by Steve Doocy
Mom saw we were safely beside her so she put it in reverse, stared in the side rearview, and started to back down the driveway. Grandma materialized at the door and waved good-bye. “See you tomorrow.”
“Okay, bye!” I yelled.
Cathy had been with Grandma less than thirty seconds earlier, but hearing Gunga’s voice she made a typical two-year-old’s snap decision that she’d rather stay there than go to our house and watch Mommy cook. The concept of MOVING CAR + SMALL CHILD = DANGER was beyond her years, and when she pulled up on the door lever it opened and she promptly fell out of the car. My mother, who was looking over her left shoulder away from us, missed it. But we both felt the front of the car bounce a little.
“JoAnne!” Grandma screamed in a bloody-murder voice I’d never heard on earth before and haven’t since.
My mother turned around only when Gunga screamed. She immediately knew something bad had happened.
“Where’s your sister?”
“She fell out, that way.” I pointed toward the door.
“Oh my goodness!” Out she leaped, leaving me alone where I couldn’t see a thing, until my mother appeared at the back passenger door with my screaming sister in her arms. “Mother, you drive.” And Grandma got behind the wheel. We had never driven that fast through downtown as we headed south down the main drag toward the hospital. I rode up front, hugging the seat and looking back at my sister. I was the only one with no tears in his eyes.
“She’ll be fine, Stephen, don’t worry.”
I wasn’t worried at all, because this was nothing new. My sister was always falling down and then crying, although I couldn’t understand why this time we were going to the hospital. As we pulled in, Gunga laid on the horn and somebody from the emergency room ran out with a gurney and they carted off my sister with Mom alongside as Grandma parked the car and we sat vigil in the waiting room.
Since I was a kid, nobody told me anything, so Grandma and I just sat in the waiting room, waiting. It was my first real hospital visit and nothing like Medical Center with Chad Everett, where doctors were urgently barking out orders to “Give them ten cc’s, STAT!” as nurses set up IVs for somebody with a rare but untreatable disease that would somehow be cured one minute before an exciting preview of next week’s episode. In real life there was no dashing, no running, just a whole lot of sitting and waiting with Grandma next to the pay phone as she chain-smoked Camels. The waiting-room TV was not tuned to the channel Gunga and I normally watched, so the shows that were playing were unfamiliar to me. We watched Merv Griffin and his distinguished sidekick, a slender and sophisticated man who sounded like he needed more fiber in his diet.
“Is that the king of England?” I asked her, pointing at Arthur Treacher.
“Looks like Orville Bebbemeyer from over in Brit,” she said, reducing the Edwardian actor to a small-town hoaxer who’d affected a phony accent to one day franchise fried fish to a nation.
Grandma had been trying to locate my father all afternoon, but with no cell phone or answering machine, every fifteen minutes she’d walk over to the pay phone, dial our number, and wait for my father to answer, which he finally did around seven thirty that night.
“We’re at the hospital—JoAnne ran over Cathy. Come quick.”
That was the first time I heard officially that my mother ran over my sister. Within ten minutes my dad appeared at the double automatic door, and I remember a feeling of relief that now everything would be okay.
“The tire went right over her belly,” Grandma told him, “and the doctor said because her bones are still so rubbery, nothing got broken. JoAnne’s still in there with her.”
“I could use a cigarette,” Dad said as he turned to a passing physician from whom he bummed a Lucky Strike. He smoked it next to the nurses’ station, where there were plenty of ashtrays right under an advisory from the surgeon general that cigarette smoking could lead to burning down your house. Why was the whole country worried about harmless smoke, I wondered, when the real danger to America was children falling out of cars only to be run over by their parents?
Miraculously, my sister had no internal bleeding and was going to be fine. Very late that night my mom told my dad to take me home. For the first time in my life, it was just the two of us alone in the house, sitting at the kitchen table as he drank one cup of coffee after another. I remember the pin-drop quiet framed something he said that was so remarkable to my five-year-old mind that I’ve never forgotten.
