Losing Baseball Is Nothing When You Almost Lose Your Son

Baseball is an integral part of my life, as I’m sure it is yours. We go to sleep at night digesting the just completed game, hoping that it doesn’t give us heartburn.  

And in the morning, before we eat breakfast or shower and shave, we check the box scores from around the country to find the heroes and the goats from the day before.

Sometimes, we create a perfect balance between loving baseball and loving family. Other times we don’t.

But when we begin to drown in an unhealthy imbalance that leaves our family awash in a sea of stats, bats, and Baseball Tonight, things can turn dark very quickly.

I thought I had found that balance because I’ve been working on it for 30 years, but something happened yesterday that showed me that, indeed, I had not.

When your son almost dies and you don’t notice, that is a sure sign of an imbalance of the worst kind.

At 53, I should be just about through with raising children, but then, no one said I was terribly smart.

Five of my kids have flown the coop, and one, my 20-year-old handicapped daughter, remains at home with me (note to the politically correct: parents are exempt from the PC police. You try getting peed on, pooped on, and thrown up on all at the same moment and use words like “challenged”).

Four years ago, the state heard from a friend that we had successfully raised two severely disabled children, and wanted to know if we’d be willing to take on an infant with significant physical problems. It would be, they said, for just 30 days.

This past June, Some 1,400 days later, we finalized Joey’s adoption. He’s had 14 surgeries in his young life, and spends more time at various weekly therapy sessions than I do watching the Nationals every week.

But he’s healthy now. He doesn’t talk very well, but we’ve taught him how to sign, so when he needs something we watch his hands.

Friday was his fourth birthday. He woke up excited, literally bouncing off the walls and scurrying underneath beds and couches, trying to find his well-hidden presents.

I gave him a big hug and a kiss, and sang “Happy Birthday” enough times for him to ask me to stop.

Joey sat next to me on the couch and said, ”What’cha doin, Dad-dy?” I looked up just long enough to tell him that I had to bang out a story for Bleacher Report about the Stephen Strasburg and Mike Rizzo signings.

He looked at me quizzically and I smiled and said, “Daddy is writing a story.”

He cuddled up to me and pushed his face into my stomach, ferreting from side-to-side until he created the perfect place to rest. I noticed what he was doing, but didn’t pay much attention to it. He had, after all, done this a hundred times before.

By the time I reached the fourth paragraph of my story, he had stopped jabbering and I assumed he’d gone back to sleep, though that is something he’d never done so early in the morning.

“Tired?” I asked him. There was no reply.

By the sixth paragraph, Joey had laid back on the couch, his face staring up at the ceiling.

With the eighth paragraph finished. I noticed that he was slowly slithering off the edge of the couch and onto the floor, head first, eyes closed, arms limp at his side, in what can best be described in baseball parlance as “super slo-mo.”

His little body folded onto the floor by my legs, head facing away, his back arched in an unnatural position.

My peripheral vision caught him on the ground and, still typing, said, “Joey, don’t do that! You know how you freak me out when you play dead like that.”

The ninth, tenth and eleventh paragraphs took some time, but I got them done, and had to only bring the story together in the final paragraph. Once finished, I was going to take Joey into the backyard to play some baseball.

Still typing, I poked him with my big toe—doink doink—and said, “Dude, do you want to play some baseball or not.”

Again, from the far edge of my sight line, I saw Joey’s little head move up and down quickly as if to say yes.

But a strange thing; two minutes later, he was still nodding yes.

“Okay, okay!” I exclaimed. “Stephen Strasburg can wait 15 minutes!” I stood up and walked across the room to get our gloves and ball. With them tucked under my arm, I shut the closet door and turned towards Joey, who remained on his side, on the carpet, his head continuing to nod.

For the first time, I looked at my son and not past him.

And there on the ground, wearing just his diaper, was my precious boy whose body had been signaling me for five minutes that he was in jeopardy.

I fell to the floor and was terrified by what I saw. His lips were blue. Joey’s eyes were now open but all I could see was white; his eyes had rolled back into his head.

His torso had become rigid and immovable but his arms had twisted into a sickening position where the palms were facing in the opposite direction. His legs were bent at the knees.

He looked dead.

I did all the things that adults should be smart enough not to do in that situation. I screamed his name in his ear. I grabbed his arm and shook it for all I was worth.

I even began patting Joey’s cheeks to the point of them almost becoming slaps.

My wife ran into the living room screaming, crying, and wailing. I called 911 and in the most calm voice that ever came out of me, I gave my address and said, “four-year-old boy is having a seizure, he’s had multiple surgeries, he’s unresponsive to stimulus.”

At least I remembered where I lived.

The dispatcher did her best to keep me calm, and began to give me a checklist of what not to do until the paramedics arrived.

I had done each of them, as well as some she didn’t mention.

