Search Results for: Outside

Child Mortality

Longreads Pick

The writer on contemplating death at an early age:

“For a time I thought that if I ignored death it would ignore me. At school, I tried not looking out across at the cemetery; I shielded my eyes when I was driven past it in the mornings and afternoons, turned my face away any time I was made to go outside during the day. But the grounds and the graves were always there on my blurred periphery. Even tucked away inside the school building, sitting in class or walking the halls, I felt a dark, sickly pull, like death had me in its sights, like it was daring me, just daring me, to look it in the eye.

“I wasn’t even safe at home, or asleep. That fall I began to dream of death—or perhaps I had always dreamed of death but it was only then that I was able to remember the dreams in any detail when I woke. I was so much a child then that it is almost hard to comprehend. I feel like I never possibly could have been so small, so new. When things happened then, they happened for the first time. They had never happened before.”

Published: Jun 20, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,379 words)

Malrotation

Drew Magary | Someone Could Get Hurt, Gotham Books | 2013 | 10 minutes (2,520 words)

For our Longreads Member Pick, here is the first chapter from Drew Magary‘s memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together:

I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would hopefully earn me a billion dollars in movie franchise royalties when my third kid was born. There were complications. I find that ‘complications’ is the universal euphemism for anything bad that happens during the birth and early life of an infant. It can mean anything, really: birth defects, mental illness, a lost limb, an ambulance driven into a tree, etc. 
 
If you’ve ever experienced complications with a baby, you know that it immediately makes any other difficulty you’ve ever experienced in life seem harmless by comparison. Your life can be neatly separated into Before Complications and After Complications. They always say that having a kid changes you, but that’s a lie. It’s having a kid on the brink of dying that changes you.
 
So I had to table the novel for a bit and get this out of my system. I had to write about my third kid, and I had to write about my family as a whole, about this whole unit of people that needed to be strong enough to go through what we were about to go through. And that’s how Someone Could Get Hurt came to be. This is the first chapter.
* * *
Our third child was born seven weeks premature with a condition known as intestinal malrotation. The doctor explained it like this: When you’re in your mom’s uterus, your intestines initially form outside of your body. Then they retreat into your abdomen, twist, and your abdomen seals up around them. If you’re unfortunate enough to be born with this condition (5,000-to-1 odds, though more common in premature infants), that crucial twist never occurs, and you can end up with something called a volvulus, which sounds like a kind of Swedish superhero but is actually a dangerous condition in which the intestines get kinked, like a garden hose, and the path of digestion is cut off, restricting blood flow. You must have your belly split open so that everything can be put back in the proper order, or else you will die. If you’re among the lucky souls born with properly ordered bowels, you should thank those bowels the next time they process a two-pound burrito on your behalf.

They found out that the baby had the condition when he began vomiting thick green fluid after his first feedings. The bile that he secreted to digest his formula was getting clogged in his intestines and was gurgling back up into his stomach, causing him to vomit over and over again. They placed a tube down into his stomach to suck up all the excess fluid and hoped the issue would resolve itself. Nights before the surgery, I stood by his isolette—an enclosed plastic incubator— in the NICU and stared at the output of that tube, praying that it would turn yellow or clear, hoping to God that he’d be spared the knife and that I’d never see that horrible green shit come out of him again. But I did see it again. I would come to the NICU during the day and ask the nurses if he barfed, my fingers crossed tight enough to break. And they often said yes, he had an “emesis.” The first time I heard the word, I asked them if “emesis” meant barf, and when they said that it did, I wished they had just said that he had barfed instead.

The vomiting wouldn’t stop. His insides weren’t going to just naturally fall back into place. He had to be opened. No one makes it through life unscathed, but you usually get a grace period at the start. My son would not be so lucky. At the time, he weighed five pounds—large for a preemie, but still just five itty-bitty pounds. No heavier than a dictionary. I wondered how the surgeons’ blades and instruments would fit inside him. Such a large surgery for such a tiny body, I thought.

The surgeon was talking us through the procedure as we all stood by the door to the OR. He had only a few moments to speak with us before our son had to go under. To wait any longer risked killing him.

“What’s the survival rate for this surgery?” I asked the surgeon.

“If I don’t find any salvageable bowel, the survival rate is zero.” Doctors never explicitly say your loved one will die. They say things like “the survival rate is zero.” It’s up to you to jump to the proper conclusion. “But if the bowel is healthy,” he said, “the survival rate is one hundred percent.” He suspected my son’s bowels were still viable, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that there would be “dusky bowels,” parts of the intestine that had lost blood flow permanently and were now dead and would have to be removed. Forever. I had never heard the term “dusky bowels” before. It sounded like a good name for a fantasy football team.