“Stephen, I wish I could trade places with your sister.”
To me, that was just plain weird—why would my dad want to fall out of the car and have Mom run over him? Then we’d have two in the hospital, and with Mom sitting vigil, who would make my breakfast? I just nodded, and hoped his crazy idea did not come to pass.
Two days later my sister celebrated her birthday in the pediatric wing, where the staff threw her a party with chocolate cake and rubber gloves inflated balloon style. After many hugs and kisses, and a ride in a real wheelchair, Cathy was dismissed, and considering what had happened to her in the previous four days, she was lucky to be alive. But I wasn’t thinking about my sister. I was fixating on the wheelchair ride and blown-up-glove balloons. I made a mental note to make sure my appendix burst mid-October so I too could have a bedpan birthday.
“Let’s go!” my father said as he helped my mom and sister into the car. “JoAnne, I’m driving so nobody gets run over on the way home,” he cracked, which got an audible gasp from Gunga and a dirty look from my mom, who surely felt guilty. Now I wonder if my father felt responsible that he wasn’t at home the day it happened. He went through a period as a helicopter parent, hovering over us all the time, but eventually we broke free from him and resumed pulling boneheaded stunts that were at the danger level of the stupid chart.
When my own children came along, I thought about what my father had said, about how he would have traded places with one of his kids so she wouldn’t have to suffer. It was a gallant and admirable suggestion, but I just didn’t feel the same way. Maybe it was because all of my children’s maladies were so pedestrian—why would I want to trade places with a kid with the croup?
Our children Mary and Peter did something that freaked us out in their first few months—their eyes would float around every which way. Thankfully, they grew out of it. At four months Sally’s eyes were still randomly drifting around to the point that sometimes when you looked at her eye all you could see was white because her blue iris had rolled out of sight. She did not outgrow it, so my worried wife took her to a series of experts whose early treatment was to build up her eye muscles by putting a patch over her best eye.
“What’s with the little pirate?” an older man who stopped at our garage sale said.
Not funny to us. We just icily stared at him as he bought an eight-year-old Sony Betamax for ten dollars. Had he not made the pirate crack I would have told him the only thing that worked on the Sony was the clock.
The eye patches didn’t work, and before she was a year old Sally was already wearing glasses, which would stay on the bridge of her nose between five and nine seconds before she’d paw them off. To train her to keep her glasses on, they had my wife put Sally’s hands in mittens, which got odd glares from strangers in mid-July when she was wearing them at the mall. She had a bright red pair, which when worn with her glasses and eye patch would have prompted the guy at the garage sale to ask, “What’s with the lobster pirate?”
She could not see well, and as her vision deteriorated, her parents were constantly tormenting her with patches and mittens and glasses and burning eyedrops that blurred her sight so badly she’d crawl blindly every which way until she’d run into a wall headfirst. Sally had a truly pitiful start to life. One night before bed, I was giving her a bath and as I rinsed her hair I noticed a lump behind her left ear. I called in my wife, who’d never noticed it either. The next day we were blown away when we were told Sally would need brain surgery just when her eye doctor said she
needed her eyes operated upon as well. Before her second birthday she would have two operations; curiously, she was at exactly the same age as my sister when she fell out of the car.
“I’ll bring you back to recovery as soon as she’s out,” the nurse said, prying Sally from my arms. The child had sensed that this was no ordinary trip to the doctor, and alerted the entire first floor of the Fairfax County Hospital that she did not want whatever was waiting for her behind door number one.
Kidnappings are quieter. Every head turned our way, but nobody gave us the shut up your kid look, because they all recognized that cry, and at that moment not a soul wanted to be in our shoes. The sobbing was as loud and heartbreaking as I’d ever heard. Tears were streaming down my wife’s face as the nurse carried the squirming Sally out of the waiting room through the automatic doors. We sat there stunned because our littlest, most vulnerable one had just been pried away by a total stranger and taken somewhere very bright and scary. In fact, we knew exactly where she’d been taken, because even though she was somewhere in a pre-op room three or four closed doors away from us, we could still hear her screaming. It was a wretched wail that went on for an agonizing ten minutes.
