A BODY PART IN FRANCE

We pick our story up after a kick-save ending to the hardcore “Prom-a” that had unfolded around the “ask” to my daughter’s senior prom (see previous blog).  Crisis averted.  My work there was done.

A day and a half of shopping in Paris with friends; walking and eating, photos, smiles.  The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Left Bank, you get the picture.  We were good.  And we had the VAT receipts to prove it.  I’d eaten enough crepes and croissants to sculpt a third leg with the carbs.  And then?  The stomachache.  Not mine-- my daughters. 

We’ll leave out the vomiting parts and missing the last night of dinner with our friends before they took off, but suffice it to say that I was not concerned at first.  There is a lot of low level whining that accompanies teenagers, lots of phantom aches, fatigue and growing pains to navigate.  Even women’s prison-guard-hard me (“you don’t know real pain till you’ve birthed a child or had your head blown off in a war like your father”) sensed storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

We’ve all heard the stories about people whose appendix burst.  It’s one of those perennial parent fears along with meningitis when your kids are babies.  These are clear “go-to” maladies, but then again, no one wants a burst appendix on Air France for Pete’s sake (read prior blog about airline’s level of emotional involvement).  A daughter with gut pains in Paris was no time to decide to “make a run for it” home. We’d see how the night fared.

We both went to bed, me with my fingers and toes crossed that this was just a stomach bug.  But deep in my gut, my maternal sixth sense was on simmer.  The next morning the stomachache had turned into specific pain on the right side.  This is where I really, really wished I had called Verizon and figured the international calling thing BEFORE I left.  Suddenly being unplugged didn’t seem so wonderful, bon vivant and important for our mother-daughter bonding.  My friend Kerri was boarding a train to London with the only cell phone we’d had.  Our umbilical cord was being cut.

But for those of you who believe in divine intervention, the day of the acute stomach pain was the very day we’d planned to see my high school friend Nancy.  Her life is a made-for-TV movie. 

She lives in Paris: blonde, beautiful and stylish, fluent in French with two adorable little girls and … wait for it… married to a doctor.

And guess what?  Nancy assured me, enthusiastically, that shepherding two stressed out (one grimacing) Americans through the French public health system on a sunny Parisian afternoon was JUST what she wanted to do on a Saturday. This is a real friend.

We dropped our bags in her apartment, had a quick bite and headed to the French emergency room.  I was feeling more confident about a stomach virus and began to envision hitting a French bistro for dinner and making our flight the next morning.  I was dead —D-E-D wrong.

Suffice it to say that the next 12 hours in the emergency room and then finally, thank God, the surgery produced some of the most roller coastery events I’ve been through in a compressed period.  First a possible bladder infection, then a blood test showed a spike in something, then two hours later, as ambulances kept unloading people on gurneys, and a restrained mental patient was screaming “Seeeeeee vooooy plaaaaaaay” at the top of her lungs, it was confirmed.  Appendicitis.  

She’d never had surgery before, never had a medical procedure more invasive than a shot.  I had no idea how she’d react to anesthesia.  She had three AP exams scheduled for that week and on top of that, I smelled smells.  Bad smells.  A French ER after a Friday night reeks of the Mad Dog 20/20 bottling factory.  Blood, sweat and tears, complete with vomitorium.   Some other folks clearly had a lot more serious issues in this queue. 

All of this raced through my head in addition to the fact that I don’t speak French.  Every time I tried to think of a French word as simple as “good morning,” lame high school Spanish floated mysteriously up to the surface of my brain like a magic eight ball reading.  “Si” I kept answering everyone.  “Gracias.”

God bless Nancy.  I don’t know how I would have navigated this whole mess without her.  And thank goodness for those French doctors and nurses, eye candy each and every one of those residents.  Some of them trotted out their high school English, albeit sheepishly, but it was head and shoulders over my two-phrase Fren-Spanglish. 

But what I realized, about halfway into my game of charades with the residents, is that parents can communicate all the important stuff with body language, with their eyes and their fears.  Sometimes, you simply don’t need words—the heart has an international language of its own.

At this point Nancy’s surgeon husband got on the phone and tried take the bull by the proverbial horns.  They listened, they nodded, he talked, they reacted.  Yes, we can operate, no, sorry, now we don’t have a bed, you have to transfer to another hospital, no we can hold you here—maybe surgery tonight now, no, sorry, tomorrow.  The hours ticked by.  I physically began to shrink.  I got weepy.  I wanted my husband.  And I felt kinda helpless.  OK, really helpless.

Now let me just say as an aside that I’ve had my fill of medical situations. I consider myself a pretty tough customer after going through all Bob’s medical nightmare with a head injury in military hospitals.  It takes a lot to rattle me.  And I was well aware that we could have been in a foreign ER for much more serious circumstances; a car accident, a head injury, two broken legs. This was minor.  But when it’s your child, it’s a whole different landscape of fear and internal God-whispering.

