Rolling up a sleeve as a rite of passage
A close call at Children’s Hospital Colorado in March 2011 converted my husband and me into frequent fliers at area blood donation centers.
We donated blood throughout the pandemic on-site at that hospital. Before and after the lockdown, we donated at CHC bloodmobiles and at Vitalent blood mobiles parked beside the hospital, now called Common spirit Longmont United Hospital, and at Vitalent donation centers in Boulder and Westminster.
I started donating blood as a high school student in the cafeteria — a habit I more or less maintained until life seemed too hectic with fulltime work, graduate school and a baby on the way.
But, there is nothing like being in need of blood to bump giving blood to a highpriority rhythm of life.
For us, that happened when our third son, Ray, now 14, got diagnosed at age 15 months with “failure to thrive.”
This ominous phrase indicates poor weight gain — among other negative measures of healthy human growth — at the dawn of life.
The first turning point in our crisis hit the day our pediatrician sent Ray and me to CHC in Aurora for a swallow study.
She ordered the test to rule out a physical obstruction that would explain why Ray often vomited and began declining after weaning off milk to eat solid foods.
Our stunted boy wore a heavy lead apron at the appointment as the doctor took a series of X-rays to image the flow of a thick, radioactive barium drink.
As Ray swallowed the gloppy stuff, I watched it on the monitor move from his mouth, down his throat and into his stomach before it emptied into the small intestine and appeared to pool behind what the doctor later described as a “nearly complete” obstruction. It was a duodenal web, a stretch of small intestine that did not hollow out during Ray’s in utero growth as expected.
Instead, this web — like thick cobwebs or stringy, seedless pumpkin guts — caught most of Ray’s solid food until it backed up and forced him to vomit.
How miserable our precious boy with so many other special needs must have felt.
Ray drank very little of the mix before the doctor stopped the procedure and delivered the news after making a few calls to colleagues.
Ray needed to be admitted immediately for emergency intestinal bypass surgery.
The 5 ½-hour laparoscopic surgery — camera-guided surgery through small incisions — to bypass the clog seemed successful.
But the Norwegian surgeon with enormous hands, the one whose dream of skiing professionally failed and led him instead into becoming a surgeon, told us he could not guarantee it, yet.
After Ray’s two weeks as an in-patient, a team of doctors arrived at his cribside to tell us they planned on doing open surgery to get it right.
Since my husband, David, and Ray both share the same A+ blood type, David donated blood at the hospital immediately to bank for the surgery.
However, the next morning another team of white coats — doctors and students — stopped by very early.
As she explained why, the lead doctor walked over to the wall and unplugged Ray’s vacuum system that sucked swampy looking bile from his stomach through the nasal gastric tube.
Then, she told us they had called off the open surgery and would test him on liquids and then food. If everything flowed, we could go home.
That morning, when the team reviewed the swallow study Ray did the night before to confirm the failure of the bypass, by some miracle it showed normal flow.
“We can’t explain this,” she said, while looping the tubes around a stand by the crib.
That moment still floors me, a bedraggled person who took in the miraculous news sitting in her PJS on the couch in Ray’s hospital room before them — people who had showered, brushed their teeth and finished their morning coffee.
Then, they left.
Very soon, our boy scarfed up blueberry pancakes and recovered at home as food moved around the clog through the bypass and the rest of his digestive system normally.
He grew and grew and grew!
Meanwhile, the blood David donated preemptively helped another child or children.
Now, years later, this experience continues shaping our hearts. It continues reminding us of our close call and miracle of healing.
It explains in part why our family arrives like a herd at the blood donation center regularly.
The kids enjoyed a snack and watched us donate blood when they were younger. But when they turn 16 and can donate blood with our consent, we ask them to join us in a lifestyle of rolling up a sleeve for this good cause.
It has become a rite of passage, a way for them to join us in sharing good health with someone who needs something lifegiving that only another human being can produce.
Still, given the moody and cantankerous nature of our two older teenagers, I didn’t know what to expect when I invited our son, Andy, who turned 16 in January, if he would like to on Thursday night to donate blood.
Even though his hemoglobin level turned out to be slightly too low to donate, his response might be a second miracle to count toward another kind of healing.
“Mom, I’d love to,” he said.