“That’s not good,” Kathy said as it abruptly got louder. We turned toward the operating-room door, and our nurse was speed-walking in our direction.
“We need a pacifier,” she said sternly. “And a bottle. She’s quite disruptive.”
I was surprised a state-of-the-art medical facility didn’t have standby generic pacifiers at the ready. Kathy dug the requested items out of the diaper bag, and ninety seconds later Sally was quiet. Relieved, we sat there scared out of our wits: what were they doing to our baby in the operating room? It was then that I had my first conversation as a parent with the Almighty. As a kid I’d had many urgent one-way chats, generally along the lines of “Now I lay me down to rest, I hope I pass tomorrow’s test. If I should die before I wake, that’s one less math test I have to take.”
God never let me down. But this was different. I wasn’t praying for myself; it was somebody else who needed some help. I was new at asking for third-party miracles, so I kept it simple. Because it was an off-the-record prayer just between me and Him, I’d like to keep it private, but it was exactly what you would expect from a father whose child was on an operating table.
Of course we are an instant-gratification society, and when we ask for things, we want an immediate return phone call, so I waited for a sign that He was on the case. There was no deep James Earl Jones voice that told me to relax, nor a friendly apparition on the waiting-room TV that I could imagine was directed at me, or even a pronouncement that I should go and build a baseball diamond in our cornfield; instead, I felt an unnatural calmness because I knew she had the best doctors in the world and it was now in God’s big hands.
“Doocy family,” the nurse barked out, walking through the automatic door. “Everything went well. She’s fine.” That was our cue to start breathing again. Outfitted in hospital scrubs, we were led to a blindingly bright recovery room, where Sally was breathing heavily as she lay there hooked up to an IV and heart monitor in a cheerless little crib. It wasn’t like her bed at home, no stuffed animals or mobile, no brightly colored sheets and matching bumpers—everything was simple and white. It was like a layout from Pottery Barn’s hospital collection.
We were surprised that her eyes weren’t bandaged over, and the doctor explained: “She’d just rip them off, so why bother?” A few quiet minutes after we arrived she started to stir, and when she opened her eyes they were instantly and recognizably straighter. Thank you, God. It was a medical miracle.
Her ten seconds of quiet time abruptly ended when she recognized us as the people who had sent her into the back room where those strangers in surgical masks had done things to her eyes. As she screeched I saw something I’d never witnessed in forty years on this earth. There was blood running down her face. She had bloody tears.
She looked like she’d just been punched in the eyes. This was easily the most pitiful thing I’d ever seen. We felt helpless. I held her tight on my lap as my wife caressed her hair. Late in the afternoon Sally’s doctor released her, so we took her home, where she crawled over to her brother and sister and put her face next to theirs because she wanted no part of her parents.
At some point in the ordeal I thought back to my father, who’d said he’d change places with my sister who’d been run over, and I wondered, would I do the same? Would I trade places with Sally? My heart said yes, but as I thought of having a highly trained specialist prop my eyelids open with surgical toothpicks and then, using a razor-sharp scalpel, slice into the muscles behind the eyeball to make them an iota longer, I equivocated. Would I trade places with my child if it meant a doctor would poke me in the eye with a knife? The answer was swift and blunt—I would…but I just can’t.
I had a really good reason: because it was impossible. Hiring a stand-in for surgery didn’t make the sick one any better. In reality, all parents can do is hold our kids and stay with them until the pain or the scare goes away. Would I donate a kidney to my kid? Absolutely.
Retina, part of my liver? Yes and yes. If I’ve got some spare part, it’s here for the taking, and that is a pledge that will stand as long as I’m standing.
On the day of Sally’s brain operation there was some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the bump behind her ear was an unexplainable growth that had no effect whatsoever on her, so the brain surgeon simply removed it, and then vacuumed clean our insurance company.
