Once we moved to Johannesburg, my mother took me to Jo’burg Gen (Johannesburg General Hospital) for the yearly cardiac check-up. It was a whole day affair and I rather enjoyed it because it meant skipping a day of school!
The day always started with a stressful drive in peak-hour traffic through some very busy areas. My mother wasn’t used to this drive so it wasn’t easy for her.
At the hospital we had to check in, take a seat and wait for my name to be called. We always took lots of stuff to do, read and play, anything that could be done while sitting and waiting. Every year I’d agonize about whether or not the procedure had changed and they’d have to take blood. I hated giving blood in general and it never was part of the regular check-up procedure.
First it was always the weigh-in, height measurement and ECG.
From there it was sometimes an X-ray, sometimes an echo or sometimes nothing but a long wait for the final step.
Whatever happened, there was always enough time before the final step to go to the hospital cafeteria for lunch. I never found hospital food as detestable as most make it out to be and the cafeteria food was always good. The best liver & mash I ever had was from that cafeteria and I still remember having the fleeting thought of “I wonder who’s liver this was?” since it was a hospital. Excuse me, I digress.
The final step was always a consultation with a cardiac professor and usually the same pediatric cardiac professor every year. They tended to hold onto their patients and knew them by sight and condition, sadly not always by name. It was also fairly standard practice that they’d talk about me to my mother and not to me. My mother would always ask me how I felt about what they were asking or speak to me and then reply to the professor. To the professors I was an object. Like an overly complicated puzzle that needed solving. To my mother, I was her son.
Sometimes the consultations didn’t end on a happy note. The professor would ask, or rather strongly suggest to my mother that they need to do a cardiac catheterization to confirm something or explore further because they felt they’d be able to see or figure out more. My mother would always convince me that it was for the best and I’d always see reason and go through with it. I hated those catheterizations though. They were a special kind of torture. In those days they sedated you enough to be jelly but you were awake through the procedure. I believe the reasoning was to keep the heart rate and blood pressure at normal waking levels. Things have thankfully advanced since then.
Then there was the year my father insisted that he’d take me to the cardiac appointment like my mother usually did. He was adamant that he’d take me and mom needn’t worry. He’d take care of it that year.
I was nervous. I mean, what would we talk about? We’d grown apart since the move to Johannesburg and I wasn’t really comfortable with him to be honest. There were the awkward puberty emotions, the extended period of absence when he was in Johannesburg preparing the way and then the problem that I hated Johannesburg and wanted desperately to go back to Port Elizabeth that had put a wedge between us. What was I going to talk to him about?
Well, the day went as expected. We exchanged pleasant, superficial chit-chat and I mostly kept myself busy. It was all going along quite normally until we went in to see the professor.
It felt like I’d walked into an ambush. It was clear that my father and the professor had been corresponding at length about me and that my father had deemed it unimportant to inform me about what they had planned. I was sitting right there and they were talking about me as if I was somewhere else. I could understand this from the professor. To him it was work but my father? I thought he’d tell me what the plan was or at least give me a heads-up. I honestly wanted to get up and leave and I think I should have. Unfortunately I had more respect for my elders than my elders had for me.
In hind-sight I know my father was simply trying to fix me. He wanted to do what every parent wants to – to make it right for their child. Unfortunately the sneaky way he went about it was the wrong way. To me it felt like the final wedge had been driven home.
It was the first and last time he took me to Jo’burg Gen. I can only assume he lost interest because the procedure, a balloon angioplasty, didn’t work. I can only make assumptions because he never (even afterwards) spoke to me about the procedure, his expectations or the reasoning for it.
Conclusion: No matter how painful, risky or obscure the procedure, tell your child what’s going on and why.
Ciao for now.