The Mermaid, The Surgery and Frasier Crane

For several years, The Muse and I watched Frasier. Eventually, like most really good TV shows, it stayed on too long and got pretty stupid, so we stopped watching. (Experiences like this make you realize just how incredible a show like Seinfeld was, where it pretty much stayed good until the end. Well, except for the finale in Seinfeld's case. And MASH's.) Anyway, one thing that Frazier himself said one time has stuck with me and became very relevant recently when The Mermaid became sick. Specifically, Frasier was talking to Roz about her in utero child, which she was having unwedlocked and thus worried about the experience, and told her:

"It's not just that you love your children, but that you actually fall in love with them."

Few truer words have ever been spoken and certainly not on TV. Well, maybe "trying to get something off the Internet is like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool" from NewsRadio, but you know what I mean.

The Frasier line popped loudly into my mind recently when The Mermaid got sick. Specifically, after a few miserable days (for The Mermaid) of hiding like a nasty stomach bug, an large ovian cyst decided that it needed to come out of The Mermaid. Right now. The Mermaid had just been talking about how she had never wanted to have surgery and, now, it was basically a health necessity. Once it was explained to her that she would be asleep and would not, as she put it, "feel them cutting me open," she was down with the idea because she wanted to get better. She now appears to be well on her way back to health, although things like parts of the incision popping open are still happening and we are still being quite vigilant about infections and she still doesn't want to look at the thing and neither do we really and we have talked to the on-call surgeon three times in the last two days and she has another appointment tomorrow. (What a fabulous health care system we are.)

The experience, however, has made me realize the truth of the Frasier line.

One oh-so-wonderful aspect of this experience was that, when the surgeons wheeled The Mermaid into surgery, they did not know exactly what they needed to do. The ER docs had thought that it was clearly a "hot appendix" that needed to come out, as they put it, but said that the surgeons wanted a CT scan to make sure before the surgery. For the few hours in the ER that we thought The Mermaid had a "hot appendix," it was oddly comforting. I know I was thinking, "Oh, a hot appendix is bad, but she's in the hospital and they take appendices out all the time and, hey, no one needs an appendix anyway." (We have "appendices" in the law business, so words like that occur to me.) Then the CT scan came back and, no, it wasn't an appendix, but some huge unknown thing inside The Mermaid that had to come out, right now. So, when they wheeled The Mermaid into surgery, they didn't know what they needed to do exactly.

And I don't really know if I have had a lower moment before. It is "please just do that to me because I don't want you to have to do that to her" moment. I will not say that nothing is worse than having your child wheeled into some unknown surgery because I know that there are worse things. I just know that I don't want to experience them because I know that never want to experience that again.

But then things picked up because the surgery went smoothly and, less than 24 hours later, The Mermaid was more or less back to herself, at least emotionally. In fact, the following 24 hours or so were a real eye-opener with The Mermaid.

If you are a loyal reader of this blog -- see that's irony (I think) because I know I haven't written on here for months, so I know that there aren't any loyal readers -- then you know that The Mermaid is high-functioning autistic. She also is 12 1/2. In the last 6 months to a year, she has been pretty withdrawn, keeping to herself a lot. Given her condition, this worried me some. It turns out, however, that she basically is just 12 1/2. While she was sitting there in her hospital bed between she kind got back into her own head and they sent her home (without the meds she needed, but, ah, that's different story), she was kind of a Chatty Kathe. I gave her the local newspaper's real estate section -- which she likes to read because she likes to see what houses go with what addresses, I think -- she said, "Thanks, Dad, that was really nice of you to give that to me." She finished watching whatever TV show she was watching and offered me the remote, saying, "Dad, if you want to watch baseball or basketball, that would be great."

The whole experience has been not just an arthimetic reminder of how much I love The Mermaid, but rather an exponential one, because the highs and the lows multiplied, not added, together.