Never too old to learn ~ March 28, 1996

by David Heiller

Sometimes I’m not the greatest dad or husband. That rooster came home to roost last weekend.

Malika and David with MacKenzie: a hammock moment.

Our daughter, Malika, complained of stomach pains on Friday. She told her teacher, who called us and left a message on our answering machine. Then she went to the office and they called us and did the same thing. Then Mollie slept until her school bus came and brought her home.

I was home by then, and expected to see a sick kid limp off the bus. Quite the contrary. Mollie had brought a friend home with her, as she had pre-arranged to do, and her mysterious stomach pain seemed to have disappeared.

Like a good dad, I thought she had been faking it. Hey, it’s been known to happen.

Malika complained again that night before going to bed, and Cindy gave her a tylenol. Then she woke up in the middle of the night, and complained again, so we let her sleep on the couch.

When day broke, Malika still had her pain, so Cindy took her to the emergency room at about 7:30 a.m. “Maybe it’s her appendix,” she said.

“No way, it’s not her appendix,” I said. It’s never the appendix.”

They did a few tests, and thought maybe it could be her appendix. They told Cindy to keep an eye on Malika and let them know if the pain got worse.

Ms. Malika, earlier that winter.

It did get worse. She laid on the couch and slept and watched TV all morning and into the afternoon. And this was with a friend around, a friend that is always on the go, playing, exploring, building forts. Mollie didn’t play with her friend, didn’t help us plant seeds, didn’t eat tuna fish sandwiches. She was in a lot of pain. So Cindy took her back to the doctor at about 2 p.m.

Old skeptical Dave still wasn’t convinced. Maybe a cast iron skillet up side the head would have helped, but Cindy was too busy with Mollie for that.

So I took Malika’s friend home, and stopped on the way back to visit with some friends, and when I finally rolled home an hour later, our son met me at the door with the news that Malika had to have her appendix out and Mom was trying to call me and where the heck was I anyway and I’d better call Mom at the hospital right away.

The dog house outside was empty, and I felt like crawling into it.

But I faced the executioner and called Cindy and hustled to Moose Lake and we took Malika to St. Luke’s in Duluth where a doctor tapped and prodded and listened with his stethoscope and even then I thought he was going to say it was something else.

He proclaimed that Malika had a bad appendix. An hour later Malika had her appendix removed. It had a bad infection in it.

Daddy had other opportunities to rescue Malika, 
such as digging her out of a bottomless frostboil.

Malika stayed at St. Luke’s until Monday. She has to stay home from school for a week. She’ll recover fine. It’s just an appendix, for crying out loud.

There I go again.

I’m making light of it here, but I blew it, and maybe I’ll recover from my hands off approach to illness too. Maybe I’m making a sexist generalization, or trying to share my guilt, but I think we dads are a bit more removed from our kids’ and spouses’ ailments than we should be, and don’t always take them seriously. We don’t even take our own illnesses seriously.

(Dads, help me out! Write a lot of letters to the editor confirming that I’m not the only Idiot Father in Minnesota.)

When someone gets sick around our house, I usually say, “Why don’t you take a walk, and get some fresh air? That always helps me.”

If Cindy hadn’t been around, I probably would have made Mollie walk to the culvert and back. I would have waited a lot longer before taking Malika to the doctor. Maybe too long, which could have resulted in a ruptured appendix, which could have led to fertility problems and other infections.

We’re never too old to learn. I’m living proof of that.