RAISING MY THREE SONS ON MY OWN

RAISING MY THREE SONS ON MY OWN

Ruth’s Chris was my stomping ground for effecting change in building codes to save historic structures and to put monies in the pockets of my employers, a triumvirate of a chemical company, a wood treater and the big miners. Naturally the home builders association, good old boys with dark side Mafioso connections would stop at nothing to thwart our desired mandates. But they didn’t cause the car wreck. My husband fell asleep at the wheel on the three hour trek north at midnight, after the meal.

So two years post wreck, post political dinner, having lost the initiative to mandate treated wood but making progress with a Belle Chase military Base and one Hope VI project in New Orleans framed entirely with borate treated wood, I planned to have lunch with my son, Cahir Doherty. He had a scholarship to LSU and his own apartment.

I called and called, but no answer. When I arrived, I saw a painting like a volcano on the grey door of Cahir’s F150 truck. Maybe a dream sicle had melted, creating the art. Maybe it was practise for a science project, with Cahir… who knows.

I licked my finger and smeared it through the art, on one level I must have already suspected it was blood. Walking around the truck I discovered the entire bed covered in the same rust color. I found him inside, passed out. His nicked artery scotch taped closed. He lived.

And he lived and lived and lived through harrowing, life halting events. Fracturing 30 places through both plates of his skull, egg shell cracks of the fragile basal skull from an avalanche in New Mexico he caused by leaving the trail in a race and pulling up on 14 foot pine trees on the lip of the mountain, which dislodged, along with boulders. His brothers witnessed him falling upside down through space. Niall, the boys father, knew before he turned on the trail. He recalled the high pitched mournful, cry of irrevocability from Ian. A death cry. He landed on rock face thirty five feet below, or on a small patch of grass covered with leaves, the only padding on rock face. They saw him try to stand and his head wobbling unable to be lifted above shoulders and then, a crumpling. He was supposed to have a craniotomy or later experience seizures or have his brains grow through his nose, causing retardation or death. He survived without intervention, except for IV’s in intensive care, and stitches on his shin.

We found a top neurosurgeon who had written chapters on basal skull fractures and believed that in Cahir’s case, the fractures would align and grow back together, perfectly. After six weeks of recuperation and terror everytime he sneezed ( the fear of the fractures re-opening and of a cerebrospinal fluid leak) he was given clearance to go back to school. No bumps, no running. No PE. He blew on a duck call before getting in the car with the other children and clear fluid poured out of his nose. We were going to have to airlift him for an immediate craniotomy. Cerebrospinal fluid leaves a perfect circular pattern on paper towels, and has an unforgettable sweet taste. He laid on his back for an hour, and when he arose, the leakage had stopped.

The following year he was shot point blank in the face. The bullet missed everything vital and he doesn’t even have a scar, as the barrel parted muscles in the corner of his eye, tearing only the lachrymal duct, which recannalized. His hair fell out in tufts, leaving geometric patterns, rectangles of allopecia which I think was from the radioactive isotopes in the dyes from the angiography when surgeons went in through the femoral artery to cauterize the bleeder.They thought it was the carotid, but it was a lesser vessel.

Cahir in trauma unit at LSU, 12 doctors and nurses, sliding on bloody floors, my job to hold up a hand towel to catch the paint ball like trajectories, the clots that emanated from his nose and mouth as he coughed and sneezed, drowning from his own blood draining from inside his head. “Be a soldier,” he said to Ian his bother, as they wheeled him away, giving us not much hope that they’d make it in time to save him. But they did.

And he came out thinking he was Tupac instead of getting it. He got it for a week, or rather said the things his more mature friends, his real friends insisted on him saying if he wanted the continuance of their friendship.

They said they were tired of being pall bearers at friends funerals over drugs and stupidity. One was a banker, one in construction. Childhood friends of Cahir’s who were at our house almost every week-end, told him the only chrome he saw growing up was on old people’s wheel chairs. That he was from an educated affluent loving family, not poverty and abuse. That his sagging, silver heavy chain wearing, gansta rap persona was passé, a phase they admitted to having been in, but grew out of, and theat he, too must move forward. Embrace growth, get over it. Get over himself.