You would not believe the things that race through your mind when you think a loved one is dying. I kept seeing his headstone with his date of birth (August 21, 2005) and his death (August 21, 2009).

That seemed so unfair.

I wondered how I would tell his birth parents, and his new brothers and sisters.

I was so engulfed into this tsunami of terror that I didn’t hear the sirens of the ambulance as it pulled into my driveway. Before I knew it, three blue-shirted EMT’s had surrounded my son, hands full of tiny blood-pressure cuffs and miniature diagnostic equipment.

For a moment, from deep within that circle of bodies that surrounded my son, I saw his arms jerk and his glorious green eyes come to life.

For two seconds.

Then the paramedics began to quietly shout something about losing a blood pressure reading. One of them scooped Joey into his arms and shouted, “Let’s go!” and moments later we were in the sterility of the ambulance.

Seeing Joey, the size of two-year-old, strapped into that adult-sized gurney only exasperated my feelings of dread and despondency.

At just four, he had yet to live even 5 percent of his life. He would never fall in love, marry, have children, and create a lasting legacy upon this earth.

Once again, he shuddered, opened his eyes for a moment, and then drifted back into the ether of the world of the in-between that separates life from death.

At the hospital, we were met by a team of doctors and nurses, the kind that ready themselves for what could be an impossible task of keeping a patient alive.

They pulled the gurney from the ambulance and wooshed him past the little cubicles for patients with high fevers, broken bones and ouchies on their knees.

We were wheeled into the big, scary room at the far end of emergency room that looks more like an operating room, with tiled walls, tiled floors and all kinds of life-saving machinery onerously hanging on the wall.

It’s the kind of room where a person could die and the rest of the emergency room wouldn’t know it.

A series of doctors, diagnosticians, nurses, and staff came in and out of the room, poking and prodding Joey while peppering me with questions about his family health history, questions that as his adopted father, I could not answer.

It had not been more than 40 minutes, and my son remained unresponsive and comatose.

At some point, the room, once brimming with scurrying white-jacketed workers, was now empty. The overhead lights had been dimmed and the one remaining light cast a giant shadow of my son in his hospital bed against the wall.

It had a very surreal, film-noir feel to it. Orson Welles couldn’t have done it better.

I waited in the near-darkness for a doctor to come and tell me that what struck my Joey down was a minor problem and that he would quickly regain consciousness.

But that person never came.

I imagined that it was a seizure brought on by a stroke, or a blood clot, or something even more devious and sinister. In a vacuum of information, the mind tends to fear the worst.

After what seemed an eternity, a man came in wearing a type of flight suit and walked over to my son’s bed.

He was a flight nurse, waiting for an incoming patient on the hospital’s helicopter. He gently brushed Joey’s hair, and then gently opened his hand and placed something in it.

He then quickly left, never seeing me in the shadows.

A few moments later, the doctor appeared, and began what seemed for him a laborious process of explaining to me what happened to my son.

Somewhere between the “unknown seizure-like episode” and “continued unresponsive nature,” but just before the “non-predictable future functions,” I heard a tussling of the covers in Joey’s bed.

I looked over and saw Joey, eyes open, head gently embracing his pillow, with his hands clutching an “official” Lifeflight helicopter.

The “Hi Daddy” that he gave me came as matter-of-factly as if he just woke up from a nap. “Do you like my helicopter? It’s like the one out front of the Hospital.”

The doctor leaned into me, and, almost whispering, said, “Of course, he could also wake up at any moment.”

Four hours later, after a hundred hugs and a thousand prayers, my Joey was back home, and that evening was running in the park with his cousin Emma, dancing and shucking and jiving to music and diving into piles of birthday presents.

Turns out, if you believe what doctors say, that he either had a feveral seizure—brought on by a spiked fever—or he had the first of what will be thousands of similar seizures that are a part of one of the many syndromes that continually attack his body.

Personally, I’m hoping for the former but fully expecting the latter.

I asked him this morning if he remembered anything from yesterday. “Yep,” he began. “There were doctors in blue shirts around me at the house, and the ambulance was all silvery on the inside, and a man gave me a helicopter at the hospital.”

Pretty remarkable for someone who came to for a grand total of 10 seconds in two hours.

Baseball will return tomorrow. But before it does, I wanted all of you to know what it feels like to almost lose a child you cherish and worship.

Five years ago, I lost one of my disabled daughters, but because we always knew that she wouldn’t live a full life, it wasn’t totally unexpected.

But to see a healthy, happy part of you spend so much time at the precipice of death is something you cannot imagine and will never accept.

We all need life’s “getaways,” those things that allow us to disengage from the difficulties of life.

But when we do that, we also disengage from those who love us the most, who need us the most, and those we cannot live without.

I can tell you that this daddy will spend a little more time actually listening to his kids. Oh, baseball will still be a big part of my life, but it will now be alongside of, and not in place of, my beloved little Joey.

Baseball and Joey, forever more.