in perspective.  One thing that makes the rest pale by comparison. My son survived brain surgery.

Two days after Gabe’s fifteenth birthday,  Zac, his older brother, ran upstairs saying “Something is wrong with Gabe.”  We ran downstairs to find Gabe in the middle of a grand mal seizure.  It was the scariest thing I had ever experienced. We turned him on his side and called 911. The patrol car was there in minutes.  The seizure was over by the time they arrived.  Gabe was disoriented.  They tried to assess his level of awareness. The ambulance arrived a few minutes later. Then began the task of getting my 250 pound fifteen year old onto a gurney in the basement, through the sliding glass doors into the backyard and around the side of the house to get to the ambulance in the driveway. Gabe fought strangers trying to lift him onto the gurney and he kept trying to sit up. It was awful to not be able to explain to him what was going on.

It was determined I would ride along in the ambulance, and Andrew would follow in the car.  The other kids stayed home with their grandparents who just happened to be visiting. The ambulance sat there for what seemed like an eternity while they tried to put in an IV. Gabe was not convinced that it was necessary and he hadn’t completely come around yet.  The EMTs finally managed to get him ready to move.  As soon as we started moving down the road, Gabe started sobbing uncontrollably. I hadn’t heard him cry for years at that point. It may have been the most heart wrenching experience of my life.  The EMT driving the ambulance assured me that it was a common occurrence with seizures.  That was not much consolation at the time.

We arrived at the hospital.  Gabe was mostly coherent at that point but pretty exhausted. They wheeled him into a room. Assorted medical staff arrived to check him out.  That part is a bit of a blur.  They wanted him to have a CT scan to be sure but one seizure wasn’t necessarily a huge cause for alarm. Anyone can have one with the right set of circumstances – over tired, over stimulated… There was a nurse there whose son had experienced seizures starting at about Gabe’s age.  He had managed to learn to cope with and control them for years.  That helped a little and Gabe headed off for his CT.

The CT came back showing some calcification in one spot.  We were assured this was probably nothing but we should schedule a MRI and make an appointment with a neurologist just to be sure.

We took him for his MRI and then to the neurologist to get the results. He said the word brain tumor and I sort of went numb. We sat there stunned for a minute, asked a few questions the neurologist couldn’t answer, and were set up for an appointment to meet with a brain surgeon for more information in a week.

It was a very long week filled with a lot of thoughts of worst case scenarios.  It’s hard to care about any of the other things that normally occupy your days when you fear for your child’s life.  Minutes crept by.

Finally, the surgical consult arrived,  A member of the surgeon’s team pulled up the scans on the monitor to show us what we were dealing with. We were joined by the surgeon and a child oncology doctor. The group had concluded that, most likely, the tumor was a slow growing benign one. They used the fancier, medical terms but that is what I gleaned. We were given the option to wait and track the tumor for a while and see if it grows or changes or to schedule surgery to remove it.  Gabe had already had a seizure, likely, because of this thing.  Leaving it to grow and quite possibly cause more problems didn’t make sense to us.  We scheduled the surgery.

Then, we went into autopilot mode. Gabe was going to be in the hospital for a week and we had other kids to think about. They still needed to get where they needed to go and they needed to eat. People came out of the woodwork to get us meals. Those Methodists like to feed people.  Others were brave enough to transport Gigi to school and keep an eye on her after school.  Three grandparents showed up from out of town to help however they could.  By the time the day arrived, all of our ducks were pretty much in a row.  I had so much adrenaline running through me that I couldn’t sit. My house got very clean.

We arrived at the hospital, filled out the paperwork, waited and prayed.  Eventually, Gabe was wheeled off and the long wait began. We sat in the waiting room. Two grandparents, Andrew and I, and our oldest son.  We looked at each other, looked at magazines, tried to make small talk, looked up at the monitor to look for Gabe’s progress. I tried to think about something else.  I prayed that he would come through it all fine.  I tried not to think too much about what was actually happening.  Time passed so slowly.  I looked around at the others in the waiting area and wondered who they were waiting for and what they were up against.  We were a bunch of people sitting in a room and realizing how little control we had over anything.

After a painfully long wait, we were escorted to another waiting room where we waited for the doctor to arrive.  All he said was, “It went great.” and the pent up stress and anxiety drained from me.

We had made it through the biggest hurdle but we weren’t out of the woods yet.  We took the long trek to the ICU of the Children’s hospital. Gabe had a rough couple of days of recovery. He had monitors and IVs that annoyed him, no appetite, and to say he was irritable would be putting it mildly.

After a few days, he started to participate in conversation a little more and we started to feel like the real Gabe was starting to come back.

We also got the lab report back.  The tumor wasn’t actually a tumor at all but a malformed section of brain tissue. So there was no cancer and, miraculously, there hadn’t even been a tumor! There was no reason to think that anything would come back and Gabe would be fine. He is still considered epileptic but his seizures have been well controlled since the surgery.

Gabe has since fully recovered and gone back to life as a teenager.

While we were in the midst of the storm, I think I blocked a lot out.  It was too much to absorb at once.   It was only after some time passed that I felt the enormity of the situation.  Months later, I would occasionally be spontaneously struck by the fact that my son had actually had brain surgery.  It would stop me in my tracks. Someone had opened up his head, reached in and removed some of his most delicate and most important organ.  I am still in awe of this fact and I don’t think I have ever been more grateful for anything as I am for the fact that he came out the other side completely fine.  There could have been so many worse options.

This one event has changed how I look at life. When things look grim, when it is hard to pay the bills, when there are unwanted phone calls from school, when jobs are at risk, when the wrong guy gets elected, when the house is a mess and no one cares but me I say to myself, “This is not brain surgery. If we can get through that, we can get through this.” It’s amazing what a little perspective can do.