When I was a kid, the priest
at our church was involved in smuggling Cubans into the US. Not Cuban
cigars, but Cuban humans. My father and another priest were called to
testify against him in the ensuing legal battles. I don't know all of
the details, and my Dad doesn't talk about it much; it still upsets him
when I ask for details.
But I do remember coming home after school and having to leave the
house because of a bomb threat. Apparently, other parishioners didn't
appreciate my father's testimony.
This was my first experience with organized religion's deleterious effects. I was perhaps 10 years old.
As I watched the trial unfold, from a child's eyes, it seemed to me
that the talk of love and forgiveness that I had heard at and around the
Church was not something that was practiced by the religious.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that this was because there was no
God.
When I later went to De La Salle High School in New Orleans, a
Catholic school, it did nothing to help me shift towards being a
believer. The arguments that the Catholics made in favor of their faith
tended to be circular in nature (believe in God because He exists),
appeals to authority (Einstein was a deist. Who are you to disagree
with Einstein?), and occasionally they were morality based (without God,
there is no reason to be a "good" person).
Fast forward about a decade: my son was about to be born, and my
brother and I were about to embark on starting a company. I had taken a
job with a Chicago dotcom startup's branch in Austin, TX. The company
was called Xqsite, and I took the job in the hopes that the stock
options would explode and I would be able to fund the new company I was
starting with my brother with the wealth from that. The startup was
being funded by a company incubator from Chicago that claimed it was an
"Internet Zaibatsu," which was really just a marketing ploy for "invest
in us, because we came up with a fancy buzzword." Xqsite was supposed
to be a web consulting company, dealing in MS web services, SOAP, ASP,
B2B, all those great late 1990's buzzwords.
Xqsite had a phenomenal (-ly bad) business model for their Austin
branch: hire two managers and a programmer, and no sales staff, and hope
that sales would pour in. Oddly, that did not materialize. The result
for me was that I got a huge raise for taking the job, and then did
basically nothing for the next six months.
My son, Early Jr, was born on August 12, 2000, and Jeania and I were
ecstatic. But very soon after, we became concerned because he would not
keep any food down and was extremely colicky. Around this same time, I
admitted that Xqsite was a dead-end, and decided to move to Huntsville,
AL to pursue my new company.
About a week before the move, XQsite finally got a consulting gig
that involved me showing up somewhere, and Jeania decided that she
should take Early Jr to the pediatrician to find out why he was throwing
up so much and why he was so colicky. The doctor told her something
along the lines of, "you're probably just being an over-protective
parent; most babies show colic around this age. However, there is a
rare condition called pyloric stenosis that it's conceivable this could
be. Basically, it would mean that the pyloris, the valve at the bottom
of his stomach isn't opening, and that his stomach over-fills when he
eats. This would cause him to throw up, and would probably hurt,
causing the colic. Why don't you head on down to Texas Children's
Hospital and get a test? Here's your referral."
Jeania picked me up at work, and we went to TCH to get the ultrasound to check on his pyloris. They came back to us, and said something to the effect of: "Well, that test was negative, so his pyloris is fine. But I tell you what; your insurance is pretty kick ass, so let's test him for this other thing." I can't recall what the other thing was - obviously in the context of this story, it wasn't the cause. When that test came back negative, the tester said something to the effect of: "Well, that test was negative, so he doesn't have that 'other thing.' Your insurance is pretty kick ass, so let's get him under a video x-ray, give him some barium, and see if we can induce the vomiting to see what's going on."
We went upstairs to Texas Children's Hospital to give Early Jr a barium drink, spiked with grape flavor, if I recall. The radiologist started with still x-rays, and actually caught some pictures while Jr was throwing up. She came back and said she wanted to try again because his stomach was near the edge of the film and there was some "parallax" causing some distortion. This was my first clue that something was terribly bad. Why? Well, parallax is what causes you to see in 3D. It's the difference between what you see from your left eye and your right eye. Your brain matches objects in its field of view and does a quick calculation of the parallax to determine distance. In other words, parallax does not occur if you have a single point of view, and this was not a 3D x-ray. So she was trying to get extra pictures without making us worried, and using jargon to cover it up.
