if you have kids, be glad you have…

i’m sitting at children’s hospital in the surgical family waiting room. it’s relatively busy in here. who knows what these other parents have brought their kids in for. sebastien is here because he had yet another accident with his whittling knife, that sharp bugger! this time, he hit a tendon. so he’s in surgery. i just left him in the OR–TV shows make these rooms look way more interesting than they really are. the room where seb is right now, where they just put a mask on him, and he tumbled into a dreamless (i assume) sleep, is cold and white, unlike the brightly painted everything else in this place. i don’t like watching my boy fall to sleep that way, eyes glazed, body going limp. seb had a hernia repaired when he was 5, so this isn’t the first time i’ve been with him in that drug induced moment. i know for him it’s harmless, but i just don’t like it. it isn’t natural.

it is necessary though. and seb is glad to breathe in bubble gum smelling chemicals if it means he won’t feel any form of discomfort: no pokes, no prods, no needles, no anything. his biggest complaint was that he couldn’t eat anything since 8 o’clock last night…20 hours ago. he was feeling pretty crappy and decided he wanted to put it off just before they came in and told him it was his turn.

we had been waiting since about 1 o’clock this afternoon, and they finally fit him into the queue. children’s hospital has 13-14 operating rooms, and the surgeon said that they could use many many more. when you go to children’s hospital you are hit at once with how many kids there are with major problems, problems they were probably born with, problems that require much care. and you wonder how the parents can do it, all the doctor appointments, all the bills… so seb was fit into the queue, a space made for his poor little tendon in the midst of cleft pallets and who knows what else. it humbles me to think how minor our trouble is in the face of all this brokenness.

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