Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
I consider myself a pretty avid reader, and yet… I had never read a Vonnegut.
I have heard of his books my entire life, but never took the leap… until recently.
I did a Reddit search of books that will change how you see the world and a lot of respondents suggested this book.
I went into this without knowing anything about it other than it was recommended by people who would inevitably add, “and so it goes” to their post.
Now I get it.
I can confirm that this book did cause me to think about ideas and topics in different ways than I had before, which is what I love in a book.
Does it challenge my idea of reality?
Does it cause me to empathize with individuals or groups of people in a way I hadn’t thought of before?
If yes… I love it – even, and sometimes ESPECIALLY when I don’t agree.
If you haven’t read it before, give it a try 🙂
Get it Here
Words of Wisdom – A Family Emergency
Sickness and pain are awful for anyone.
With kids, it can be overwhelming.
If you follow the channel, you may have noticed that, during the busy season of the Annual Enrollment Period, I wasn’t able to get out as many videos as I normally put out during this time of year.
One reason was what happened to my daughter.
My Birthday Present
The last newsletter went out around my birthday.
I spent that day at home with my daughter because she wasn’t feeling well.
Her symptoms were flu-like and, with the flu going around in our area, we thought to just have her rest and wait it out.
It got worse, to the point she couldn’t move because her stomach had started hurting.
My wife and I went to the urgent care near our home to see if it was serious.
She couldn’t walk, so I carried her to and from the car and into the clinic.
The doctor took her temperature and gently pressed on her stomach, causing her to yelp in pain (something she doesn’t normally do).
He told us to take her to the Children’s Hospital immediately.
The ER
We went to the ER at a Children’s hospital about 20 minutes away.
The doctors believed she could have appendicitis and an ultrasound confirmed that there was a problem with her appendix.
It had ruptured, and they wanted to get her in for surgery.
A Child’s Fear
Our daughter is 12 and sharp as a tack.
She is days away from becoming a teenager, but has been acting like a teenager for a while now with wild, emotional rollercoasters and her overwhelming desire to spend every waking moment with friends instead of her lame parents.
But… in her quiet moments with us… she is sweet, loving, and trusts her mom and dad completely.
When she heard she needed surgery, she didn’t know what that meant other than it terrified her.
She didn’t want to be away from us, she didn’t want to be put under, she didn’t want to venture into the unknown.
The panic and fear in her eyes were a gut punch and got my head spinning to the worst-case scenarios as well.
What if…?
Kind of like when you get on an airplane.
I don’t like flying, even though all my flight experiences have all been pretty good, and logically I understand that it’s safer to fly than it is to drive.
But… what if…?
A hospital administrator had given me a tablet with a bunch of disclosures and my commitment to pay for everything.
As I was going through that, a nurse came in to get a blood sample from my daughter.
Just as she was about ready to start… and I’m talking… the needle is inches away from my daughter and getting closer… the nurse’s pager went off and said they had a code red coming in.
The nurse immediately stopped what she was doing and said she’d be back.
I was confused because in the hospital where I volunteered during college, they had a different color for emergencies.
They didn’t want “code red” to scare people, so they made it a different color.
Hearing the word “red” definitely did the trick of making me feel like something bad was happening out there to someone else.
After I finished with the tablet, I left our daughter’s room to return it to the hospital admin.
I stepped out of our little room and glanced across the hall to a different room that looked like a scene from a TV drama.
Machines were beeping.
Doctors and nurses were moving quickly, communicating in short bursts of numbers, phrases, and acronyms that would effectively position the right person at the right place with the right thing to do in this situation.
A man and woman who I assumed were the parents of this patient were outside the room, watching with looks of terror and shock stretched across their faces.
This wasn’t good.
I returned the tablet and went back to our room.
Surgery
The doctors and nurses were amazing in taking their time to explain to our daughter what was happening and what they were going to do to fix it.
She was still super nervous, but it helped calm her a bit.
They told us that they wouldn’t know the severity of the rupture until they got in there and could look around.
They wheeled her off in a hospital bed and told us to go to the waiting room with the other nervous parents who were praying that their kids would be okay.
About an hour later, the surgeon called us into a small room to explain how the surgery went.
She said that they successfully removed the appendix and that it had, indeed ruptured.
The surgeon explained that it was pretty bad and a total mess in there, but she felt they did a good job in cleaning everything up.
She outlined the next few days for us with the range of it taking anywhere from 3-14 days for our daughter to be ready to go home.
The surgeon described that, with how it looked in there, they want to be cautious and monitor her closely, ensuring that sepsis and other complications do not go unnoticed.
Her estimate was that we would not be on that lower end of the range of days in the hospital.
The Other Stuff
As all of this is happening, we have two other kids who are getting out of school and have their own lives, sports, and activities.
My wife and I were calling and coordinating friends, family, and neighbors to step in and help where they could since we only had the one vehicle we had driven here.
I am forever grateful for the people who stepped up for us here to take our kids where they needed to go, feed them, and distract them from their sister missing.
Recovery
Recovery was rough.
I still have my appendix, so I don’t know what it’s like, but our daughter wasn’t feeling great the first few days.
She didn’t want to eat.
She didn’t want to drink.
She didn’t want to move.
Antibiotics were having unpleasant side effects and she had now gone a couple days without food, leaving her lethargic and unwilling to get up.
The doctors and nurses instructed her and us that for her to start feeling better, she needed to get up and slowly start moving.
We set daily walk goals, volume goals for the amount of water she should try to consume, and bathroom goals.
She slept a lot, and I would take most of the day/evening/night shifts while my wife took the car back home and to keep our other kids alive.
