WITH SURGICAL PRECISION

One of the worst feelings in the world is that split second when you hand your child over to a doctor, and he turns to walk into the operating room.

For a fleeting moment, you have this urge to grab your child back and sprint from the hospital. The main thing that keeps you from doing this, of course, is that you are busy holding your wife back from doing the same thing.

Our son, Parker, had to have surgery to correct a hernia. In retrospect, I should not have made a three-month-old haul my luggage on my last trip. Lesson learned. OK, so it was just something that he was born with, and the doctors decided a little nip and tuck would serve him better in the long run. Apparently, quite a few boys have had this procedure. In fact, as I have talked to folks, I have found that roughly 600% of all boys have had this surgery.

When we arrived at the hospital, we were understandably nervous. After all, this is our baby boy, our only son, our second deduction. We were just as nervous when his sister had to have tubes put in her ears. I know that it’s technically a minor surgery, but it’s still surgery, and they still have to completely knock the little patient out. My in-laws were there as well, so we had roughly one adult per three pounds of child. I am fairly sure that is ample support. When the doctors took him, we were asked to go to the waiting room. I thought the waiting game was going to be sheer torture. I knew that hour after hour would toil by, and we would pace anxiously, biting our nails down to the wrist.

As it turned out, however, about the same time we sat down, a nurse told us that he was ready to go. “Uh, I just got comfortable,” I said.

“THWAP!” said the rolled up magazine on the back of my head.

Long before we got to the operating room, we heard Parker. The nurse who was escorting us there said, “Your son is NOT very happy with us right now.”

That was an understatement. Our son is a very laid back, good-natured child. When he does fuss, it is for briefs and rather subdued sessions. This was the scream of undeniable anger. He was ticked. And for good reason. All this time of passing him around to folks, and he had grown confident that none of those people would knock him out and then perform surgery. He figured he could trust us.

My wife took him and he momentarily stopped fussing. After he completed taking a breath, he resumed screaming at a decibel level just shy of a locomotive. As the anesthesia wore off, Parker began to have more and more moments of calmness. When you’re a baby, most every day is filled with new and exciting things that you take in with awe and wonder. Suddenly having to sober up from anesthesia probably makes all that the extremely unpleasant.

By the time we got him home, he was pretty much back to normal. He was doing what he normally does, which is sleep for about 42 hours a day. The only difference is that he would occasionally wake up, fuss for about 10 seconds, and then doze back off.

So fortunately everything turned out fine. The doctor said that he will never even know that he had a procedure. He should be hauling my luggage again in no time.