The doctor needed our consent before going ahead with the surgery. We didn’t hesitate for an instant. In fact, we felt as if we had wasted enough of his time already. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll agree to a procedure like this once you hear talk of survival rates. You take a leap of faith. You trust that a total stranger will know how to properly disembowel your child because you do not. He was a nice-looking doctor. He seemed to know what he was talking about. Fuck it. I signed the forms.

The doctor rushed back into the operating room to prepare, and a very nice NICU nurse named Kathy led my wife and me to our son, to see him one final time before he went to have his guts torn out. They had knocked him out with an anesthetic, so he was sleeping peacefully by the time we got there. He was in an isolette and had wires running from his mouth, chest, stomach, and foot. He looked like an IED. He was surrounded by a phalanx of adults who were all determined to prevent his death because the death of a child is the saddest thing in the world. He wasn’t old enough or awake enough to know that he didn’t want to die. We did all that worrying for him. Kathy opened the top of the isolette so we could kiss him on the head—possibly for the last time, possibly just another kiss in an entire lifetime of them.

His head was coated with a shocking mass of black hair. When a baby is born premature, it still has plenty of the mother’s hormones racing through its system. This can cause it to have enlarged genitals, lactating breasts (!!!), or a healthy head of hair. That hair eventually falls out and is replaced with new hair. But for now, our son still had hair long enough to get a side gig as a bassist. I bent down and let my nose glide along the soft fur, alternating between taking in his scent and kissing him on the head. I wanted to retain as much of the sensation as I could.

Kathy led my wife and me back out to the general surgical waiting room. They had updates on the status of all operations listed on a big monitor at the far end of the room. We could check on our son’s intestines like we were trying to catch a connecting flight to Milwaukee. The second I saw my son’s doctor and room number up on the board, I got a morbid thrill. THERE’S MY BOY UP ON THE TEEVEE! Then reality set back in and I could feel my heart withering. There were dozens of other people sitting in the room, and I felt exposed, naked, without any armor to protect myself. I just wanted to find somewhere for my wife and me to cry ourselves sick. Kathy saw us visibly breaking down in front of everyone and stole us into a private waiting room. I sat down next to my wife and stared off into space because the rest of the world seemed empty to me at the moment. Desolate. We took turns telling each other it was going to be okay because it helps in times of grief when someone you love tells you everything is going to be all right, even when you suspect that it’s a lie.

All I could think about was my son dying. I tried my best to avoid it but I couldn’t. I wondered what would happen if his intestines were deemed unsalvageable. Do they euthanize your child? Do they just leave him until he starves to death because he can’t fully digest anything? They can’t do that. The world couldn’t possibly be that cruel, could it? I envisioned being escorted into the morgue and holding a swaddled, nine-day-old corpse in my hands, and how that would make me feel. He wasn’t dead yet, but I had a clear idea of how badly it would hurt. My heart was firmly clenched to absorb the blow. I thought about whether we’d have a funeral for him. I didn’t think we would because that would just be too awful to put our friends and family through. You can’t herd people into a room and force them to stare at a tiny coffin for an hour.

I wondered if he could donate his organs as a premature infant. I wondered if we would bury him or cremate him, and where we might scatter his ashes. Maybe the Atlantic Ocean. He might like that. Maybe we would get a dog if he passed away, a little dog named Otis or Kirby that would bark and yip and shit all over the place and help us forget about this. That might help. Maybe nothing would help.

Maybe our marriage wouldn’t survive if he died. We’d been married nine years, together for twelve. I remember the night we met, in some shitty Manhattan bar that no longer exists. I staggered out of the john and there she was, drunk and smiling, as if she had been planted there by some magnificent benefactor. It took five minutes for me to get her full name right because it was an obscure Armenian name and I was too shitfaced to pronounce obscure Armenian names. God, I loved her. Only an act of extraordinary circumstances could possibly end us: a war, a natural disaster, an unspeakable crime, etc. And as we waited, I thought that perhaps these were those extraordinary circumstances. Maybe we would look at each other after this and see nothing more than a reminder of what was lost. Maybe we would drift apart and I would become a filthy hobo, working odd jobs and dabbling in surfing and heroin.