Mom vs Dad
I don’t know how many of you experienced this with your kids, but our kids act differently around me than they do around my wife.
In general, they will all have their moments of pushback, but they will inevitably do what I ask them to do.
With my wife, they are much more stubborn and will get more vocal in their disagreements with her or just ignore her more readily.
Our oldest is no different, and probably the most deliberate in her rebellion against her parents in general, but her mom specifically.
She’d argue and fight when I’d push her to do what the doctors and nurses said, but she’d begrudgingly do it.
When my wife would come take over as I returned home to shower and try to keep up on work, our daughter would shut down.
She wouldn’t budge for my wife and stopped doing everything the doctors and nurses were asking.
I got a call from my wife on about day 4 and she was in tears.
She had stepped out of the room because our daughter had taken a dive.
Her breathing, energy levels, and spirit were all down.
Our daughter told my wife that she thinks she’s going to die here.
My wife said it looks like she’s completely given up on trying to get better.
Hospital staff had started an IV for fluids because she wasn’t drinking.
They had introduced a “breathing game” to try to get her to take deep breaths for fear of pneumonia as a result of her not getting up and moving, and a fever had made an appearance, which was a possible early sign for sepsis.
I’m taking this call in my car and there have been very few moments of my life where I just didn’t know what to do or say.
I was helpless.
Was I going to lose my daughter?
A few hours back in time and everything was wonderful.
She was telling me she was going to make me a great birthday breakfast, smiling, and joking.
We didn’t have a care in the world, and now there is a chance I’ll lose my 12-year-old little girl?
What was going on?!
Angels
I had a few appointments that day, but once I got that call, I cancelled the rest of what I had scheduled and headed back to the hospital.
When I got there, one of our daughter’s friends had arrived to say hi and bring her gifts. This motivated her to get up and move around.
As my wife, my daughter, my daughter’s friend, and the friend’s mom went to one of the hospital play rooms, I went to the nurse and asked her to give me a run-down of what’s going on.
She said that we need to get my daughter moving, drinking, and taking deep breaths.
She is being stubborn and unwilling to do those three things.
I asked how aggressive I should be in enforcing these things?
I don’t want to be the bad-guy dad who is forcing his daughter to walk when it could cause more problems.
The nurse said I need to be very demanding and push her.
“You need to get her up and walking, drinking, and deep breaths. It will not hurt her. Doing what she’s been doing, which is nothing, will hurt her.”
After our daughter’s friend left, my wife went home and I stayed with our little girl.
We talked through her goals and wrote them on a little whiteboard they had in the room (you know how much I like whiteboards).
We put little checkboxes so we could mark off each time we went on a walk, finished her water jug, or did a breathing exercise, and I told her that I’m not going to let her miss these anymore.
We worked hard together over the next few days, going on walks of the hospital, rating different foods, and crushing the “breathing game.”
She fought it… hard… on days 4 and 5, but she did what she needed to do.
We’re In The Clear
The rest of the story is that at the end of 7 days in the hospital, we got to take her home.
After she stared doing the things the doctors and nurses were telling her to do, things got significantly better quite quickly.
Weird how that works…
She is fully back to being her drama teenage girl self.
She is back at school and back to wrestling dad when she thinks she’s tough.
Some things happen in life that snap you out of the routine and make you realize how fragile we are.
I thought about my past…
I had originally planned on being a surgeon.
All I had to do was take the MCAT and apply and medical school would’ve been my path.
After going through this and seeing the sad, sick, and ill kids, I don’t know how our medical professionals do it.
Like the nurse who was about to take our daughter’s blood but is whisked away to go help a more serious emergency.
She reentered our room calm and cheerful, like she didn’t just see a traumatic child problem just seconds ago.
Like the staff who are there to help patients with all kinds of icky, gross, and unpleasant things that come because of being sick and unable to do or control certain things.
Like the doctors and staff who are responsible for delivering the unthinkable news to parents and siblings who did not have the same outcome we did.
I don’t think I could do it.
The Point
Several points here.
- We are so glad our little girl is okay.
- We are so thankful for the many people who were able and willing to help for that unpleasant week.
- Further appreciation for doctors, nurses, hospital staff, volunteers, and countless others who do this each and every day.
- I apologize for not being able to get out as many videos to YouTube if you were hoping for more than what I was able to deliver.
- Do not take the time you have with the people you love for granted.
Bonus Thought:
A song that was popular around 2006 is called “All At Once” by The Fray.
In it, they sing the line, “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing, are the same.”
That line in that song has stuck with me for 20 years.
I’ve used it when approaching tough conversations with employers, clients, family, athletes… all kinds of areas of life, but this time, it applied to my 12-year-old little girl who kept repeating, “It’s hard” whenever she was asked to get up, drink, or breathe deeply.
Sometimes we, like my daughter, look at things that are hard, and don’t want to go through them.
I know I have this happen all the time.
But, sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing… are the same.
This Month
I hope you enjoy this holiday season with your friends and family.
However you approach, feel, believe, or celebrate this time of the year, I just hope that you are focused on what matters most to you and take the time to spend the time with the people who matter most to you.
Please know that I appreciate your influence in my life.
Until next month.
Erik
PS – Around day 6, when my daughter was on her way back to feeling better in the hospital, I told her that it looks like she doesn’t want to leave.
She said, while holding a book the hospital gave her and a plate of French toast, “I don’t know if I want to leave. I don’t have school and it’s so cool that everything here is all free!”
All I could do was shake my head and remind her that this was definitely not free.
She has since given me permission to use her costs for a future YouTube cost comparison video coming soon 🙂
