7 Quick Takes Friday #13

As I started to write this post, I noticed that it is my 13th Quick Takes Friday, a meme hosted by Jennifer at Conversion Diary. I was a little unnerved, seeing the number 13 so closely associated with Friday! Ah, well...here we go, anyway, in no particular order.

1. Stealing Doah. Yesterday, by request, I posted an excerpt from my book, Blest Atheist, on the Clan of Mahlou site about how many years ago Doah was dying at Renboro Hospital (name changed) and with Doah's pediatricians' implicit consent (not explicit -- he would not have been able to give that kind of encouragement), Donnie and I literally stole Doah from the hospital in a very dramatic, made-for-the-movies episode in our lives. It's a story that Doah never tires of hearing. Here are the first paragraphs. If you are interested, you can read about the whole story, including how once again God was able to bad into good, at the Clan of Mahlou site.

Told by doctors at Renboro Hospital that Doah would die for certain, the trail ahead of us to bring him into adulthood seemed hopeless and far, indeed — except that I simply have no idea what the word, hopeless, means. To me, where there is life, there is hope. Clearly, though, to maintain that hope, we would have to do something about the attitude of the doctors and hospital in which Doah was being followed.

We did not have to think long. Matters quickly came to a head at Renboro Children’s Hospital. Our knock-down-drag-out fights with doctors there pitted parent against doctor in a war that was not going to serve Doah well. In June 1980, that cold war heated up rapidly. I refused to sign papers for a fundoplication, an operation that would repair Doah’s hiatal hernia at the risk of losing him because of his breathing difficulties from a subglottic stenosis (narrowing of the trachea) that were treated by a tracheotomy. (Nowadays children's with tracheotomies have decent survival rates; back then, most of the children died.) Doah’s pediatrician, Dr. Paul, was one of our strongest supporters. He would come to the hospital, mediate disputes, and provide me with his medical opinion. Dr. Paul researched the surgical procedure. He learned that the operation (in 1980) had only a 25% survival rate in cases like Doah’s and, if the patient survived, there was only a 50/50 chance that the surgery would take care of the problem. In any event, the surgery would have to be repeated every few years. (Over the years, the surgery success rate and survival rate has approached nearly 100%, but the surgery does still have to be repeated every five years.) Given these statistics, the pediatrician agreed with us that surgery was not wise.

Bent on what we assumed was their pursuit of medical training and the chance to do what was then a relatively new procedure, the doctors insisted that Doah have the surgery. Part of me wondered whether they just assumed he was going to die, anyway, and therefore he was a good candidate for “training” surgeons on a new procedure. In any event, the doctors did not accept my refusal to sign papers authorizing surgery and took the case to court, requesting that the court grant custody of Doah to Renboro Children’s Hospital so that they could do the surgery. We were not told about this court proceeding; apparently, we were going to be deprived of the opportunity even to be in courtroom and defend our rights as his parents. Shades of American democracy as it sometimes perverted by evil forces! I found out about this intention because I read promiscuously —- books and journals and articles and medical records: all Doah’s surgical reports, all the nurses’ notes, all the medical entries of any sort. And that is where I found it. In Doah’s four-inch-thick file was a scrawled note about our being unfit parents because we would not sign for the surgery and the date of the court proceeding. The date was only two days away.

What to do? A daring plan entered my mind: steal Doah from Renboro Children’s Hospital and take him out of state to Beanton Children’s Hospital where Noelle had been treated for her spina bifida and related birth defects three years earlier. I trusted the doctors because they listened to me. The doctors I knew there even liked me. I quickly found out more about Noelle’s former urologist, Dr. Colodny, and learned that while he was at that time specializing in lower GI problems, he had at one time worked in the area of upper GI problems. He could be Doah’s doctor, I reasoned. That thought comforted me, but we still had to get to Beanton.

We developed a step-by-step plan to steal Doah from his hospital room. I shared the plan, but not the details or the timing, with the pediatrician. He looked at me thoughtfully. Then he said, “I cannot condone what you propose. However, if you do happen to end up in Beanton, please be aware that Bob, the son of my partner, is an intern there. He can provide the link back to us and make the transition of records and information smooth.” He disappeared from the room and came back in a couple of minutes with Bob’s phone number. The pediatrician’s implicit encouragement was all that I needed to put our plan into action.

