Nervous Thursday

So my youngest son goes into the hospital tomorrow and I’m nervous.

Now, this isn’t something serious (thank god), but he does need to go under general anesthesia. I’m not nervous about the procedure itself, because it’s pretty minor. But I’m nervous because this is the first time he’s going to have to deal with being scared of something he’s got to go through. In other words, mom and dad can’t handle it for him.

I’ve often told people that when I was younger, I thought I knew what fear was. I’ve been in plenty of bad situations and have gone through many encounters and met plenty of bad folks along the way that pretty much gave me a fairly good idea of what fear was and how to best handle it. Well, I also tell people that I was wrong to define it only based on myself. Because as soon as I became a parent, fear took on a whole new meaning. Any parent will tell you that there’s nothing quite so scary as suddenly realizing that your children will have to go through their own bad times and face their own forms of evil…without you around to rely on. The best any parent can do is to try to prepare their children as well as they know how and hope for the best.

So tomorrow’s one of “those times.” My wife and I have tried to make it fun for him, but I know that when he wakes up tomorrow and we drive in to Children’s Hospital, the poor little guy will have that gnawing fear in the pit of his stomach. It’s a feeling I know all too well. My little man is going to have to take a deep breath and walk through it.

I’ll be taking my own deep breath as well. Probably a lot of them.