My three-year-old woke up crying at one o’clock in the morning on Wednesday.
As a parent, you quickly learn to recognize your kids’ different kinds of cries. There’s the I don’t want to go to sleep cry, the I’m hungry cry, the I had a nightmare cry, and my all-time favorite, the I-bet-you-didn’t-want-to-get-any-sleep-tonight-so-I’m-going-to-make-sure-you-don’t cry, too.
But this one was different. It was the cry – no, the scream – of a little boy in severe pain.
Noah told us, the best he could, that his leg was hurting. We tried to get him to walk and he limped in severe pain. I stepped away and when I came back, I noticed that my wife was crying, too.
She wasn’t crying because our little boy was hurting. She said she was crying because on Monday, he was complaining about his leg and she brushed it off – but now the pain was back.
And she was crying because this was the same way that a nightmare started for the family of a little boy named Cannon who was diagnosed with neuroblastoma that she follows on Facebook. My first reaction was to look up the symptoms on my phone to confirm for myself.
Warning: don’t ever do this unless you want to drive yourself crazy before you can see a doctor.
So, being half asleep, I typed ‘bone cancer leg’ into google to see what the signs and symptoms were to watch for. It read “…pain in the affected bone is the most common complaint…at first the pain is not constant. It may be worse at night…and the person might limp if a leg is involved.”
I did another search and came across a post by a mother who ignored her daughter’s complaints about her leg hurting because the pain kept going away and eventually took her to the doctor and received bad news. I thought about Noah and how Missy said his leg was hurting two days before.
Why would his leg hurt on Monday and not again until Wednesday? We asked ourselves, becoming more worried as Noah’s screams got louder and more intense.
An hour later, we finally got some children’s Tylenol in him and Noah fell asleep. Missy and I went back to bed, too. But I could not fall asleep. When my alarm went off at five, I went downstairs.
For the first time in eighteen months, I didn’t write. I prayed. Harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life.
I prayed that there would be some other explanation. Some reason why he had this pain in his leg. An answer for why the pain was not constant. Why it hurt so much. Why it left and why it was back.
An hour later, I heard another scream, so I went upstairs to lay down with him. After I calmed him down, I put a hand on his back and as he fell asleep, I realized that while I had laid down with my oldest son many times while he fell asleep, I had never done that with Noah. It was the first time I had really watched over him as he slept and I listened to him breathing. And that’s when I lost it.
As he slept, I rubbed his back and I whispered about all of the things that I was sorry for.
I told him that I was sorry for No being my default answer most of the time. No, we can’t go in the backyard to play in the sand table. No, we can’t blow bubbles. No, we can’t go outside.
I was sorry for saying No when he would sometimes ask for a piggy-back ride because my back hurt. My back didn’t always hurt. Sometimes – no most times – I was just being lazy.
I was sorry for showing favoritism to his older brother, if I ever had. It wasn’t intentional.
I was sorry for being so gruff all of the time instead of listening and being understanding.
I was sorry for not being interested in things that interested him. To parents, everyday things seem mundane. To little boys, the mundane is magical. I was sorry if I took any of that magic away.
I was sorry for not capturing all of his special moments like I had for his big brother. I could have written a book with all of Kyle’s milestones that I wrote down, from losing his first tooth to going “pee-pee-in-the-potty” the first time… five years’ worth of memories captured before I lost interest.
But I had nothing written down for Noah.
I thought about what that would mean if God-forbid something really was wrong with him.
How would I remember all of those special “firsts?” How would I remember his first words or the first time he called me Daddy or the first time he threw a Chicken McNugget across the room?
When he woke up we took him to the doctor who ordered x-rays, an ultrasound, and blood work.
The results confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis – something called toxic synovitis – which sounds scarier than it is. The problem was in Noah’s hip, not his leg, and it was just a temporary inflammation that caused limping and pain. When I looked up the symptoms, I felt a lot better. It’s common in children between three and eight and the pain starts suddenly and mostly at night.
To say that Missy and I were relieved would be an understatement.
I think as a parent you tend to assume the worst but hope for the best. While it worked out for Noah, that’s not always how this kind of thing turns out. We are blessed to have two healthy, unruly, wildly rambunctious, sometimes crazy, often uncontrollable, but always lovable boys.
And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
While I’d love to put a bow on this and say that from now on I’m going to be a perfect father, I can’t. Parents aren’t perfect. We get tired and overwhelmed and frustrated. We have long, hard days, and our kids are the ones who suffer. A week from now, we’ll all be back to our old, selfish ways.
But I will try to remember.
I will try to be better.
I will try to be a real father, one that gives piggy-back rides, even when I don’t feel like it.
Because in the end, it’s not the memories of our kids that really matters. It’s their memories of us.