Reliving the Past for the First Time

This has been a tough week. I feel kind of bad saying that, because it's been a much tougher week for other people, even in the situation I'm thinking about right now, but it was tough for me too in a different way. I've made references on Facebook to being at the hospital with a student. With medical privacy laws, it's hard to know what I can say here, but hopefully since there's nothing here identifying the particular student, this will be okay. If not, well, I don't think any of my three followers will turn me in to anybody.

The student went to the hospital with internal bleeding. He felt terrible, was completely exhausted, and started excreting blood in the way you can probably imagine. To make a long story short, he almost didn't survive Friday night/Saturday morning, but on Saturday, after several failed attempts, they were able to fix the problem. (He's not out of the woods yet, but things are looking good.) I spent many hours with him in the hospital because his family was out of the country and it took them a while to get here. This was hard because he's a terrific young man, and no 16-year-old should have to go through this kind of experience, but there is more to it than that. The more I talked to his doctors about the problem or looked at the endoscopic pictures of the problem site and the fix, the more I came to realize that this problem is exactly what took my father 30 years ago this July. The last time I heard an explanation of what happened to my Dad was when I was 9 years old, and I have never fully understood it, but everything began to make sense as I listened to the explanations of what was wrong with my student. In 1981 we didn't have the ability to send a fiber optic camera down somebody's throat to identify and then fix such a problem, and I am so thankful that we do now. I have to wonder, though, if my Dad could have been saved the same way my student was. As we approach both Father's Day and the 30th anniversary of my father's death, I can't help but dwell on these thoughts more than usual. Mourning never ends, but I am thankful for all the advances we have made, and for the unsung heroes who toil all their lives in obscure laboratories making scientific advances that eventually become things they never dreamed of, like fiber optic cameras which can be threaded through a patient's mouth and into their intestines, eventually saving the lives of terrific people who deserve so many more years, like my student and my Dad. I respect those unsung heroes so much that I married one of them!