Sleepless in Pasadena

Sleepless in Pasadena

“Enjoy your sleep tonight,” my mother told me just before I was due to give birth to our first child. “It’ll be the last good night of sleep you’ll ever have.”

I recalled these words this past Monday morning as I wound my way around the barricaded streets of my neighborhood in Pasadena, blocked off for the Rose Bowl Game traffic later that day.

“It’s never what you think it’s going to be,” I said to Hank, navigating through the road closures en route to Huntington Memorial Hospital. 

Just a few blocks north on Colorado Boulevard the 103^rd Rose Parade was in full steam while I was on my way to visit our grown daughter, Hilary, in the hospital.

A dog bite?

I’d spent the better part of this fall worried about our youngest, Joseph, back and forth between Malawi and Zambia, shooting a documentary about elephant poaching in the national parks.

I’d seen Joe’s pictures. Guns, flack jackets, undercover operations to capture the poachers, filming night raids…I was a wreck. 

For Christmas, all I wanted was for Joseph to arrive home safely on the 18^th of December. Before then, if I woke in the night, I drummed up all sorts of scenarios where he was in danger.

“Joe knows what he’s doing,” Hank would try to reassure.

But, a mother always worries.

When Joe got home, I breathed a sigh of relief, thanked the Man upstairs and crossed that worry off my list.

Then, Hilary’s dog got into a fight with, Hank’s sister’s dog while we were visiting Hank’s mother in Santa Barbara.   It got ugly, and on impulse, I tried to pull on the collar of one dog while our daughter, Hilary, pulled on the other – we were doing exactly what NOT to do when two dogs are fighting.

The result was a dog bite on Hilary’s finger.  She cleaned and bandaged it, but later the finger swelled and became infected. Eventually, this led to the ER at Huntington Memorial in Pasadena around dinnertime on New Year’s Day.

“They’re admitting her,” her husband, Doug, said when he called us later at 11:30pm.

Forget sleep. I started in with all the night thoughts. “Don’t worry, Heath,” Doug had said. “They just want to keep an eye on her and IV antibiotics.”

My mind raced, though. What if they can’t get the infection under control?

Again, Hank tried to reassure. “She’s going to be fine. She’s where she needs to be…”

But, I’m a mother. And, mother always worries.

Hilary was discharged two days later, on Wednesday to the comfort of her home and her husband in nearby Los Feliz armed with antibiotics and instructions to help the bitten finger heal.

“The doctor says it looks good,” she’d told me.

Again, I breathed a sigh of relief, thanked heaven above then, searched for the pink journal I’d packed away in the garage.  I wanted to see what I had written all those years ago the night before our first child, Allan, was born.

June 8, 1982

Mom says that I will never sleep well again after this baby is born.

Mom is so dramatic.  What does she know?