“Thank goodness,” my wife said to me while we were gathering our belongings in the waiting room. Then I noticed an important business bulletin had interrupted Wheel of Fortune. We watched live as Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, signed papers to buy the television network where I worked. How would that affect me? They would clean house, and I would be fired tomorrow because my week hadn’t been quite lousy enough.
I was so numb and bone-grindingly tired that I really didn’t care. My father had taught me that jobs were simply places to go to make money for our families. My daughter was going to recover, and that was all that mattered. As for Bill Gates, if I ever saw his car in the parking lot I would probably steal his NERDMOGUL license plate and put it in Sally’s room.
I am a father who would do anything for his family, and while Bill Gates is probably also a good dad who has made trillions with Microsoft, the truth is, I can shred his high score on Tetris.
5
Legacy
Should I Follow Tom or Diane Sawyer?
Tom Sawyer was the Million Dollar Movie my dad and I were watching when he pointed to the star’s raft and revealed, “I built one of those.” My father had chronicled much of his childhood, but the raft thing was tantalizingly new information. My immediate reaction was that if my father had done it, I should do it too. Some families from one generation to the next hand down heirloom jewelry, odd parcels of real estate, or gravy recipes; I would follow in my father’s footsteps and make raft building our family tradition. Additionally, the idea of my own personal watercraft would put me on par with Ari Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who was at that time married to Jackie Kennedy, the former first lady, and pictures of the two of them gallivanting on his yacht seemed to make the covers of every supermarket tabloid my mother bought.
Why’d the pretty lady marry the guy with the gut? I’d wonder years before I learned he was worth three-quarters of a gazillion dollars, and as I now know, vast wealth is very slimming.
My father gave me permission and a pile of unused lumber to set up a dry dock in the basement of our ranch house on Margaret Street in Russell, Kansas. A third-generation do-it-yourselfer, I used what I’d observed in the movie as the inspiration and general concept for the raft. There was one gigantic problem with me building that thing: I was only seven years old. As I look back, the State of Kansas Department of Transportation should have come to our house and arrested my dad on the spot becau
se having a second grader build a watercraft clearly fell into the category of unwise things that should never be attempted, like singing karaoke sober.
I cobbled together as simple a flatboat as you could imagine, a wooden platform on a couple of two-by-fours. This was the first time I’d ever constructed something from scratch, and my father had encouraged me to add some extras. I chose something neither my father nor Tom Sawyer had on his raft: a steering wheel. That would make it much easier for me to navigate around partially submerged tree stumps as I spent lazy afternoons floating downstream. When I turned the primitive wheel side to side nothing happened. It wasn’t hooked to anything and didn’t really work, because a seven-year-old with a hammer has the mechanical wherewithal of a raccoon.
With the assembly complete, it was time for the final flourishes. I plugged my wood-burning iron into a basement plug and waited twenty seconds for it to heat up to nine thousand degrees, then branded the boat with a name that would surely be the envy of every second-grade boy: Kon Stinki.
During the final construction phase the excitement of my project had spilled over into a conversation with some school chums, who a few days later dropped by unannounced for a viewing. I wasn’t ready to officially unveil it, so I did the adult thing and hid behind the water heater pretending I wasn’t home. But my grandma was and told them to take a peek in the basement window. When I heard giggling, I assumed it was “That is so cool” laughter, but it was followed by “And look at that dorky steering wheel!” Another added, “Idiot,” as they adjourned to spread more goodwill around the neighborhood and doubtless torture a cat with a red-hot poker.
For the first time in my young life I felt absolute humiliation. Getting your pants pulled down between classes was one thing, but this was personal. It was my own creation—why didn’t they understand that? Rejected, dejected, and generally feeling rotten, I mothballed the project. My father arrived home in time to watch the final fifteen minutes of The Mike Douglas Show, but my mom confided what had happened and he went directly to the basement, where I was using a pry bar to rip the pine plank captain’s chair out of the SS Laughing-stock.