Yet he insisted that I give him “dap.” Had a fight with me when I refused. Hit closed knuckles to everyone else’s saying dap. He used double negatives and eubonics when he spoke to doctors. It was truly miraculous that Cahir lived, and doctors came in on Easter Sunday, marveling at his sterling condition, no permanent damage. No follow up needed besides tracking the tear duct. Cahir was practically unscathed from being shot point blank in the eye. The roof of his mouth revealed broken vessels, tracking the path of the bullet. It missed esophagus trachea, brain, nerves (that is what suprized them most, touching his face with his eyes covered and finding no neurological deficit.) everything except sinus cavities, which would calcify. He already had trouble flying and couldn’t scuba dive because of the cracks from the 35 foot fall on rock face.

My son Cahir sat in a hospital bed with the following scene repeating as fresh doctors did rounds with patients they had never seen before.

Doc appears outside of hospital room door. He or she picks up chart, reads the intake and enters the room of the victim of a gunshot wound to the face. Doctor looks at patient, and jerks agrily toward the nurse, flaring anger at the obvious error…his boy has not been shot in the face. This boy has a black eye. No stitches, no trauma and he is sitting up in bed, coherent, with his fist extended, lifting his chin, encouraging the doctor to give him dap, back.

Chele, his Hispanic girlfriend comes to the hospital every day. She is a senior and has never learned to drive. Most boys think she is extraordinarily attractive, especially as Cahir has her dressed like Little Kim. She is lean, exotic looking with a narrow face, doe eyes and a slender, aristocratic but not aquiline nose. She looks as if she should have kohl around here eyes and a tiny ruby nose ring. But she has an extra set of eye teeth, visable when she smiles.

When I arrived at the hospital, and saw Cahir, having confirmed on my race to the hospital that my firstborn baby had been shot in the face with a .25, he was talking trash. He was drunk, messed up. He didn’t really want anything to do with me, pushed me away, as he embraced Chele, her little sis, and her very young, mother, saying loudly, This is my family right here.

I was crushed but amazement and concern kept me drinking in the scene. The attendant RN’s and LPNs bit their lips and crossed their arms tightly around their bodies, shaking their heads. Most of them, in this small town, already had a fair idea of the difficulties and traumas I had endured with Cahir. Their attitudes were a direct reflection of his apparent ungratefulness coupled with the fact that he acted as if he had done something marvelous and admirable instead of risking his life stupidly buying drugs

. He obviously didn’t think he was at risk of dying. With bullets to the head, it can take a while for the bleeding to show, to drain into the lungs, to asphyxiate.

Regardless of Cahir’s wishes, I was the only one allowed to ride in the ambulance as he was transferred to a trauma unit at a large University hospital. By the time we arrived, he was going downhill fast.

I was numb, for the first time in my life. It didn’t happen during childbirth, or during the shooting by Mickey’s ex. Not when Cahir’s shirt and the skin of his belly were sucked into the escalator intake belt, and he was nearly disemboweled, at a third world airport in St. Martin, on the way to Paris, not when he was busted, any of the times, not even when I sat and slept on the cold floor outside of the schizophrenic unit waiting for my 20 minutes, to catch a glimpse of the boy not on earth. I never felt completely numb, emotionless in all of my life except for this experience. I felt nothing. It was too, too horrible. My worst fear was realized. I couldn’t save him from himself.The reality was as bad as the fear I lived with of him committing vehicular homicide or being in prison for life. My son was dying from being shot in his precious face, his Cahir-face, in a drug deal. Two men, who had begun the day with $5.00, they bragged, and ended it by having done $1,000 worth of cocaine, planned to steal my son and his companions’s money, kill them, take the truck and go to Houston.

As A A Milne might say, “Now he is twenty five”

A woman friend saw him in Austin and commented “He’s so handsome he doesn’t even look human.” By the absolute grace of God Cahir is fine, well, adjusted, happy, healed.