The next day, the doctors were in court, and we were at the curb outside the hospital. Charles kept the car running in a “standing only” zone. What I was about to do would not, could not, take a long time, we reasoned.

Click here to read what I did: continuation of Stealing Doah.

2. The intensity of it all. As I write, I am exactly half-way through an entire semester's course, taught in 5 days! Today the students take their midterm. This is clearly a whirlwind course! For me, too. As soon as I finish the quick takes, I will have to prepare the mid-term, but I also have 8 students coming by this afternoon for short appointments about their research papers, which they will be able to write after I leave and turn in during the rest of the "real" semester, after I am comfortably back at work. I hope that they do better on the midterm than on their "surprise" quiz yesterday, which was not a surprise but seemed to be, based on the failing grades of 1/3 of the class. I went over the results with them before they went home, and I will do an hour review before the midterm today. Hopefully, some of this information will start to gel for them. Linguistic research is not an easy topic.

3. The note in my pocket. I had loaned my warm winter coat to Sr. Maria right before coming here and did not have time to go pick it up. Sister is not young and does not drive (does not have a car), so one of my friends offered to pick it up after prayer group, which I had to skip in order to take Noelle to see Ray -- glad I did since he died soon after. After I arrived here in Lithuania this past week, I put my hand in the pocket and found a note from my friend, saying "Have a safe trip and know that I will be praying for you and your family while you are gone." How nice, a warm touch from home in the cold and snow of a Lithuanian winter!

4. Shane. Good news came for Shane this week. He will be able to get COBRA. Of course, his unemployment check covers only his rent and COBRA would be 50% of that cost, so he would not be able to afford it, but it looks like Donnie and I can pay it for him by tightening our already cinched belts considerably more. The irony is that the company that fired him in order that their insurance premiums not go up due to the 2-million-dollar medical marvel of Shane's called Nikolina will have to pay twice as much as Shane for each premium. Firing Shane may not help them achieve their goal of protecting their low premiums after all. Seems like poetic justice.

5. Shane again. It has been only two weeks since Shane was fired, and he already has an interview for another job. Woot, woot! It is in the tech field; he had been working in dispatch. He wonders if the firing will not be a kick forward since he is skilled in tech and has always been the tech specialist for dispatch wherever he worked. The entry pay is lower than he was making as a supervisor, but the pay would quickly catch up. Where a door closes, God opens a window? We don't know if this is the right job for Shane or just an encouraging fluke, but he did get called back for a follow-up interview next week, a very good sign. So, he ends the week on a hopeful note.

6. St. Casimir's. On Sunday, a friend (the one who has enticed me to come to Lithuania two winters in a row) and I attended Mass at St. Casimir's. St. Casimir is the patron saint of Lithuania, so it is no wonder that the church is Baroquely grand, made of marble, and, in the winter, very, very cold. I could barely walk all the way to the front of this huge church, colder because few people were there to warm it with body heat, for the eucharist and really happy that here the Eucharist is served on the tongue only. My hands would have been far too inflexible to take it in hand. But the church is incredibly beautiful, and I, incredibly, have no pictures of it. I did not bring a camera! :(

7. A cold in the cold. Since last night I have felt a cold trying to seize me. I have been downing all the Vitamin C tablets I can get my hands on, but I may need to buy more. I don't know if it is the cold outside, the cold inside (it took a few days to locate a space heater so I spent a lot of time under blankets, typing with frozen fingers), the cold at work (now I have a space heater there, too, as do other faculty members), or the one time I went out into the cold with wet hair (something that I would not have been able to do in some countries where I have lived because of the cultural inappropriateness but here it is okay; I forgot my hair dryer -- along with, unfortunately, my long underwear -- back in California where I need them far less). Or maybe, it is the late hours I keep. I no sooner finish my evening classes here than my Blackberry is jammed with emergency messages from work, some of which I do have to handle, making for limited sleeping hours.

And now, I had better go write that midterm!