After several more attempts, she managed to catch it on video x-ray and grabbed a surgeon. As the four of us watched my son vomit on the video x-ray, the surgeon said one word:
"Interesting."
He then turned to me, and said something like, "In case you didn't know, 'interesting' is doctor-speak for 'really
really bad.'"
My heart pounded, and my wife looked terrified. The doctor walked over to the x-ray, which he had paused mid-vomit. He pointed to my son's throat, and said, "yeah, here's his esophagus - it's full of barium. Here's where it connects to his stomach, the little white blob to its right here." I said, "yeah, okay. Makes sense." He then said, "so here's the problem: the esophagus is going into the stomach from the bottom, which means that side of his stomach is upside-down. The barium ought to be filling his whole stomach, but it's not, meaning his stomach is twisted around itself, like a leather pouch. He's got
gastric volvulus."
He explained that this condition is exceedingly rare in humans, and that our son would probably be something like the 64th reported case in human history. The prognosis was really bad, too: if the stomach was allowed to flop around in his abdomen willy-nilly, that twisting would kill his stomach. And as he said, "as the stomach goes, so goes the child."
The surgery he suggested was miraculous: using a laparoscope, they would go in through a small incision in his abdomen and apply two stitches to fix the stomach to the abdomenal wall.
We brought him home for some fasting so he would be prepared for his surgery at 6:00 am the next morning.
On our way home, we called my parents and filled them in. They expressed shock, support, disbelief. All the things one would expect. Later that evening, my dad called back and told me that he had been talking to some friends who were doctors. Their indication was that it was extremely fortunate that Jeania and I were living in Austin, because Texas Children's Hospital was one of the top three places in the country to bring a child with a rare condition like this. Every one of them said they probably would've stopped after the negative pyloric stenosis test and told the parents they were being overprotective. He mentioned to me that he had thought that my taking my job at XQsite was a mistake, but that it placed us in Austin and gave us a level of support, insurance-wise, which made it much easier to quickly discover the problem. He called the string of coincidences there miraculous.
During the surgery the next day, I had to go to work, which of course I couldn't do very effectively. I ended up spending most of my time trying to find case histories for gastric volvulus. I found maybe one story about an old homeless man who had presented with severe bloating and ultimately died due to his stomach turning necrotic. That was of course not encouraging. I learned that gastric volvulus is actually quite common in dogs. It tends to give them a bloated stomach and tends to kill them when they are not treated, as well.
His surgery ended up being successful. Early Jr has a small scar just below his solar plexus, and recently turned 13 years old.
My dad's description resonated with me: there was really a long chain of coincidences which put us in the right place, with the right insurance, the right pediatrician, the right hospital, the right radiologists, the right surgeon. This entire chain started with a company called XQsite which was part of an "Internet Zaibatsu," a cheesy marketing term coined by a Chicago Startup with an unlikely name:
Divine Interventures
As a rational man, I recognize that this could be — and possibly is — just that: a series of coincidences. There is no way to prove that it isn't just random chance which happened to go in our favor. But that's an awful lot of random chance for me.
I'm still not a
religious person. Religion still does quite a bit of harm in this world. I watch
religious people act out against members of their own churches, and against people of different faiths. I watch supposedly
non-religious people, members of "the cult of atheism," do the same. It seems to me that too many of us spend our time trying to
convert everybody around us to our religion: "How can you believe in God? Are you stupid?" "How can you not believe in God? Are you stupid?" I try (and fail, and try again) not to allow
religion consume so much of me that I become bigoted.
Belief on the other hand... That is something I choose to hold on to, despite the rational part of me noting the lack of clear proof. The romantic part of me looks at the small anecdotal sample and says simply, "wow."
