Another Doctor Story. A hatful of sky and a handful of...

 I think Doctor stories are becoming my biggest issue on my blog.  There must be three or 4 of them

up by now.

Dads, I know there are a lot of you with muscles of steel and iron will temperament.  A lot of you have seen action and seen your buddies get their legs blown off.  I remember reading Viet Nam war stories with the sentence, "I strapped my best buddies innards back inside of him waiting for the medic to come."  Or, "I looked at his leg, it was hanging together by one tendon. `You are going to be all right`, I lied to him."

That is not me.

Sure, call me a coward, call me a wuss, whatever,

But the point I am leading up to, is that, I hate trips to the doctor.  And now my wife says as a 40 per cent Dad, I have to take the kids to the doctor more.   I am the Dad, I have to live up to my position and moniker,  Dadnamit.

Taking a trip to the doctor gets me as nervous as having to take a bus trip (see this story).
I start getting nervous the night before.  I have a few trips to the doctor already under my belt, and I think I have it in control.  Uh..... maybe, maybe not. 

Yet, the further point of this story is is that I experience everything my daughter experiences.  Its not like I can close my eyes when she is getting punctured and is screaming and then say, "See, that wasn't so bad now was it?  Keep a stiff upper lip little girl".  So I have to watch and...  I don't like the pain.   Lets face it, many women can take the pain and the blood and punctures better than men.   For certain reasons they are used to having blood run out of their bodies and can take or watch pain better.   I assume. I  may be wrong or stereotyping.  I hope I am not Donald Trumping.

Fathers, prospective Stay at home Dads, I hate to say it, but some of your duties will call you to view the pain of your children at the hands of the doctors.  I have seen enough of them, my daughter crying when they punctured a ball in her ear to let the pus out.  I was at the major one when they took her out of Mothers stomach and she was hanging by a thread so to speak to her Mother, which was actually a strange one to see.  But today's view was having to watch them stick a Kleenex into each nostril all the way to the bridge of the nose.  She didn't scream, but I could see when they were putting it in it was terribly uncomfortable for her and she wanted to cry.  I have to admit I nearly broke down crying for her.  While looking at your buddies leg hanging by a tendon would be 10k times worse, having to watch your helpless, very sweet daughter who you love more than anything, nearly life itself, sitting there in discomfort with two Kleenex up each nostril...  just drives the adrenaline from my body, drains me out, saddens me, depresses me ad nauseum.

What is worse is she probably has some allergies, so I will have to be bringing her to the doctor from the Fall once a month for all these tests, and, ......... I wont get the medal of honor for doing so.  Just all in the days work of the stay at home Dad, bringing up daughter, but who cant stand to see his little girl in pain or discomfort.  Lord give me strength.

B.  A Hatful of Sky.  A Handful of...
So we are riding back on the tram back from the doctor.  And this is the second ear nose and throat doctor, and after a complete test for allergies earlier in the year, this second doctor tells us it is probably allergies, it is not due to sickness and your daughter is not sick. Come back in the Fall.  My daughter is suddenly very tired, has a headache and her stomach has been hurting all morning.  She is sleeping on my lap.  "Not due to sickness," were docs words. 

"Daddy,  I think I am going to throw up" were her sudden words while riding back on the streetcar.   Now for someone who rides the street cars every day, the disdain of having what you think is drunks puke on the floor is mighty.  So, these words caused just a bit of forward movement in the noggen muscle;  it got the wheels in the head turning VERY quickly.  I said, "We have one more stop, after this one, can you hold it?"  With stupid questions come answers.  Within two seconds, I knew the answer would be  a resounding NO.

So, I put my hand up to her mouth and caught about 50 per cent of the vomit.  The rest, as it turns out went on her jacket, pants and my pants.  But none, let me repeat that, NO VOMIT got on the floor of the street car.  So for the next ten seconds until we reached a stop, I was holding a handful of vomit.  Now believe it or not, this did not bother me at all.  And the interesting part of it was that she had eaten exactly nine strawberries, strawberries being in season at the time of this writing, for breakfast. So in fact it was strawberry vomit.  In those ten seconds, I thought about all the Strawberry Shortcake and Pinkalicious story books I read my girls and thought it a perfect oxymoron that here I am holding a handful of strawberry vomit.

Without any problems I hoisted all our stuff, my 22 kilo daughter and a handful of strawberry vomit all off the street car without spilling a drop.  She promptly threw up on the sidewalk outside the tram.  Cushlemacree.   I have to say the whole thing was pretty amazing.

As I am wiping her down on a bench in a park at the stop, I again remembered that wonderful Joan Rivers joke where Joan Rivers has absolutely no problem taking a piece of food from her daughters mouth that her daughter doesn't want to eat and eating it herself.  Parents do these things.  Like holding a handful of strawberry vomit until it can be displaced in a not so unreasonable location.  I was totally calm through the whole thing as I wiped the vomit off her pants and coat and my pants.

One for the grandchildren.  One for the Gipper.    

The Big Bully. Part 1

It is a big topic.  I intend to write a book about it, but I have to say, as a Father concerned and taking time to be involved with his kids upbringing, I think there is one thing I don't want my children to be.  A Bully.  If my children are being bullied, I am going to go to the proper authorities and make some noise.  If my child is bullying and I find out about it, and she initiated the bullying then there is going to be some serious talking to my child and probably some crying too and guilt on her part.

In fact both have already happened.  My girl was pushed into the boys bathroom and they barred the door on her once, and then she was tripped on the stairs.. and things kept happening.  My wife went to talk about it with the teacher and the teacher agreed there was a problem.  The bully`s parents came in and it appeared the bullier was having trouble at home because of a new baby brother.  She probably didn't think she was getting the love she used to get and was probably angry about it and took it out in part on my daughter who was actually her friend.  They never stopped being friends, but it was touch n go for a while.  We didn't want her to be friends with someone who was pushing her around and hurting her physically sometimes. 

The thing is, it seems, bullying and bullies existing in childhood is endemic,  even across all generations and countries.  Can we divide kids into three groups?  The bullies, the bullied, and the bystanders who usually don't do anything but are usually a friend of bully or bullied.

It makes me wonder, the sociologist that I am, whether there is some inherent purpose for bullying?  It  either plays a role of vying for head of the group or functions as socializing youngsters to act the way of the group.  For example the bullied can often be the weaker "weirdos" who profess an alternative way of thinking or acting than what is normal.  Then you get the bully to put them in their place and make them act "like the rest of us" and doesn't let the person be alternative because that would destroy or weaken the mores, the social fabric, of the group.  

Or else bullys form some pecking order of strength, like in a gang or a circle of people.  The best bullyers will of course be the leaders. The real tough guys.  In the past the biggest bullies in fact might have been rewarded with the best food or the best mating choices.  Maybe they still do.  

Bullying grows out of some social purpose for carrying forward group mores and group socialization.  Or else it establishes the leader and hierarchy of the group.  And humans are a very hierarchical animal.  Here is a good article, strangely from Forbes magazine, which puts the finger on the issue  

That is,  in the old days when it was Us vs Them.  Haven't we evolved to, "Us vs Ourselves"? 

 Haven't we evolved, outgrown this earlier "need" for both the method for achieving a hierarchy (through bullying) and the necessity to spurn those different from us?  In fact  these days, we need differences in communities and groups.  The more diversified a group you grow up in, the stronger the individuals we have for society and for even leading society.  Sadly, the bullying still exists and has not kept up with our evolutionary growth.  Or, just as sadly, bullying still is an effective method for both "putting people in their places" and establishing who carries more weight around in this street, school or community.  

In my next installment I will be remembering a bully from my time and see where he is today.