Brave.

It's like riding a bike.  With my Mom, behind Reeder's Creamery.  Calistoga, CA.

When I was 13, I came down with Bell's Palsy.  Youngest patient in Washington State History at that time.  Quite an honor.  It happened while I was living here with my Grandparents.  I had been out late at night on  the Herron Island Ferry dock, fishing with my cousin.  Well, he was fishing.  I was just cold and bored.  But it was out of the house so I went. I woke up the next morning and the entire right side of my face was paralyzed.  My externally calm Grandparents put me in the car and drove the hour and a half to the closest military hospital in Bremerton.  Escorted by their neighbor the venerable Colonel (Ret.) Alvin P. Johanssen.  I have no idea why.  But he drove and in the way of Retired Colonels got us seen by the top brass very quickly.  In the age before cell phones there was no way to contact my parents en route.  So I called from the pay phone in the waiting area, using my Dad's social security number as collateral to get the operator to put through an out of state call with no cash.  With my face paralyzed my words were very slurred and my Mom could not understand me.  I handed the phone off to the nearest Nurse and she explained the situation.  I really don't remember much else. My Dad was on maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean and unreachable by phone.  My afraid of flying Mom boarded a 12 seater plane in San Diego and held the hand of an anonymous to me young sailor who had been assigned as her escort.  She was Brave.  Fearless in the face of an unknown condition affecting her only child.  Terrified about what she would find, and how she would get here, she came anyway.  Flying into the dark holding the hand of a man she didn't know. She must have been frightened, but what else could she do other than get up and keep moving.

She came with me to every painful, horrifying appointment. An hour and a half each way, one 30 minute appointment in the middle. I was hooked up to an electrical current through my face and grounded by my arm every day for weeks, then every three days.  The current left blisters on my arms and red splotches on my face.  The idea being that stimulating the muscles in my face would keep them in shape for whenever the 7th facial nerve woke up again.   Three months later we went back to San Diego together and repeated the process at  Bob Wilson Naval Hospital near Balboa Park.  Every three days. Eventually my Dad took over driving and then he sat through the electric stimulation therapy with me.  The hospital in San Diego was much older than the one in Bremerton.  Taking the stairs to the basement pt rooms always made me feel like we were walking into a dark cave.  A dark pink cave.  Why are all Naval Hospitals pink?  It was brave I guess, I didn't really have a choice.  I was just desperately hoping that I would look normal when school started. 

I didn't. My face was still mostly paralyzed on the right side when I returned to high school. I was  worried  that people would make fun of me. I made jokes, my  right eye watered when I ate ( It still does, an incorrect blip in the way the nerves reconnected), I made the best half a goldfish lip face that anyone ever has.  Biting my lip, I could cry on demand.  Very useful stuff.  Mostly no one noticed me at all.  It was a very big school.  There were a few incidents (including a notable one in which a 6 foot tall football player stared down the four foot zero Driver's Ed instructor when the instructor asked, "What's wrong with your face anyway?") but mostly nothing.  I had friends, they either understood or were silent.  Either way there was nothing to do but get out of the car and go in every day. Three mornings a week before school my Dad drove me to the hospital and watched me hook up to the tens unit, waiting for my face to twitch. Watching new blisters rise under the grounding pads on my arms. Eventually my  face  returned to mostly normal.  There is still some drooping and paralysis, but most people don't see it.  Was I brave?  It didn't feel that way at the time.  Is there ever really any choice other than putting one foot in front of the other and moving on?  I do know my parents were brave.  Imagine, wondering what your wounded/disfigured child will find outside the shelter of you?  Alone, in a crowd.  Will they be teased? taunted?  Will they break down or go on?  Did you give them enough to get to the end of the day?  Will they ever be the same again? Will it come back?  Until very recently I had no idea how they did it.  How they could be brave to my face and scared out of their wits underneath.   I understand now.

Doodle is currently living a very similar circumstance.  Not life threatening, but life altering.  It is not my story, it is his and I won't share the details. I can only talk about the places where it intersects mine.  I can talk about how I don't feel brave sending him off to school.  How I am hardwired for any hint of threat or trauma around him.  On high alert for behavioral changes and anything that hints at bullying.  He on the other hand is Brave.  Brave with a capital "B".  BRAVE.  Walking everyday into what I know feels like a waiting time bomb.  But I know this boy.  He is made of strong stuff and he will not falter.  Like his Mom, he makes jokes.  Diffuse them with humor. That's my boy.  

My sleep has been pretty fractured lately and this particular parallel hit me on the head in the middle of the night.  Putting one foot in front of the other, getting up again and getting on with it.  I gave him that.  That comes from the way his Dad and I live our lives. From the way his grandparents, and their parents lived their lives.  Through natural disaster, trauma, death, fear, war and poverty. We don't fall down and stay there.  We fall down all the time, but we get up.  And so will he.  Like my Bell's Palsy, one day this will just be another mildly interesting episode in his childhood. A footnote.  Not a chapter.  Not a definition, just a defining moment.   A moment when he realized that there really is no choice but to get up and get on with it.   And to laugh at it, if you can.