Kid A

No matter how they try to brighten things up, children's hospitals are depressing places. You look around at all the kids, some look fine, some are clearly broken and there for fixing. And then the rest are there because their brother or sister is broken.

Today, when I went for my weekly ultrasound, I saw three things at Children's Hospital that were profoundly sad, things that seemed like omens given why I was there. First, as I was walking through one of the many glass-walled corridors on my long walk through the hospital to my doctor's office, I caught a glimpse of a teenager in a bed, surrounded by machines and tubes, his mother sitting nearby reading a book. From the door leading to that ward walked a little girl, maybe 5, balding with wisps of white hair, wearing a surgical mask. Clearly, this is where kids go for chemo.

Later, an elevator door opened to a packed car. In the center, a woman with employee badges stared ahead into nothingness, one tear dripping from her left eye. No puffy red cheeks. No sobbing. Just a tear on an otherwise stoic face. I wondered what she had just seen.

So, when my doctor delivered some unsettling news, that the mass in Mr. A's chest had grown faster than he did, past the ratio that sets off alarms, I was saddened, but not heartbroken. Because he's hidden beneath my abdomen, I don't have to watch him suffer the way all the other parents in that hospital do with their diseased children. That mom with the teenager and the parents of the five year old and the employee in the elevator have to look at sick kids and feel a far more palpable helplessness than I. For now.

Mr. A is going to need surgery. I will at some point be that mom sitting bedside watching my kid suffer. Hopefully, it will be just once, with just one kid. Hopefully, Mr. A will stabilize and stay inside long enough to grow enough lung tissue to be able to breath once he is born. Hopefully, he will not be born before 32 weeks.