For all the dads out there.

When I heard from my 4 year old’s mother his best friend had been seriously injured by a dog, and asked if I could help, I felt strangely out of my element.

As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, taking care of injured children is a routine part of my job. Taking care of children injured by dogs is unfortunately something I have done numerous times as well.

But you see, Rogue Three’s (my 4 year old) friend isn’t the type of patient I take care of at my hospital. It’s a stuffed owl, named Owl, that my son has had since he was an infant.

Since the divorce, Owl has dutifully gone with him to pre-school every day as well made the trip back and forth between his mother’s house and my own with every switch. He is probably the sole constant presence in his life since the divorce.

When I saw the pictures, it was not as bad as I feared, but the injuries were not insignificant. Owl’s right eye was no longer attached, and a significant amount of stuffing was missing. He looked for a lack of a better word, deflated.

Owl was transported to me via backpack with his eye kept “on ice” (in a little ziplock bag). Like many beloved stuffed animals, Owl was already in rough shape — he is routinely dropped, thrown, and manhandled, and had not bathed in months (perhaps years). He wasn’t pretty, but he was family.

I wasn’t sure I had what it took to patch up Owl. It had been years since my last stuffed animal resuscitation. When Peach the Parrot, property of Rogue One (my oldest) was injured in 2013, he only needed a minor repair job in a cosmetically insignificant area.

I put him aside for a couple days to ponder the best approach, and to gather the necessary equipment. I didn’t have the supplies at home for a high-stakes operation.

After some careful planning, I decided Owl needed a stuffing transplant, followed by eye reimplantation.

It was risky — a procedure I had never before attempted. I knew, however, it was Owl’s best chance.

Finding a Donor

Thanks to COVID and the need to keep my children entertained, I have been periodically ordering them craft activity boxes online. Devising crafts to keep them entertained isn’t a forte of mine, and like so many other parents during COVID, I was constantly looking for ways to keep them busy.

One of Rogue Three’s craft boxes provided materials to make a rainbow pillow. Like most of the other crafts my children did over the course of the pandemic, they were forgotten almost as soon as they were completed.

I went on the hunt and found Rainbow buried in Rogue Three’s room. I could not have asked for a better match.

He was practically bursting from the seams with stuffing. And, if you didn’t know, rainbows are universal donors.

Things Fall Apart

The day of the operation, Rogue Three threw me a curveball. He had retrieved Owl from his pre-op resting spot without my knowledge and demanded to take him to school.

On top of that, I had planned to do the surgery overnight while Rogue Three slept, but he demanded to have with him one last time overnight. The coup de grace — somewhere along the way, the eye was lost.

“It’s okay. He doesn’t need the eye” he told me.

Maybe he doesn’t, but what do I do about the hole? I thought.

Forced to improvise, inspiration struck.

The Operation

The day arrived — Rogue Three went to pre-school and left Owl with me. I carried him into the operating theatre — my bathroom — and laid him next to Rainbow.

The transplant went remarkably well.. Rainbow continued to spill stuffing even after the operation ended — he could have saved a million stuffed animals that day.

After the stuffing transplant came the more precarious step — the eye . Lacking access to prosthetic eyes for stuffed owls, I decided to create Owl an eye patch using some black ribbon I found laying around.

Satisfied with the outcome, I proceeded to perhaps the most delicate phase — post-op bathing.

Owl underwent a gentle, soapy hand bath, careful to keep his new incision out of the water. He then spent the day in recovery.

That night at bedtime I reunited Owl with his owner. It was not the reaction I expected.

Rainbows Can’t Cure Everyone

I should say, as I performed Owl’s transplant, my mind was elsewhere.

While I was working on Owl, my dad was hospitalized, severely ill, and waiting to find out if he would become eligible for a lung transplant. It was the only avenue given for him to survive a debilitating and progressively worsening lung disease that had failed all other treatments.

At age 73 my dad was a practicing psychiatrist, working six days a week, including the day before he was first hospitalized with a mysterious (non-COVID) lung ailment.

While I’m not sharing many details of his illness, to give some perspective on the type of person he is in general:

1. Until he became ill, he routinely worked more hours a week than me.
2. He twice took part-time jobs as a prison psychiatrist to keep himself busy while in his 60’s.
3. Once while visiting Pakistan he was hit by a car while walking (in his 60’s). He didn’t receive medical attention until weeks later (back in the United States), when persistent back pain led to a diagnosis compression fracture in his spine from the injury.

