For John Harrison
1909-1994
by Harvey Harrison
February 17, 1986. I became a dad on February 16, 1986 with the birth of my son, David. The next day February 17, my dad John Harrison and I were together in my wife’s hospital room, and my dad was cradling the newborn in his arms. In the background, the obstetrician was finishing up a check-in with my wife and was chattily preparing to leave. I said to my dad, “If I can be as good a father to this boy as you have been to me, then I will have succeeded … and I mean in my life …” Both of us were surprised as the OB burst into tears. She had overheard the comment.
July 7, 1990. I became a dad again on this date with the birth of my daughter, Rebecca. As she displayed some jaundiced yellowing of the skin, very common as the baby’s liver kicks into action (taking over from hitch-hiking on the Mom’s liver), the doctor and staff put her “under the lights” … basically, a bitty baby tanning salon which somehow counteracts the mild jaundice, as measured by the biliruben in the blood. But for this common and almost always mild matter, Rebecca was in fine shape.
July 8, 1990 . Abruptly, we were informed that Rebecca’s biliruben did not go down as expected but instead steeply upward, and that the OB doc and the staff had the “neonatologist” on the way, as they say “stat”. I knew that “stat” falls between really fast and emergency but headed toward emergency, so I asked for more on the biliruben deal. The nurse said that the neonatologist, Dr. George Franco (I remember the name these years later), would explain, but basically a too-high biliruben in a newborn can produce … here it comes … “severe brain damage”. In the context of the supreme joy of the birth, the inevitable chaos that follows including sleep and food deprivation as well as complete disregard for personal hygiene, the sudden drop from the top to the most feared cellar of terror effected by that phrase “severe brain damage” was more than we could handle. So, Dr. Franco arrives. He explains a lot, and basically concluded that Rebecca requires an “immediate exchange transfusion”; that is, flush out all her blood and replace it with somebody else’s, an anonymous donor. And over the Edge we went. I experienced a weird split: I realized that this doctor only met his patients, the parents, at the worst moment of their lives (how’s that for a job?), and he was utterly masterful in the way he treated us. I admired that, and then over the Edge. One feature of currently fashionable child-bearing is to festoon the process like a party, which if all goes smoothly it can be. We were not in that situation. My cousin turned out to be the right advisor: he is a pediatric hematologist … a baby blood doc who mostly cures leukemia. His advice to me was chilling: Do it; do it now; this is not the time to slow down or ask questions; do it. We did. I was not thinking straight if I was thinking at all, but the party context told me to go see this and took me to the glass windows of the nursery behind which I could see Dr. Franco and nurses pulling open the clipped umbilicus I had snipped only yesterday to insert a large needle to feed the units of blood. Rebecca was screaming and struggling in a way I can never describe except to say that as I write this it turns my hands to ice. True madness occupied my mind, and I seemed to be about to break into the nursery, just as I felt a palm pressing against the middle of my chest. A nurse had intercepted me, and, as she increased pressure against my chest, she said, “You do not want watch this …” The impulse to rip out her throat flashed and then some higher wisdom prevailed. I truly believe it was the nurse’s voice and the steadily increasing yet somehow gentle pressure that led me to retreat. The procedure was a complete success, and I used to joke that I would recover from the shock, oh, by the time Rebecca enrolled in pre-school. Turned out not to be so funny. I have not started to recover, and Rebecca is seventeen years old.
Circa 1992-1993. Rebecca flourished, but her astute pediatrician detected some visual irregularities which got us to the neuro-opthamology expert at the venerable Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. So, advises neuro-opth, time for eye surgery on our little girl’s eyes. And, so we did. Rebecca did not care for coming out of anaesthesia or anything else about it. She sobbed in my arms and urinated on both her mom and me, which I found an eloquent gesture under the circumstances.
1996. First grade for Rebecca! As these sweet months passed, Rebecca did well in all respects, and, then, she, her mom, and I noticed what Rebecca called “twitchies” or neural tics. This time the docs soothes: Oh, it is very common for children of this age to have tics as their neurological system matures. What was not common was that, by the middle of first grade, those tics had become so severe that Rebecca was diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome (“TS”) by the foremost expert pediatric psychiatrist on the condition. He called it “moderate to severe”. Rebecca called it “like living in an earthquake …” Before the onset of TS, I often remarked to my wife that it was a good thing we were not Tibetan, else the llamas would have come and gotten Rebecca. Personally, I think she’s a boddhisattva, and I’m not even Buddhist. TS is a strange and extremely frightening disorder. It can range from mild to grotesquely severe. The stereotype of someone with TS is a crazy marionette of a creature jerked all over the place, emitting weird noises, and, should “coprolalia” present, blurting out obscenities loudly and without control. We were really scared. What the bigots against the disabled do not know (among other things) is that in eighty percent of the cases, the symptoms of the person with TS subside by adulthood to the point where they simply disappear to nonTS people, which means the World Generally. It is quite evident that Rebecca is in this eighty per cent… though she still manifests decreasing symptoms. Just so we are all together here: TS and intelligence are not related. Some of the most brilliant people I know have had TS; Mozart is reported to have been Tourettic.
1996-2007. Rebecca has emerged as the most remarkable young woman. The two I know who I can with certainty identify as sages independently referred to her as “the wise one”. She works hard in school and does well. She has great friends. Her heart overflows with compassion. Trust me. I know.
August 10, 2007. I drove Rebecca over to her best friend’s place, and we had a good long time to talk. In our family, one of the central principles is “You always watch out for your buddy …” which we learned from my group of friends who, unlike me, served in the infantry in Vietnam. (Rebecca’s best friend was having four wisdom teeth extracted, and the friend wanted Rebecca to be with her for support and comfort.) On the road, somehow we found the subject of TS. Rebecca said that she would never wish it on anyone. At the same time, the expressions of the condition have afforded her a way of discerning among peers: those who talk down to her like a “retard”, those who ignore her, and, joyfully, the true friends. So, for Rebecca, TS has served to sharpen her discernment about peer relationships, which we parents of teens know is everything. I do not recall what I said. What I felt was “I am in awe of you, my beloved daughter.”
That brings the Diary of a Dad up to date.