2012 Belongs in the Rear-View Mirror

Two recent stories as a roundabout way of talking, finally, about 2012.

A few Fridays ago I drove Natalia into Mass General Hospital for a minor heart procedure. She had been diagnosed with a condition called SVT (explained here), which manifested itself by occasionally causing her heart to beat in excess of 200 beats per minute. This would happen randomly and was totally unconnected to anything that she happened to be doing at the time. Sometimes the episodes lasted less than a minute. Other times they would last for upwards of an hour. They left her exhausted and worried. Naturally, they had the same effect on me, though I was spared the biological effects of the condition.

Surgery offered her the best option for ending these episodes, and more than one cardiologist reassured us that though they would be tinkering about in the regions near her heart, the procedure was safe and about 95% effective. I wasn't worried. I had seen Natalia go through three pregnancies, and I knew her to be strong, resilient, and healthy. We were going to one of the best hospitals in one of the best cities cities for hospitals in the country. Nothing was going to go wrong.

Slowly, though, that optimism turned to worry. They called Natalia into the prep room around 9:30. I was left alone, wholly unnecessary, in the waiting room. Fifteen minutes later, they asked me to come in and see her one last time before they whisked her off to some hidden operating room. She was lying on a gurney and dressed in a hospital gown. It finally hit me that we were at a hospital and that a team of doctors was about to fix a problem with the circuitry around my wife's heart. I was not ready for this.

Listening to the details about the procedure--including possible complications--did not help my state of mind either. They would insert a catheter in Natalia's leg and run it up the femoral artery to her heart. Once that was in place, they would induce the SVT in order to identify why it was occurring and how it could be eliminated. (They eliminated it by "burning" off the extra pathway, as one doctor said.) It would take between three and five hours. Oh--and Natalia would be awake for all of this. Naturally, there was risk involved too: though it was a largely safe procedure, there was a minor risk of heart attack or death.

These are the images that lingered in my head as the nurses showed me back to the waiting room. I felt powerless to do anything. I was powerless. The extra-long hug I had given Natalia before they took her now seemed trivial and inconsequential.

There was nothing to do but wait, so I waited. I finished a book I had started months ago. I got a cup of coffee. I looked around the waiting room. I stewed, I worried. I played out worst-case scenarios in my head. What would I do if there were complications? How could I parent three young children on my own? I tried thinking about best-case scenarios too, but the worst-case ones kept pushing them out. I lost interest in Angry Birds after seven minutes. I wished for the procedure to be over. I also wished for it not to be over in order to stave off potential bad news. I looked at the clock. The time crawled by.

And then at 2:15, the doctor called with the news that they had expected all along: Natalia was fine, the procedure had gone according to plan, and they had eliminated the SVT. A routine procedure had, of course, gone routinely. My worry had been misplaced. Relief is a wonderful feeling.

I stayed with Natalia for a few hours that evening before heading back to Waltham. I was reluctant to leave her but happy to be away from the hospital, now the home of so many people with so many more dire medical issues than my wife. I wanted the night to pass quickly so I could wake up, return to MGH, and help her get out of there as quickly as possible. My worrying wouldn't really be over until Natalia was back home.

Sleeping that night was easy. But on my way out the door at 8 A.M., I noticed a letter taped to my mailbox that I had missed the night before. It was from our landlord. It said that our rent was late, and, mincing no words, it said that this was a big deal. I saw the word "eviction" somewhere in there and quickly folded it up again.

I knew that the letter was a mistake--I remembered mailing a check a few weeks earlier, and I seriously doubted that the locks would be changed on us. But it was a Saturday morning, and with the landlord's office closed for the weekend, I had no way to figure out exactly what had happened. My mind had the entire weekend to construct improbable yet convincing scenarios that resulted in the five of us being homeless.

All the worrying that had drained out of me when the doctor had called the day before came flooding back. I arrived at the hospital happy to see Natalia, but dreading what Monday's call would bring. I had swapped one crisis for another. Where would we live? What would happen to our stuff? I couldn't bear the thought of moving everything into storage again. I also couldn't bear to tell Natalia any of this, so as we waited patiently for the nurses and doctors to finally discharge her, my mind went into panic overdrive, uninhibited by the presence of ay rational thoughts. As she was finally talking to the nurse about recovery, I was thinking about legal recourse I could take to stay in our place. I wasn't leaving without a fight.

Natalia could tell that my mind was somewhere else. She always can. Later that day she asked me about it, and I finally told her. I spared her my doomsday scenarios. "But you paid it, right?" she asked. Yes, of course, I answered. I gave her details about where I had put the envelope and the exact type of stamp I had used. "Well, I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding," she said. "It's not like they are going to kick us out or anything." She seemed unbothered by the whole affair. This helped me regain perspective (and rationality) for a little while. But I don't keep it leashed, and by Sunday it had vanished, replaced again with panic and dread.

On Monday, though, everything was resolved easily with a phone call. Turns out they had received the check--they had even cashed it!--but somehow they had failed to record it in their master ledger. That mistake had prompted the letter. "I don't know how this could have happened," said the guy on the other end of the line. "I'm so sorry about this, but you're clearly all set." And he did sound apologetic, like he knew that this had to have been weighing on me over the weekend. Except there's no way he could have known how much.

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This is what all of 2012 felt like for me. It was an oscillating pattern of worry, fear, panic, and temporary relief. It took a few months of peace, and then a weekend of craziness, to help me see why I had been on pins and needles the entire year.

It was a year of major life changes. A third child was on the way. So, too, was a home sale, likely at a very disadvantageous price for us. We had to move all of our stuff. And then we had to find a new place to live. We also had to find a Kindergarten home for Andres, who, all of a sudden, was turning 5. A lot of things were happening quickly. Too quickly for my taste, as I have always walked slow as a turtle when confronted with change.

I spent most of 2012 focusing on immediate needs, just trying to make it through each day. Every so often I would look down the road a few months and get dizzy. Where would we be? How much money would we have? Would my wife be ok? It was easier to concentrate on the now--tonight's dinner, tonight's baths, tomorrow's lunches--than to predict what our lives would look like later in the summer or fall.

But days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, and by the end of July we were wishing goodbye to our home, having somehow packed all of our belongings into a storage container, a POD, our two cars, and garages in Dover, MA and Mt Laurel, NJ. The Turner St chapter of our life was over. Then our nomadic August, and finally our return home, to a new address on the other side of Waltham. On September 1, the year began to improve.

On October 23 it got a lot better with the birth of Lucia. I breathed another heavy sigh of relief seeing her in Natalia's arms, both healthy and safe and cherishing the other. It had not been an easy year by any measure. And in this moment, the birth of my third child, my second daughter, I felt like the year of panic and uncertainty was finally behind us. We had a place to live, our family was healthy, and we could get on with living instead of waiting. And I could drop even more worry off my shoulders.

2013 has not been perfect. But it has been more mundane than its predecessor, and that is a welcome thing. Natalia has gone back to work. I am on leave until June 3, making only a small dent in my giant to-do list. My life is one of routines. I like it that way.