The man knows hard work, and the man knows how to push himself even when he doesn’t feel well.

Yet after an up and down course of treatment over the course of several months, he was hospitalized not long before Christmas last year, and told his only chance of survival was to gain enough strength to be evaluated for transplant, then to qualify for transplant.

The transplant doctor was blunt — he did not expect that would happen.

So Close, Yet So Far Away

If you didn’t gather it from my description of him above, my dad is stubborn.

A month later he was listed for transplant.

A week later my parents received a late night call: he had a matching donor and would undergo surgery in the morning.

I wasn’t going to be allowed in due to COVID visitor restrictions, and was scheduled to work in the emergency department during the exact same time as his surgery. So it was I found myself at work while only a few hundred yards away, in a nearby operating room in the building next door, he underwent surgery.

What kind of shift do you hope for in such a situation? Probably not the one I had.

The first patient of the day almost coded, but thankfully improved enough to make it to the ICU. As I returned from dropping that patient off the ICU, an even more critically ill patient arrived. That patient also thankfully made it to the ICU. My last patient of the day was the most critical — they did not make it to an ICU.

In between patients, my thoughts drifted. No news, or the sporadic news my mother received while waiting, was good news.

As I finished my shift, his surgery finished. I walked over to the adult hospital, which felt strangely deserted. While visitor restrictions meant only my mother was supposed to be allowed in the waiting room, my university and hospital badge earned me the good will from the charge nurse and a visit in to the ICU, where we were told the surgery had gone remarkably well.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step…

One month after surgery, he came home.

It was not a celebratory arrival. COVID (and his suppressed immune system) put us in the same boat as so many others, changing the daily tenor of our lives, and changing how we marked momentous occasions.

But maybe that was for the best, because what felt like a momentous occasion was really just the start of a very long journey. Not just for my dad, but for both my parents.

The transplant doctor told us before the surgery they “can get anyone through the surgery. The hard part is the rehabilitation.”

Hoo-boy were they right.

My father started 5-day a week rehab, needing to regain the strength to stand and relearn basic tasks such as walking.

Time proved the transplant team right (not that they had any doubt) — the hard part came after he went home. The time in the hospital after surgery paled in comparison to the physical and emotional toll of the effort required to continue the recovery process at-home.

I initially planned to write about months ago, a month after my father came home from the hospital. I think this is the better day to do so.

Today is Father’s Day, almost exactly 5 months after the surgery., Instead of having to constantly look forward with a murky future of unknown duration, we can look back at the journey he has taken. I don’t know if anyone ever fully recovers from such an ordeal, but my dad made it through the most challenging parts of his process, and is quite literally doing better than almost anyone expected he would.

He’s able to do most things independently, his stubbornness is back at full strength, and he’s again planning for his own future (hopefully a return to work).

The Hidden Hero

I’m publishing this post on Father’s Day, but it would be egregious not to point out the biggest support in my dad’s recovery.

My mother, the most devoted and caring person I know, acted as his full-time caregiver, driving him to appointment after appointment, keeping track of a dizzying array of medicines, in addition to doing the many other things needed to support his rehab and recovery.

For months she has been his home health nurse. We all know how challenging it is to be sick, and how challenging it is to help a loved one who is sick. Now imagine being the live-in home health nurse for someone with a serious illness who also happens to be one of the most stubborn people alive.

If you need any more confirmation of her skills: a week after my surgery on Owl, his eye patch dehisced. My attempts at repair were unsuccessful, so I transferred him to my mom’s care. She promptly sewed the patch on far better than my initial effort, and Owl has had no further complications.

It took a special person to make it to and through surgery, and another special person to help him through it. I’m fortunate that on Father’s Day I will be able to celebrate not only with my own boys, but with both my parents.

Whatever you’re doing today, even if you aren’t able to celebrate Father’s Day with your dad, maybe just celebrate whatever or whomever you can. It’s been a rough year for everyone, and I think we all deserve it.

I realized after I initially published this I forgot a significant acknowledgment. Thank you to all those who participated in my father’s care over the past year and supported him, my mother, and the rest of our family through this process. While the doctors and nurses were instrumental in his care, it was also transplant coordinators, physical therapists, nutritionists, medical assistants, valet parking attendants, and many many others who helped him through the worst of the process.

Most of all, thank you to the individual whose organ donation allowed my father to live. Thank you as well to that person’s family/friends, who lost a loved one, but in losing them allowed us to hold on to a loved one of our own a little longer.