Daughters…

There are tons of us girls out there, right?  We need to stick together.

This has been on my mind for such a long time now.  I can’t tell you how often dads come in to my ultrasound room and tell me that all they want is a little boy.  I can count on one hand the number of new daddies that said they were hoping for a little girl.  I count myself lucky if they tell me that they would be “ok” with a little girl.

This hit me really hard yesterday.  It upset me to the point of tears a couple times.  Every time I came back to thinking about it, my eyes would mist up again.

I’ll start with the story that brought it up, and where I went from there.

A couple came in yesterday with their lovely, tiny daughter.  She toddled in wearing little blue jean shorts, and a white camisole top.  Her hair was blond, and still short like a baby, but the ends curled just so.  She was so brave, she didn’t need mommy or daddy to hold on to her, she just followed behind me like she was told.  Her dad said that today was her first birthday, and getting to see her little brother was her present!  I chuckled with him, and said that I bet it wasn’t her only present.

When we got into the ultrasound room, I gave them my whole speech about how my job is to get the pictures the doctors need to make sure the baby is developing normally and healthy.  I told them it would take me about ten minutes to get all of those pictures, and then I would be glad to show them the baby, take some pictures for them to take home, and (if they would like to) we would find out if it is a boy or a girl.  I remembered his comment from earlier, and asked him if they already knew what they were having.  He said, “No, but we just want a little boy this time.”

I turned down the lights, and heard this tiny, piping voice say, “Lights on, peese.”  I stopped where I was standing, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dim room.  “Lights on, peese.  Too dawk.”

My mouth fell open, I stood there stunned. 12 months old?  Today is her first birthday?  Full sentence?  I couldn’t believe it.  I asked her, “You want the lights back on?”  She said, “Yes peese.  Too dawk in heea.”

I laughed!  I said to her mother, “That is incredible!  She talks like a two year old!”

They started to tell me about all of the amazing things that she can do, what she talks about, how precocious she is.  Dad was fumbling all over himself pointing out how amazing his daughter was.  He demonstrated her ability to say goodbye in French, Spanish, and German when asked.  (Ever seen a 12 month old baby say ‘auf wiedersehen’?  You melt.)  He seemed like such a proud poppa, so in love with his little girl.

I also have to point out here that their first daughter, and indeed this pregnancy as well were conceived with in-vitro fertilization – a procedure that only works around thirty percent of the time.  I had been thinking to myself the whole time how lucky and thankful they should be to be pregnant at all.

When I got to the part where I turned on my ‘big screen’ TV for them to watch, he half-shouted, “Ok!  Lets find that pee-pee!”  My heart sunk right there.  I already knew it was a girl.  I already knew it was a healthy, beautiful girl… and if she was anything like her big sister, she was gorgeous and amazing.  He didn’t care… he just wanted a boy.

This followed me all day, and then home again that night.  Brock and I started talking about it, and he couldn’t see how much it bothered me.  I told him, “I need to call my dad.”  He laughed and asked, “Why?  So you can talk about Stargate SG-1?”

With tears starting to flow down my cheeks, my voice caught in my throat and I replied, “No… so I can ask him if he was disappointed that I was a girl.”

He gave me a big hug, and tried to console me, but Brock didn’t get it – not even a little bit.  His reply was, “Of course he wasn’t disappointed, he already had two boys.”

Which is exactly my point.  If dad hadn’t had two boys first, if I was his girl, if all he had was girls… would he have been disappointed?  Would I have been enough?  What is it about men that limit them to thinking they can only love a child if it has a penis, and not simply because it is their amazing, beautiful, blessing of a child?

John Mayer wrote a song that said, “Fathers, be good to your daughters.  Daughters will live like you do.  Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers, so mothers be good to your daughters too.”

Daddies out there… your daughters love you.  They look up to you, and need you.  You are their strength, and their courage.  They want to make you proud, make you happy, make you smile.  Please, please don’t ever be sad that you’ve been given a tiny human being that will love you first, and above all others.

I can’t tell you how crushed I would be, now and forever, to know that my dad was disappointed when he found out that he had me.

I didn’t have a chance to sit and write yesterday, but this has been on my mind.

Sunday night was one of the worst nights I have ever worked in my entire career.  I did over 20 exams in a 12 hour shift, and I was fully exhausted by the time I was ready to come home.  I can hardly remember faces of most of my patients, let alone stories about them.  They all seem to blur together.

However, there is one fellow that stood out.  He was one of the last exams I did on Monday morning.

