Illness as a Non-Metaphor

By Richard Martin, 4-10-07

I am healthy. In fact, I exist in a halo of good health, surrounded by suffering legions. My whole family does, actually: my parents are in their mid-70s and still hale, my two older brothers have been healthy as draft animals their entire lives, and both our grandmothers made it well into their 90s. (My grandfathers weren’t so lucky.)

As for my immediate family, my wife suffers from various aches associated with faulty joints, middle age, and a car crash, but her internal systems are as pristine as a 14-year-old’s. I’m criminally disease-free considering how I’ve dosed my body with various substances over the years. And Walker, well, if all kids were like Walker there’d be a lot of pediatricians out of work nationwide.

This is contrast to other Dads, both famous (like Michael Lewis, author of Liars’ Poker and The Blind Side) and non- (like the blogger who produced Dadcentric). Lewis’ ongoing series on Slate, about the birth of his third child, is tremendously readable and instantly recognizable to all of us boomer fathers who still dream of preserving some few shreds of our bachelor lives.

The latest installment recounts the struggle of his infant son, also named Walker (obviously we’ve started a trend here), with something called RSV, which, apparently, is not a new vehicle from Mazda but yet another dread baby-disorder that none of us has ever heard of. Walker’s plight involves a trip to the ER leading to a week-long stay at the hospital, a massive dose of non-involvement guilt for Dad Michael, and an epiphanic ending in which Lewis realizes a) his son’s not going to die, and b) maybe he’s not such an awful father after all.

“It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it,” Lewis concludes.

Whit, meanwhile, is in the midst of a bout of double-sickness: one kid teething and one coughing. “My nights are spent on the couch with crying boys and Chet Baker.  My days are spent with a laundry basket full of shirts turned handkerchiefs and a headache that makes a brainfreeze sound nice.”

As with most parents who’ve survived their kids’ infant and toddler years, I remember those nights sitting up with a sick child but only dimly, like memories of some long-ago war I’d just as soon not re-live. Other than a chronically runny nose and a tendency to eat like an anorexic sparrow, Walker is blessedly healthy, something I do not take for granted as I see kids miss days, weeks of school with complaints as mysterious as they are debilitating. One of Walker’s friends has already had surgery. Another, the toddler son of a close friend, is having major surgery this Friday. One of his cousins has already missed a full two weeks of school this year. And then there are the truly unfortunate.

Having a healthy kid in Boulder is a particular kind of freedom, because, you see, we are the anti-vaccination capital of America. So, in some multiple-degrees-of-separation way, Walker enjoys his good health at the expense of other children with less robust immune systems.

For me, illness is not a metaphor but a cloudbank that hasn’t yet broken into a storm but is always there, waiting. Or, it’s a destitute country that I’ve only briefly visited, but which I know one day I’ll have to live in – since, my occasional illusions to the contrary notwithstanding, I suspect I am after all mortal.

I have nothing to thank for our health except good genes and good fortune, but I’ll admit that I see it as something of a birthright. It’s not that I deserve it; I’m just one of the lucky ones, and my pity for those beset by chronic illness or weak constitutions is colored by a faint feeling of superiority.

Now, though, that’s changing. In the last year my body has started to break down in non-life-threatening but untreatable ways (i.e., an arthritic hip). And Walker, well, Walker seems to be “gluten-intolerant.” Which, in case you haven’t heard, is the disease du jour for today’s kids.

I’ll write about both those maladies in later posts. For now, I’m just getting used to the idea that my body’s no longer unassailable. And my kid’s not perfect. It’s a new world, and illness, or at least imperfect health, is a permanent feature of it.