Recovery from a Crushing Blow

Well, with a title like that, you’re hardly expecting a happy post.  That works well, because you aren’t getting one.  Gabriel had a Doctor’s appointment on July 4^th.  It was his 87^th Eye Doctor appointment.  These appointments have stretched out over 3 continents, involved 15 various specialists and easily given me 2,000 sleepless nights.  Number 87, proved to be one of the more memorable because I was blindsided for the first time since his original diagnosis.  It was when they said that his other eye has to go.  It isn’t growing properly. He needs another transplant.  I never saw it coming.

After many days of meditation and nights of tear stains on my wine glass, I’ve released my bitterness and untangled my thoughts enough to write coherently about these recent developments in Gabriel’s unending eye saga…maybe.   Since the original title of this post was: “I’m about to Burn Shit Down”, I think I’ve made remarkable progress toward acceptance, however, I had some trouble letting go of my anger.  

At first I couldn’t figure out who I was angry with:  The Pediatrician who told me (repeatedly) when he was an infant that his eyes were fine?  No.  That’s ancient history (though that Bitch better hope she never runs into me in a dark parking lot).  God?  No.  I’ve already established that my child is my miracle, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth (seems unhygienic anyway).   

 Then I realized.  I was angry at Hope.  That tiny, incandescent, winged champion of Pandora who lives inside all of us; feeding our dreams and casting light on our darkest days, had abandoned me.  When they take my baby’s other eye, that’s it.  End game.  No more hope for another miracle.  No more hope for a sight restoring advance in technology.  No more hope that one day my son will see the love that shines from my eyes when I look into his – just the knowledge that soon I won’t have anything to look into but painted, plastic prosthesis.  Hope abandoned me and left an empty place for despair to creep inside.  

Hope is fragile, delicate.  Despair is more like a murky, black ooze.  Once released, it goes through rapid Mitosis – dividing and spreading - tainting everything with long, reaching tendrils of hopelessness. Casting shadows, it chases the dreams away.  It leaves no room for anything else to grow because it’s as heavy as antimatter, darker than a black hole.  

I wish I could say that once I realized that I’d been attacked by despair, I shook it off with my usual vigor and vim, but –alas, I didn’t.  I wallowed in it.  Reveled in it.  Six years of putting my brave face on, of putting my Gabriel’s needs before my own, of pretending that everything was fine – gone – just like that.  

The moment the Doctor told me that Gabriel’s other eye had to go, I developed a tic in my right eye.  Walking to the car my stomach was in a knot.  By the time we got home, I was broken.  Shattered.  I couldn’t pretend anymore.  I grabbed my kid, slapped some store bought chicken nuggets in the oven, put every episode of Super Why on a memory stick and took to the bed with my child.  

For a few days (okay… okay.. 3 weeks) I was majorly depressed Mommy.  We spent days doing nothing.  Literally, doing nothing.  It was bad.

In my defense, I’ll tell you that Gabriel’s eyes were not the only factor to my depression, merely the straw that broke my back. Allow me to digress for a moment:

My first blog post said, “I sat on the plane headed back from Cali, Columbia feeling, for the first time in years, that the worst was behind us.”  Apparently, the Universe took them to be fightin’ words and since I tapped them out in February, has gloried in making me eat them.

April took two men I loved from me.  Both to illness; one resulting in death, the other in the crumbling of a relationship I thought would last me to the end of my days and a family that was not my own, but loved like they were. These losses left me with no nuclear family, save my wonderful child.  Even before I learned about Gabriel's eye I'd been feeling scared and tired and very much alone. After, I felt more than a little dead inside.

I should probably be ashamed to admit how much I depended on my little son to get me through those dark days but I’m not.  He’s never seen my face, but he knows me better than anyone in the world.  He can tell by the sound of my voice if I’m tired or happy or sad.  He knows when I need a hug and when I need to hear his tiny voice say, “Mommy, I love you”.  He’s so in tune with the people he loves, and he gives his love away freely, expecting nothing in return for it.  

It was that love; that vibrant, unselfish, untamed love that chased my despair away.  In another moment of epiphany, I realized that a child with so much love in his heart has nothing to fear from the darkness.  And while I nursed a secret hope that one day science would fix his broken eye, he never did – because I never gave it to him.  He suffered no disappointment, just mild anxiety knowing that another surgical procedure looms in his future.  I was able to get it together – not for me, but for him - because this is his childhood.  It’s so fleeting, over so fast.  Every day matters.  I got up out of bed.

I still haven’t completely healed, but my wounds have been mended enough that I’m able to carry on.  My sense of humor has returned enough for me to dream up interesting prosthetics we can have made, now that he’ll have no blue eye to match it to.  I was imagining the interesting combo’s he could have: Liz Taylor purple, catlike vertical pupils, maybe even black light responsive ones for college.  Hope returned and I remembered that I have no idea what kind of technological advances the future holds.  I started writing again, probably not my usual caliber – but hey, progress is progress, right?  Most importantly, I recognized that my son is doing incredibly well.  Throughout these months of turmoil, he remains bright, well-adjusted and perfectly happy. 

I won’t apologize for the lapse in posts – you can trust me when I tell you that you didn’t want to hear anything I had to say for a while - but I will ask you to stay tuned for more exciting adventures from us.  This year will bring another surgery, but it also brings first grade, new friends, swimming lessons - a childhood – colored, but not stained, by darkness.