Sometime after midnight they finally wheeled her into surgery.  Nancy and I  (who I’d pictured would be strolling around her trendy neighborhood with baguettes and maybe a beret for good measure, playing with her girls at the park and going out for a wonderful last local meal of snails) were now curled up in hard plastic chairs in a dark hallway.  We were the only two people left in the waiting area.  It was the last surgery of the day or the first of the next day- depending on how you looked at it.

And nothing like a little medical crisis to bring two old friends back together.  The calming shawl of the hushed hospital, the day’s spent adrenaline and that sub-consciously comforting 1978 connection of attending East Aurora high in our multi-colored Levis corduroys with curling ironed Farah wings, all instantly re-bonded us.  Everything coalesced into one of those memorable intimate girlfriend conversations that hopefully happens more than a few times a year if you are blessed enough to have friends like Nancy.

And then she was out of surgery.  It was done.  All good.  I could come in the recovery room.  It was 1:45 in the morning.  And I got weepy again.  Like embarrassingly, wet noodle weepy.  Like leaving-Saigon-by-rooftop helicopter-evacuation weepy. I was throwing my arms around doctors and nurses, telling them this was my little baby girl.  I’m sure my breath alone at that point could have stood in for anesthesia.  I hadn’t eaten.  My teeth were wearing peds.  But those health care professionals were all gracious, or perhaps they were simply appalled.  But they hugged back.

And when I touched her hair and kissed her freckles, she groggily squeezed my hand and I was just so grateful we’d had the surgery; that we hadn’t had to wait one more night.  I told her what I thought she’d want to hear…what a champ she’d been, how proud I was of her.  “This will make a great story someday, honey,” I murmured.  “You left a body part in Paris.”

She smiled and then opened her mouth.  I waited, eyes misty, to receive her thanks, to hear how much she loved me back.

“Thank God it happened after the shopping,” she said,  “I love that purple dress.”  And that one utterance took all her effort.   She gave me one last blissful smile before she surrendered to the shroud of IV painkillers and post–anesthesia.

And everything I had smiled back.

Next Up —Dad to the rescue, Boones Farm Wine and a mysterious gas…….

The Prom Proposal- Part Two

I last left you headed off on a mother-daughter weekend with my girl.  I had the letter from her hopeful prom date in my pocket, having only learned few hours earlier of his request for me to have the pilot read the "ask" before take off.  I had also managed to pack each of us into carry-on luggage, with a wee bit of room for new purchases, no small feat.  Check, check, check.  

It was my grande finale of her years at home, my personal gift as a working Mom.  We would unplug, un-encumber, we would laugh and she would meet my eyes again, just like she did when I used to nurse her (that might have been one of the last times.) 

We were on the overnight flight to Paris and would land Thursday morning and hit the ground running with my chum Kerri from London and her daughter.  Shop, eat, walk, sightsee, talk, eat more, shop more, drink some wine and café au lait.  We’d be home by Sunday noon.

There was no way to have anticipated that the weekend would end with a semi-thwarted plan, a few extra days, a husband to the rescue and a body part, left in France…. (cue the scary organ music)

Lessons learned:  buy travel insurance, don’t ever truly unplug -- get international phone coverage before you go, and try to speak the language.  More about all of that later. 

Lets start with the prom proposal.  My husband and two girlfriends weighed in that she would be HORRIFIED to have the pilot single her out and raise her hand on the plane.  She is, after all, a 17-year old teenager.  She can barely sit in the front seat without minor embarrassment at my attempts to sing with the radio.  And this when it's just the two of us. 

Plus—what if they told me they couldn’t do it and she had to switch off her phone immediately for take-off?  The poor date would be left hanging for a six-hour flight.  I revised the plan in a way that was still public-ish but less mortifying.  I would ask the gate agent to call her to the desk on the loudspeaker and then read the sweet prom proposal face-to-face to save her embarrassment.

We were early to the gate and the Air France agent with trendy metallic eyewear was fussing with some phone crisis.  He waved me away, telling me to return in 15 minutes.  Then, double horror, the flight is delayed, indefinitely, for.. yes, my favorite excuse…“technical difficulties.” 

An angry mob of businesspeople with connections and elder-travelers with raised canes swarmed the gate agent who backed away like looters were attacking the storefronts during Hurricane Katrina.  His eyewear was askew. You all know this scene.  Not pretty. 

