The Worst Day

My middle son is working on his medical school applications. He asked me to edit the personal essay section that he wrote. This filled me with pride, seriousness and a great deal of trepidation. You see, my middle son’s major motivation to go to medical school started mostly with an experience that he had in high school with his younger brother. My youngest son is epileptic and my middle son witnessed my youngest son’s very first grand mal seizure (now called tonic-clonic), while he was driving them both to school. That day was categorically among the very worst days of my life – of all of our family’s lives. I cannot convey, in words, the desperate fear and the pure helplessness you experience, watching your child seize, lips turning blue, praying for it to end, as you hold him, trying to stop him from hurting himself, as his body flails uncontrollably. Every second of one of these seizures, feels like an eternity. It is scary as hell. My son’s neurologist told us that a grand mal seizure is like doing the most intense workout that you have ever done, in the concentrated time span of a few minutes. The experience is terrifying and the aftermath, is exhausting and painful. My youngest son experiences headaches that last a day and an unfathomable level of exhaustion, after coming out of one of these major seizures. Luckily, my son’s seizures are now controlled by a cocktail of medications, which unfortunately also have a bevy of undesirable side effects, but that’s for a different blog post. This post is about my middle son.

My middle son loves science. He loves technology. He loves fast cars and understanding how everything works. My middle son was my child that I was always having to pull his hands off of the buttons that he wasn’t supposed to be touching and pushing. My middle son is talented, smart, and extremely dedicated. He is meticulous and yet underneath all of that heavy, responsible armor that he carries around with him every day, lies a big, old heart of gold. I think there was a part of me that always knew that my son would be attracted to the medical arts, but the day that he witnessed his brother’s first major seizure, and was able to handle it all, in such a self-possessed, astute manner, despite tears flowing down his cheeks, as he calmly called us, and drove the car down a grassy median, avoiding the rush hour traffic, to get his brother home safely to us and to the paramedics, sealed the deal. He knew right then, that he wanted to use the gifts that had been given, to become a good, talented healer. There are silver linings in the bleakest of moments. This I know for sure.

When the paramedics loaded my youngest son into the ambulance, as he was now coming out of his seizure, I stepped up into the ambulance to sit by him and to comfort him, on the way to the hospital. Before they closed the back door of the ambulance, I glanced back at my middle son, standing in our driveway looking up at us both. If a mother’s heart can be ripped into two, it happened to my heart, in that moment. Part of my heart was beating for the welfare of my baby strapped to a gurney, and the other part was beating for the comfort of my brave, young man-child, who handled the situation so heroically. I wanted to comfort them, and me, and the rest of us, all in a steely envelope of relief, but all that I had was a fleeting glance, conveying worry/pride/gratitude/awe all at once, before the doors were quickly shut.

While my youngest son recuperated at the hospital and we knew that he would be okay, my middle son assured my husband and I, that he, too, was fine. In fact, my middle son wanted to head back to school because he had an exam that he didn’t want to miss and a soccer game to play in that night. It was evident to me that he was back to his level-headed, matter-of-fact, goal-oriented self. But I could also see that he was in a serious state of contemplation.

This morning, I made small edits to my son’s personal essay about what events motivated him to get into the medical arts, the most consequential event, being the day he witnessed his adored baby brother’s first major seizure. This essay that he wrote for the application, is his story. It is not mine to change. The story is his perspective and each member of our family has a different “story” about that very same life-changing event that happened in the lives of our family, and each of its members. We knew that this experience would change and affect all of our lives in some ways, forever, but in my middle son’s case, the change for him, came mostly, in the form of an internal, directional sign, pointing forward to his purposeful calling in life. Life works and moves in us and through us, sometimes, in the most poignant and mysterious of ways. We have no choice but to accept this fact, and let it flow.