Tomorrow’s the big day. My brave little guy is going in for surgery. I really haven’t been that concerned about it, honestly. In fact I’ve been so far from concerned that I actually missed his first pre-op appointment and sent our whole schedule into a tailspin that we haven’t fully recovered from. It’s just his eyes, he’s not sick…But now that it’s here, well, who could help but freak out?
His physical therapist is really gung-ho, and I love it. As soon as we started coming to see her, she just skipped all the stuff in between and said, “We’re going to get this kid walking.” Atti adores her, and he adores his time on the treadmill. The PT sits behind him and moves his legs in the walking motion. He laughs hysterically, and she tells me that he’s doing more and more of the work himself every time.
He works so hard. When I see him around other kids his age it’s so easy to get caught up in what he can’t do. Or even to get caught up in the myopia of just what we’re working on, and to forget what a miracle he already is. It’s hard to stay in the moment when you’re working with everything you have to get him to a normal future.
I’ve been trying to remind myself of all this as I’ve been freaking out about his surgery. It was not that long ago that we were holding our breath to see if he was going to be blind. Since then we’ve faced so many new concerns and conquered so many other problems that we’re eons away from that initial terror, but I’m trying to remember it. So that I can tell myself that this terror will go away too.
I’m sure that in a year’s time I’ll be obsessing over his latest milestone, trying to remind myself of being freaked out about a minor surgery and how it turned out to just be one more thing that happened along his way. But no matter how brave I aspire to be, no matter how minor this procedure is, no matter how hard Atti works at what’s in front of him, he’s still my baby and I suppose it’s just part of the job description that I should worry.