Rats.  My romantic proposal plot at the gate didn’t have a chance now.  And I was running out of time.  I switched gears again.  Part of my problem, and I don’t mean any offense here, but all of the people I was dealing with were French.  And the French don’t do Prom. So this whole Cinderella proposal that made all Moms knees weak just thinking about it was lost on just about everyone from Air France I came in contact with.  Including the three scowling female gatekeepers of the Air France lounge I querried.  I didn’t get one misty eye or gauzy reminiscent smile out of these folks.  “Didn’t you ever watch "Happy Days" or "The OC?” I wanted to scream.  “What about Beverly Hills 90210?”  Their eyebrows furrowed at my request.

We were rapidly clicking past our original take off time.  I worried the young man would think it was a no-go — she ought to have texted her response by now.  I began to break into flop sweats.  What to do?  We still hadn’t been given a departure time. 

The sweet weekend away kicked off by a surprise romantic proposal was ending up being a little work and pressure on Mom here.  Sheesh -- this young man had better keep his hands to himself on prom night, I thought.  I should add here that Bob had already googled him, found out his stats from the football team and announced he was too big to wrestle to the ground.  This size boyfriend would require a weapon.  Only a father thinks like that.

I made an executive decision to find a stranger to read the note.   I began to troll for sympathetic passenger types.  I’d give them the letter and they would walk up to my daughter, read it, surprise her and she could text prince charming.

I spied the only two people that looked like a couple and boldly confirmed that they were parents (so they’d appreciate the importance of this).  So what if he looked like he had been the last dude out of Woodstock, like he’d just walked 5 miles home from a Phish concert?  He and his smiling gray haired hippie wife would have to do.  Everyone else looked—well, kinda French—and I didn’t want to have to underscore the importance of the “prom thing" again.

A quick explanation and he was game.  Five minutes later he walked up and told her he had a message.  Her face turned white and she looked at me searchingly.  He read the letter verbatim, forgetting to edit out the parts the pilot was supposed to say about strapping on seatbelts, etc. 

Her cheeks flushed the ballet pink hue of roses, then turned ketchup color and she looked at me and broke into her signature huge grin.  Then the fingers were off and flying, texting like a court stenographer—more huge smiles, relief, more texts, the one-sided demented laughter we so often see exhibited between people and their personal communications devices in public places. 

But then, the unexpected.  “Mom, you still have to have the pilot read this.”  Say what?

Really? We had totally miscalculated, her father, my Mom friends and I.  She did want the attention. Who can ever figure a teenager out?

“I can’t tell him we didn’t do it,” she said to me, pleading.  “You have to get them to do it the way he wanted it.”  Sigh.  Had I not properly taught her about the intermittent importance of little white lies; about saving face and preserving dignity and the Santa and Easter bunny myths we propagate to prolong the innocence and wide-eyed marvel in the world?  Double sigh.

When we finally boarded the plane I tried vainly to get one of the flight attendants to meet my eye as I stood in the aisle.  They were so busy bustling around, taking coats, prepping the galley or whatever.  I stammered out an explanation to the youngest woman I could find, one who might be closest to the age of groping your boyfriend in the backseat of a Peugot.  After conferring with her team, she told me the pilot was not allowed to read something like this.  “Could you read it?”  I practically pleaded with her.  She would have to confer again.

And here is where I say that if we’d been on Jet Blue or American or United or Continental or you name it, this plan would have worked.  Those American pilots jabber on all the time about how many feet up we are and what kind of geological sediment is in the North Rim of the Grand Canyon as we pass over.  They babble in their Good Old Boy Top Gun voices about velocity and temperature and the kind of cloud coverage we’ve got going, and what their bowel movement was like this morning and all of it just as you’ve finally passed out in your seat from exhaustion and the little darling behind you has stopped kicking the back of your chair with his light-up sneakers. 

Those American pilots would have read the prom proposal, I just know it.  It would have been new material for them.

(Honest to goodness I am writing this on a plane to Chicago right now and the pilot just came on to give us trivia about Al Capone’s lawyer.  I kid you not.  Case in point.)

And on an American-based airline?  Those flight attendants would have turned this damned prom proposal challenge into a musical performance of “Lion King,” complete with napkin-art head gear and Radio City Rockette kicks down the aisle.  It would have been heroic.  But we were on Air France.  And the French don’t do proms.

Five minutes later the flight attendant returned shaking her head.  Nada, no can do.  They couldn’t read it on the loud speaker but she was happy to read it to my daughter in her seat.

Somehow a prom proposal read from an aging hippie dad and then heavily French accented, unemotional rushed flight attendant were probably not what her prince charming had in mind.  But the key here, as a mother, is that we tried. 

And as the wheels finally lifted off the runway at JFK and my daughter settled back with a look of satisfaction and good old wonderful smugness on her face, it was worth all the worrying and delays and concern I had about how to make this as perfect as I could.

Next up?  The story of the missing body part and the husband to the rescue.   Stay tuned!