And now we wait

Another day, another test, still no closer to any answers.

Jonas and I spent the day at the hospital today being subjected to another round of baby-torture. Poor kid. I don't know if I can stand much more of this, and it completely amazes me how resilient he is.

Lying there on the second x-ray table of the day, catheter taped to his little penis, (yes, I said taped, how many of you men out there cringe just at the thought of pulling tape off your penis?) having iodine injected into his bladder, he wailed and screamed, and all I could do was stand there and kiss his little face and tell him how sorry I was that I couldn't make it stop. As soon as it was all over, and I had him in my arms again, he looked at the tech and smiled. How many of us adults could smile at someone after they violated one of the most sensitive parts of our bodies?

I think my son has been subjected to more radiation in his not-quite-five-months of life than most people get in their entire lives. We've been to outpatient radiology so many times that I can now navigate the winding hospital corridors with my eyes closed. Ok, maybe not that well, but you understand the point. It just seems so wrong that a child that is seemingly so perfect could actually be so ill.

The worst part of the visit over, we then took a tour of ultrasound. Hauntingly, the room he was taken to today was the same room in which I first glimpsed the beautiful little black and white image of his face a half a year ago. I remembered lying there gazing at the monitor with excitement and joy in my heart, and today, I stared at it with a sense of dread, waiting for that horrible something to appear.

I'm no doctor, but as far as I could tell, the kidneys that appeared on the screen looked very much like normal little kidneys. In other words, nothing glaring, like some huge tumor exists, and yes, there are two of them, one on each side. Outside of that, I suppose I'll have to wait for the official reports to come back.

And that's something that I really hate. These doctors will be collecting money from me for the next 20 years, and yet they can't take 2 minutes to look me in the eye and just say, "No Mrs. Martinez, we don't see anything bad here." As if playing the waiting game guves them some perverse power trip.

So we sit, and we wait as patiently as possible for the phonecall that will decide the course of our son's life. And we hold him the way that every parent should hold their child; as if it may be the last time.