He came in through the ER with severe chest pain.  The ER, of course, did a full Heart Attack work up, and then sent him over for a gallbladder ultrasound when everything was negative.  As I was scanning him, he told me about the last time this had happened.  He said that he had a stabbing pain in his side, and that it was too uncomfortable to ignore.  “I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like someone was sticking a needle in my left side.  I told my wife, and she said it was just indigestion, and told me to go back to sleep.  So I did.  The next morning, I woke up and it was worse.  She still thought it was indigestion, and she told me, ‘Go to the hospital if you want.  It’s indigestion.  I’m going to work.’  I called my daughter and had her take me to the hospital.”

He went on to tell me that they admitted him to do some tests, and he ended up spending the night.  After all the cardiac tests were done, the doctor came in the following morning and said, “You passed the stress test with flying colors.  Your heart is working.  But we’re prepping you for surgery in 2 hours.”

I was shocked!  This guy was relatively thin, healthy appearing, didn’t smoke… I asked him what kind of surgery he had.  They did a double stent in his heart, and then took him into an endarterectomy surgery on his neck – he had had a greater than 95% blockage of his left carotid artery.  It was then that I noticed the massive scar on the side of his neck.  I jokingly asked him if he has let his wife forget about it yet.  He chuckled and said, “She’ll never live it down.  But today, when I said my chest hurt, she was out in the car before I had a chance to pull my pants on!”

I finished my exam relatively quickly, and had moved him back out into the hallway, but continued to chat with him.  He was telling me about his daughter and how she was interested in becoming a Sonographer.  He asked me questions about how to get into the field.  I cant exactly remember how we got on to the topic, but he then started telling me about how he’d had a stroke, and it took them weeks to find it.  He said it started out with severe headaches, and seeing seven or eight doctors for it in the course of a month.  Someone finally put him on a steroid and a pain killer for it, and whenever he took the medicine, he would have seizure-like activity on one side of his body.  At that point, one of his doctors finally decided it was worth their time to do some diagnostic testing, and found that he had had a major stroke to the back of his brain.  He went through months of rehab and has been on blood thinners ever since.

Around that time, the transporter had arrived to take him back to his room, and even though it was on his paperwork, I couldn’t believe all of the medical problems he’d had, so I asked him how old he was.

He said, “I’m fifty-five this year,” Dad.  And for the last 24 hours, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.  This poor fellow is sitting in the hospital trying to find out what’s wrong with him, and all I can think about is you.

I know what you’re thinking, and NO, this isn’t a post about that.

On my drive to work last night, I thought about a few things that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now.  I get these ideas stuck in my head, and I have this urge to get them out but just never blogged enough to get around to it.  My posts usually ended up being pissed off rants about something horrible that’s happened, or a depressed recounting of my horrible day.

But I was thinking about how incredible it is that I can remember the exact moment I lost my total innocence, and how the world around me became a darker place.

My dad and I were sitting in the living room of our house in Smithers, B.C.  I was probably about 9 years old, and we were watching TV and talking.  Dad and I talk all the time.  He’s probably the smartest person I know, and I credit him for not only my intellect but my desire to constantly be better than I am.  I can’t remember exactly what we were watching, but I know some sort of commercial came on about a program on the second world war.  Now, up until this point in my life, I had firmly believed that people were good – the whole world was good.  I knew about war, and murder, and all of those bad things… but they didn’t happen any more.  We, as humans, had grown past all of that.  I knew that.

I remember asking my dad why Hitler did all of those bad things.  I remember saying, “People were really evil back then.  How long ago was that war, Dad?”  I clearly remember thinking the number 500 years ago in my head.  Dad replied, “World War II was about 50 years ago, Mand.”

What?  50 years ago?  Grandpa was alive?  People let this happen?  Hitler killed all of those people just 50 years ago?

I couldn’t get a grip on it.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I cried myself to sleep that night, and it took me weeks afterward to get those thoughts out of my head.  Suddenly, everything in my life seemed a little darker.  The world I lived in was no longer essentially good, and that was a hard thing to let go of.

It’s sort of sad… after that moment, no single thing I learned about the way the world worked seemed all that bad.  Compared to the evil of murdering millions of people, the rest of the bad stuff was really just sorta bad.

I look at Ronan, and so desperately want to protect him from that moment.  I want to hold him close, and keep his innocence, his child-like wonder intact.  But to be quite frank, I think it’s probably a bit of a miracle that I made it all the way to nine years old before mine was taken away.  I suppose I should just hope that he makes it that far as well.