3.1 - If I Knew Then...(Is It Too Late?)

Hindsight is eye-opening.

Yes, I’m stating the obvious.

Unfortunately, the understanding hindsight brings comes only after the events have happened, too late to change them. But hindsight is at the heart of creating a memoir.

What a gift to be able to look back at past experiences and draw lessons from them!

In this exercise, that’s just what you will do.

Hindsight can make you discover something new.

Perhaps it was a day just like every other until…

Recall such a time and tell its story in a few paragraphs.

For me, a text message I didn’t check for hours led to a rush to get to the emergency room of our local hospital. (Read Things Change in an Instant.)

Hindsight can suggest an outcome that would have been changed under other circumstances.

Recall such a moment and tell its story in a few paragraphs.

One of mine was my wondering how I would have done in sports if I were male instead of female.

(Read In Other Circumstances.)

Hindsight can lead you to moments of insight.

Recall such a moment and tell its story.

One of my moments of insight occurred when I realized a good friend really wasn’t.

(Read Eye-Opener.)

 

Examples

Things Change in an Instant

I checked my cell phone. It was something I rarely did while working. For some reason, at the end of my teaching day but before I could leave school, my eye caught the text message signal flashing. When my husband’s name and number came up as the sender, I opened and read it immediately. Thus a ten-hour journey started in a place every parent dreads. The emergency room.

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The message had been sent four hours earlier. My son, who had stayed home from school because he was having severe back pain, had seen blood in his urine. He called my husband and, when they didn’t hear from me, they went to the ER. Upon arrival, and after the typical waiting period to fill out forms, check insurance, and wait for an open bed, my son’s examinations began. And after three or four doctors poked and tested, they determined the problem was coming from his kidney.

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For the doctors this was unremarkable. It’s not uncommon for kidney infections to cause back pain. But my son has Tuberous Sclerosis, a disorder that causes tumors to grow on the body’s organs. Often, besides the brain and heart, the kidneys are affected. Unfortunately, TS is considered rare and few doctors at that time were even aware of it. This is one of the difficulties we had faced since he was diagnosed at three weeks.

For the most part, the specialists we saw were knowledgeable about it or at least became knowledgeable. But the everyday emergency room doctor didn’t have the resources or time to bone up. Luckily, we had not had ER visits for TS-related problems where it was an issue until now. So, we had to fill in the attending and the nurses. It took a while, and while we talked my son suffered in pain. But finally, they determined that he could be treated more effectively at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Since we were an hour away, they contacted CHoP and an ambulance was dispatched to pick up and transport my son.

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The diagnosis was that a tumor on his kidney was the problem. They kept him for a few hours, determined the bleeding had stopped, and sent him home with some pain medication. He was out of the woods, so to speak. Until the next time. And that next time came a few weeks later the Friday of Memorial Day weekend when the same pain and blood in the urine sent my husband and son directly to ChOP. I stayed home thinking the visit would be short and uneventful like the previous one. But this time it was more serious and the doctors decided embolization of the tumor was needed. Because of the holiday, the A team was not on duty, so the attending doctors decided to wait a day or two for them to return. My husband called to tell me that, so I planned to make the trip to Philly the next day.

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I asked my neighbor, Steve, to drive me to Philly. When we arrived, I found my son being attended to by a nurse. My husband told me that the doctors decided to do the embolization the night before because they thought waiting might result in kidney damage. He didn’t tell me at the time because he figured I couldn’t get to the hospital in time and he didn’t want to worry me.

After sitting with us for a few hours, my husband left and I took over the bedside vigil. My son had bouts of intense pain throughout the night and into the next morning. As I sat by his bed awake all night, I would feel his hand squeezing mine at intervals as the pain came on. The strength of his grip made me aware of how strong the pain was. This went on until the next afternoon when he started to have longer periods without pain.

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For the next four days, we shared a hospital room. To pass the time, we watched TV, played games, read, and chatted. I snuck in a nap or two when he nodded off from the medication. My son’s strength and calmness through it impressed me. The kindness and efficiency of the nurses and staff at CHop made the ordeal manageable. Once my son was feeling better, he was moved to a room he shared with another patient, another young person. Seeing other children and teens being treated and enduring illness and suffering with such dignity was an eye-opening experience for me even though I had experience with my own son’s struggles. There’s a community of suffering out there, but there’s also a community of caregivers compassionate and helpful. It’s a lesson we all need to learn.

 

In Other Circumstances

If only I was born thirty years later, being a tomboy would have really paid off. Not that that aspect of mine hasn’t had its benefits. It has. I grew up in a family of athletes. With two older brothers and no sisters, I didn’t have much choice but to play boy games as a kid. And I enjoyed it! I joined my brothers in the typical boy stuff like playing army and cowboys. But I also got to play sports with them. My father played soccer, basketball, and baseball, and made it to the semi-pro level in baseball. So, a lot of activities with my dad were sports. I became pretty good at kicking a soccer ball, shooting a basketball, and hitting and fielding a baseball. These abilities really guided my high school, college, and post-college life. I played basketball in high school and was recognized with some awards. I played in college, too, but women’s collegiate athletics was not very big then, so we played for the sheer enjoyment of it. After college, sports, especially softball, introduced me to friends and a lively social life. Today, forty years later, most of my good friends are from those days. I even met my husband through our involvement in recreational softball. Being a tomboy was good to me! And I wouldn’t really trade any of it for another life. It’s just fun to imagine.

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How much more productive could I have been if I was part of the generation of women who were welcomed into the world of athletics?

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Growing up I had no sports leagues or programs to get into to develop my skills. I learned from my father and brothers. And thankfully, they treated me like one of the boys and included me in their non-league, unofficial games and practices. Many of my favorite memories are of shooting hoops in our backyard, pitching baseball games in our alleyway pitcher-catcher simulator, playing wiffle ball out in the street and baseball in The Junks, and hitting and fielding batting practice in the summer and kicking soccer balls in the fall at Hetzel Field.

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Only when I reached high school did I have the chance to play competitively. I tried out for and made the Notre Dame High School girls’ basketball team. Finally, I would play in games where the score was kept officially and the rules were enforced. And more amazingly, other girls liked to compete, too.

Women’s college athletics was in its infancy when I started. During my second year, Rider funded (barely) a women’s basketball team, its first in about forty years. Our uniforms were T-shirts, one for home and away games, and whatever shorts we owned. We traveled in a twelve-passenger station wagon driven by our coach. Our schedule consisted of about twelve games against whatever schools were within driving distance. We were over .500 in each of the three seasons I played.

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So now as I watch women competing in basketball, soccer, softball, ice hockey, and more at the high school, college, Olympic, and professional level in regular season leagues and conferences and in state and national tournaments and world cups, I wonder what level I could have achieved. I imagine how competitive I would be if I had started earlier in little leagues.

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I also imagine how different I would feel about myself. Having two older brothers who were very athletic and into sports gave me a sense of equality. I played along with them—soccer, baseball, basketball—and loved it. But it also made me an outlier among girlfriends and somewhat awkward around guys outside of playing sports. It’s true that being a tomboy placed me outside the norm. But because of it I was exposed to activities I loved and people who were fun to be with.