Soccer

My twin 6-year-old boys had soccer practice this morning.
It was the first of the new season and we squeaked it in between rain showers, although we couldn't escape the oppressive humidity.
Watching them run, particularly the Redhead with the slight hitch in his step and who looks so much like his Mother, the last four years became like a decade, or maybe two, or three.
Hard to tell, really.

I involuntarily make the connection backwards to an ambulance call in a town 40 miles and five years away.
It was a September day, perfectly blue and sunny, and I was working at my part-time job at a non-transport ALS service when we got a call for a child with a pitchfork in his head in a nearby town.
We intercepted with the fire department BLS crew downtown.
The EMT in the back jumped out as we approached the ambulance's side door and didn't say a word.
In fact, I never saw him again on the call.
He knew how sick his patient was and so he went right to our truck to drive.
He also knew there wasn't much he could add to the scene we were about to encounter.
When my partner and I got into the ambulance we found a 4-year-old boy in c-spine immobilization with a non-rebreather oxygen mask strapped to his face.
He had a bandage over the top part of his head, and you could see a half-dollar sized patch of blood through the gauze.
A small three-pronged gardening pitchfork sat on the tech bench.
I'll never forget how two of the prongs were encrusted in mud, while the third gleamed as brightly as the day it was taken down from the hardware store rack.
Somehow we discovered that the boy had been playing with a friend, and for some reason the friend had plunged the pitchfork into our patient's head.
While waiting for the ambulance, the patient's mom had removed the pitchfork and the EMTs had had the foresight to bring it with them.
The boy was seizing violently, or "to beat the band," in the EMS vernacular.
We didn't waste any time in starting transport to the hospital.
En route we got a couple IVs going, administered one drug to stop the seizures and a few others to sedate and paralyze the little boy so we could put a tube into his trachea and breath for him.
A helicopter met us at the hospital and took him to the major children's hospital about 30 miles away.
I was convinced the patient was going to die.
I couldn't imagine the infection potential of the dirt and mud that had found its way deep into his brain; I could definitely imagine the trauma the pitchfork prong caused as it made its way into the most valuable real estate in the human body, into places where our true selves are secured.
While I'm convinced there is such a thing, I don't know where the soul resides, but I know that this poor little guy had just had a sharp pointed object rammed through the machine that gives motion and action to the soul's desires.
I wasn't optimistic.
But children are wonderful, confounding creatures, and they never cease to amaze me with their ability to do the unexpected.
This little boy survived first, and then thrived.
The neurosurgeons at the hospital performed miracles; the nurses on the neuro floor made sure those miracles stuck, and had a chance to cement themselves.
A year later, I was met at the ED entrance by this little boy, who now walked with a slight hitch in his step, which I barely noticed as he came forward to give me a hug.

I remembered the names of those surgeons, not because I ever thought I'd need them, but because I thought their work was amazing, worthy of the kind of fame we reserve for rock stars and actors.
I thought my admiration would remain academic, third-hand.
Then my little redhead starting getting dizzy.

Medulloblastoma is a malignant brain tumor of the posterior fossa.
That's the part of the brain, kind of near the brain stem, that controls balance, among other things.
We learned this on Nov. 8, 2004, when a CT -- in the same ED where the little boy with the pitchfork injury had thanked us for helping him out -- ordered by an ophthalmologist investigating the source of my son's swollen optic nerves revealed a large mass in the back of my son's brain.
My little redhead, 2-years-old at the time, ended up in the same children's hospital, on the neuro floor no less, and was promptly readied for surgery on Nov. 10.
I liked the date.
Nov. 1o is the Marine Corps' birthday, and as a former Marine I couldn't imagine a better day to start a fight against brain tumors.
The day before the surgery my wife and I met with the woman who would be operating.
I knew from my follow up on our little pitchfork patient that this woman had also been on the team that had saved his life.
As the ICU nurse who cared for my son put it in the hours after that Nov. 10 operation, this woman is a miracle worker.

I won't bore you with the details of the next two years of treatments.
Suffice it to say there was lots of chemo, radiation treatments, a stem cell transplant, more than a few brushes with death.
He lost his red hair and his appetite. More than a few other kids we met in the same fight lost their lives.
My little redhead is currently tumor-free, although we know there are no guarantees.
But today I watched my little boy play soccer with a slight hitch in his step, racing around a small grass field against opponents who will sit next to him in his first grade class on Monday and joke about how much fun they had on Saturday, and I couldn't help thinking that some miracles don't always end.
Sometimes they go on and on, even playing soccer with a slight hitch in their step.