I couldn’t stop crying. My wife stood in front of me and I wrapped my arms around her waist and buried my head in her stomach. I told her all my fears in hopes that it would make us both feel better. I wanted to find a way through the grief, to emerge on the other side in a state of grace, knowing I was strong enough to live on regardless of what happened. But I still wasn’t certain.

And then my wife farted—a remarkably well-timed fart that made me switch from tears to laughter right away. God bless that fart. I needed that fart. I asked her to do it again and she declined.

She went out for water, and a different nurse, who turned out to be a real shithead (every hospital has its share of dud nurses), told us that we were being kicked out of the private room. No more VIP treatment for us. When my wife came back in, we both took turns calling the shithead nurse a shithead behind her back, and then we headed out to the main waiting room. The receptionist said there was a phone call for us from the OR with an update. The doctor had promised us a mid-surgery update to let us know if the bowel was viable or not—if our son was going to live or die. This was that phone call. The receptionist held out the receiver for me.

I have a chronic case of Walter Mitty syndrome. I’m the type of person that spends an unreasonable amount of time during each day imagining himself plunged into extreme circumstances. Any time I walk outside with my children, I look up to the sky to see if a giant alien ship has stationed itself above my house. Any time I go to Target, I take note of which items I could use as weapons should a zombie apocalypse strike and then the entire store becomes a stronghold for the last of the uninfected. Any time I get on an airplane, I think about crashing in the ocean and being lost at sea for years, teaching myself to fish using only the stitching of my wallet. I am constantly foiling imaginary bank robbers and sexual predators. I waste hours every day envisioning a life far more dramatic, far more macho, than the sedate circumstances in which I usually exist.

That’s part of the reason why I wanted to start a family. When you start a family, you’re signing up for drama. You’re signing up for worry. You’re signing up for life-and-death. You’re signing up for a life that means something more, even if it isn’t as fun a life as when you were single and drinking shots of Fire Water in the Giants Stadium parking lot. Kids make your life significant. They give your life a spine. On some twisted level, I was signing up for a moment such as this: to be there waiting and weeping as I clutched my fists and begged for my son to be all right. But now that it was here, now that it was so sickeningly real, I knew I wanted no part of such cinematic moments. I just wanted life to become normal again. Uneventful. Boring. I wanted to go back to the intensely aggravating march of daily existence. I wanted my son to live so that he could grow up to annoy the shit out of me. People tell you that you should never take life for granted but that’s wrong, because taking life for granted is an encouraging sign that your life is going well. I wanted that.

I took the receiver from the receptionist and braced myself.

* * *

From Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books, 2013). Purchase the full ebook here.

Survivors

Longreads Pick

The writer on his experience raising awareness about street children:

“I recall a bleeding boy of only three or four in a doorway in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. He’d been beaten by a group of older children and was hunched over in the fetal position. His clenched fist clutched a hunk of bread that he had valiantly refused to surrender to his assailants: dry bread saturated with blood. Then a girl in Morocco, on the edge of Zagora and with the desert behind her, who put down the tray of food she was selling and showed me how she could write her name. A billowy sleeve concealed her hand as she traced into the dirt the letters of the only word she could spell. It was as if she’d conjured it from some hidden compartment. And in Bucharest, Romania, I watched a boy in a sagging, buttonless overcoat upturn the bins outside McDonald’s. With expert skill, he flicked through the rubbish, prising open boxes, rooting out unfinished food. He chucked the remains of burgers over a wall to some waiting friends. Then — like a champion smoker attempting to accommodate 50 cigarettes at once — he rammed as many chips as he could into his mouth and sucked on them.”

Source: Aeon
Published: May 16, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,287 words)

My Mom

Longreads Pick

The Korean-born writer wrestles with her relationship with her mom—and how to tell her how she feels:

“I then did what any normal kid would do and yelled and yelled about how embarrassing it was to have her at school with me during lunch of all times. She presented me with a sack of cheeseburgers that I could give out to my friends. I refused the damp bag and screeched about how it was so cheap that she didn’t spring for bright red boxes with toys for them as well. I made her take the burgers back with her. If I were an actress and had to think of something sad to make me cry in a scene, I would think about this moment. This and the time I was 13 when I kicked my mom across a room and ran away for two days because she tried to ground me — for breaking curfew after my friend Jacinta stole money from her dying grandmother so we could rent out a nightclub and write the names of those blackballed on the sign outside. For the record: I don’t know why people have kids.”

