Fear's Tango: A Father's Story

It's approaching again, albeit with lessening dread, and reduced from three- to six-month intervals. I'm confident Jack, now 6, will continue to beat the averages and ace his MRI, his odds against recurrence of his brain tumor improving with each successful passage through the giant magnet's chamber. I know that, for the prior week or so, no real work will be done at this writer's desk. Once an uncooperative Jack is anesthetized for the MRI procedure at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC, I usually kill the suddenly bottomless hour by giving blood to the hospital I've come to revere. It's a ritual that my mind sees as enhancing Jack's karma.

Fragments of memory flow in. A one-and-a-half-year-old boy with a disappearing smile. Jack's arrested speech; the hearing tests. Jack's sudden sitting up in the dark, staring at nothing. His decreasing eye contact. As little tremors crescendo into seizures and upchucking after each meal, the HMO's distant scheduling of an EEG weeks away, and the frantic insistence by my wife and me that Jack be examined NOW.

The February 1999 CT scan's revelation: in the front left lobe, a black hole the size of a golf ball sucking away a parent's dreams. The midnight ambulance ride to Children's; the tearbursts in empty hospital halls. No more tears left, hugging the limp little boy before he entered that first MRI.

Sand flowed back into my legs with the surgeon's matter-of-fact statement "I think I can get most of this thing, we'll see what it is and where we go from here."

The surgical wizard cut as much as he could of the astrocytoma Grade II. Weeks were spent feigning sleep next to Jack in the hospital listening to noisy monitors, to other patients who came and went. My life was timed to doctors' rounds, to keeping Jack from pulling off wires and yanking drips from sore wrists, to the parade of anti-seizure meds.

Home at last, then complications, as the brain drain clogged. The midnight runs to emergency, holding Jack while the doctor used a syringe like a turkey baster to pull the liquid from his swollen head. The concerned faces on his mother, sister, and grandmothers as FrankenJack kept returning. One last try, please, to avoid the medical adventure of a shunt. Finally, success with a head wrap that opened the drain. Then sleepless months of every few hours pouring various anti-seizure drugs down the hatch of an unhappy camper.

The news is grand; the plasticity of Jack's young brain impressive. Though his speech center was wiped out, he's suddenly a magpie. A unique and loving, if mischievous, personality emerges as Pinocchio turns into a real boy. Therapists move him along, warding off autism. There are still fences to leap, but Jack's leaping. He beat back, without chemo, the remnants of his unpredictable grade of tumor.

Hope never wavers, but holding the fear at bay is an art form of repression. Chills went through me at a 30th high school reunion when I spent time with an old pal, a brilliant scholar, who was losing to the same type of tumor, though of a more predictably lethal grade. As we talked, my heart saddened, for I knew what he was going through, while my mind constantly went over the differences in grades, of odds.

When Jack was in hospital, I rode a hospital elevator down with a young mother taking her son home in a wheelchair, his gaze unfocused. I knew from her father-in-law that the boy had lost to his brain tumor – he only had a few days to live. I struggled during the short ride to say something that wouldn't put her on the spot during a moment she might wish to keep private. It was early spring, and suddenly warm, with flowers coming out; the best I could manage was that it was a pretty day to go home.

I heard a mother sobbing in her little girl's hospital room after learning her daughter had to undergo yet another operation after a number of procedures failed to block recurrence. I wondered if I could muster the necessary strength if the bottom dropped out again. There are no fears like those over which one has no control.

I started yearning for fear's embrace, for a solid, identifiable fright that I could personally grapple with. I seized an opportunity while covering a trade show in Acapulco: a first bungee dive. An unusually straight out dive angle twanged me back from the beach over a couple lanes of traffic and toward a building. As the cord went slack and curled, I thought my name would forever be associated with the term "freak accident." At a reception afterwards no margarita could quell my still-pumping adrenaline. A fear that could actually seize my ankles was a wonderful catharsis for the rougher fears one imagines.

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