The Gazelle
Stories about my son are like biting into an August peach. They have the most juice. But this juice isn’t sweet. It tastes like simmering Thanksgiving cranberries before the sugar’s been added. Yet, despite their bitterness, I feel compelled to tell these stories.
Years ago, I followed a spiritual teacher who observed that humans are the only creatures who harp on past events. We hold on to them, telling them over and over again, squeezing out all the drama and trauma. He would say, “You don’t see a gazelle, after nearly being caught by a lioness, saying to the herd, ‘Did you see what happened?! She was on my tail! I ran like mad! She nearly bit my butt and caught me! I could have DIED!’ No,” he’d go on, “Once the danger has passed, the gazelle shakes it off and goes on grazing. She’s fine. But we humans. Oh boy, that’s a very different story.”
And so, true to my human form, I’ll tell you the most recent story about my son. And me. My son is thirty-one. He doesn’t speak. He’s had uncontrolled seizures his whole life. Sometimes he vomits during strong seizures. Sometimes he aspirates the vomit, which leads to pneumonia and hospitalization. Today, he was scheduled for an endoscopy to see what might be going on in his upper GI tract that could be contributing to the vomiting.
When I was getting him ready to go for the procedure early this morning, he had a seizure, fell, and hit the edge of a plant stand, creating a crescent-shaped gash on the top of his head, the size of a silver dollar. Instead of driving to the hospital on the north side of town for the endoscopy, I drove my son to the hospital on the east side, which has a better-rated ER, to get his gaping wound stapled together.
I don’t really know how my son experiences these seizures or his injuries. He doesn’t cry out in pain. Or moan. Or indicate any discomfort apart from his resistance to being examined and treated. Other than expected exhaustion from seizures, he displays no signs of trauma.
For me, the trauma of these events is in the images and sensations that linger in my mind, like the sticky feel of congealed blood on my son’s now burgundy scalp and hair. The trauma gets imprinted as I scrub the blood that splattered on his bedroom carpet, creating a constellation of ripe cherries. I see it in the blood that pooled on my denim shirt, turning it a dark crimson in the crook of my elbow where I cradled his head during the seizure.
It is in the antiseptic smells of the ER as I rushed in, wheeling my son in on his “adult stroller,” not because he couldn’t walk, but because I was afraid he’d seize again and cause further injury to his battered skull, even though his helmet was on. It’s in the shallow pulsing of my rapid breath as I told the security guard it was ok to go through my backpack, though all I wanted was to get past him and the scanner, and get to a doctor as quickly as possible. It’s in the sound of a surgical stapler piercing my son’s cranial flesh as if it were a roofing shingle.
This trauma is nothing new, though. None of it. We’ve experienced all of this many times.
So why do I write about it? Why do I keep telling these seizure stories?
Maybe it’s to shake them off, like the gazelle. Maybe each telling, verbally or in print, sloughs off a layer of trauma, leaving it on the page, in the 5G network, in the ears and eyes of others, so I don’t have to hold it all myself.
What makes us uniquely human is the telling of stories. And the receiving of them. Just as the gazelle returns to her herd and shakes off her trauma, I share these stories with you, my human herd, and shake off mine.