Source: Aeon
Published: Apr 26, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,316 words)

Inside America’s Dirty Wars

Longreads Pick

An investigation of the drone strikes that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki:

“One day in early September, Abdulrahman woke up before the rest of the house. He tiptoed into his mother’s bedroom, took 9,000 Yemeni rials—roughly $40—from her purse, and left a note outside her bedroom door. He then snuck out the kitchen window and into the courtyard. Shortly after 6 am, the family’s guard saw the boy leave but didn’t think anything of it. It was Sunday, September 4, 2011, a few days after the Eid al-Fitr holiday marked the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Nine days before, Abdulrahman had turned 16.

“A short while later, Abdulrahman’s mother woke up. She started to rouse his siblings for morning prayers and then went to wake him, but Abdulrahman was not in his bedroom. She called for him and, while searching the house, found his note. In it, he apologized for leaving without telling her and said that he missed his father and wanted to find him. He also said he was sorry for taking the money. ‘When his mother told me about the letter, it was just like a shock for me,’ Abdulrahman’s grandmother Saleha told me. ‘I said, “I think this will be just like bait for his father.”‘ The CIA, she feared, ‘might find his father through him.'”

Source: The Nation
Published: Apr 23, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,050 words)

Bloodchild

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] An unlikely symbiosis between an alien race and humans as viewed through a single multispecies family:

“T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve – why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me,’Take care of her.’And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.”

Published: Jan 1, 1995
Length: 28 minutes (7,061 words)

Longreads Guest Pick: Christian Lorentzen on 'The Last White Election?'

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Today’s guest pick comes from Christian Lorentzen, editor for the London Review of Books, who recommends “The Last White Election?” by Mike Davis in the New Left Review

“Mike Davis’s essay is the most thorough analysis I’ve seen of the 2012 election and what it portends for the future. Written from outside the Washington consensusphere, it’s free of cant, and has something else you don’t much find in DC: style.”

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Can I Get in the Van?

Longreads Pick

A writer and longtime Black Flag fan hitchhikes to Texas to audition for the band as it searches for a new bass player:

“It dawned on me: Black Flag did not have a bass player. I could be that bass player! I decided right then and there to find out where Ginn was living, hitchhike across the country, and persuade him to let me try out—just as I had attempted to do at 16. I knew all the old songs, and I figured that thumbing it instead of flying or taking a bus would prove to Ginn that I had dedication.

“Ginn, I knew, had for the past few years been based in a small town called Taylor, just outside Austin, Texas. That morning’s New York Post told me that the weather in Austin was presently a rejuvenating and springlike 70 degrees. There was no reason not to go.”

Author: Erick Lyle
Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Apr 9, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,005 words)

The Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Crime Lab

Longreads Pick

How an underfunded, understaffed crime lab in Hamilton County, Ohio manages to operate:

“On our tour we stop first in the trace evidence office, where analysts look for hair, fibers, paint chips, and other material left at a crime scene. The firearms office, which has a backlog of about 350 cases, has outgrown its own room and its machines have spilled into the trace evidence room; as a result, whenever trace evidence analysts have to look for gunshot residue—say, when they’re scouring a suspect’s garment to see if there’s any indication he fired a weapon—they must move the material two floors away to another office, to avoid contamination during testing or examination of the gunshot residue. The hallway outside is lined with microscopes and printers, and a folding ping-pong table nearby is pulled out whenever a large item needs to be spread out and examined.”

Published: Mar 22, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,313 words)

My Gucci Addiction

Longreads Pick

The Friday Night Lights author on his shopping addiction:

“I own forty-three pieces of Gucci—twelve leather jackets, six evening jackets, five pairs of pants, six pairs of boots, four shirts, seven pairs of gloves, and three scarves. I own items from Acne, Affliction, Alexander McQueen, Alexander Wang, Balmain, Band of Outsiders, Belstaff, Bottega Veneta, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Charles David, Diane von Furstenberg, Helmut Lang, Ines, Jan Hilmer, J.Crew, Jimmy Choo, Jitrois, Jos. A. Bank, Joseph, Junker Designs, Loewe, Lucchese, Marc Jacobs, Mr. S Leather, Nike, Northbound Leather, Prada, Rag & Bone, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Saint Laurent, 7 For All Mankind, Thomas Wylde, Valentino, Versace, and Wesco. I also have had several pieces custom-made for me by an amazing designer named Carla Dawn Behrle, who specializes in leather; they’re worth every penny and more, given her fastidiousness and attention to detail. I apologize to those letters of the alphabet I have not gotten to yet. Zara, don’t give up hope.”

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 26, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,645 words)