Crisis.

Take two aspirin and call me in the morning; life should be so simple. My ten-year-old son Brennen has a fever and is unable to swallow--swish and spit, swish and spit, over and over. This is new, something different. I call the doctor's office.

The nurse's voice sounds measured, reluctant to squeeze yet another patient into an already overcrowded schedule. "Well, if he can't swallow, I guess you'd better bring him in." Brennen is listless in the car; he staggers like a drunk across the parking lot and into the doctor's office.

I never imagined how sick a child could be. I never imagined I would hear a doctor saying, "The next few minutes will be critical. If we don't work fast, your son may die."

The next few minutes have stretched out for three years. We've seen times of crisis, as well as times of peace. Brennen had fallen prey to an infection that made his epiglottis, the skin-sized flap that closes when we swallow, swell up to the size of his thumb. He could not breathe without a tube running down his throat into his lungs. His mouth taped shut around the tube, he could not speak. Nights were hard.

A sticky fluid began building up inside his lungs; a respirator was brought in to help him breathe. Scared, I wrote "Kites" at 2:08 in the morning while Brennen was lying awake in his hospital bed, exhausted, and trying to cough around his breathing tube.

Brennen spent two weeks in intensive care, recovering from that infection only to have his body's white blood cells rise up in rebellion against him. Leukemia--another year in and out of the hospital. Now, fortunately, chemotherapy, radiation, shots and a never-ending supply of pills have finally laid this beast to rest. Brennen is now six months out of treatment, and confident he'll never be back.

As parents of children affected by disability or disease, we face challenges that force us to reach deeply inside for resources we may not have known existed. For some, the challenge lasts a lifetime; for others, the experience plays itself out over a much shorter segment of time.

These poems are expressions of what it was like to be with my son in the hospital while he was living with the agony and frustration of cancer...

RELATED ARTICLE: Apples

If I have to go back to the hospital again to be with my son, I'll always take my knife

Because there is never anything sharp enough in the parents' kitchen to cut up the apples that frustrate several plastic knives before yielding finally to the blunt edge of a spatula I find behind the microwave.

When all I want is a slice of normal life like apples in my cereal for breakfast.

RELATED ARTICLE: Nighttime on the Pediatric Floor

We are the parents who wait unnerved

rocking and holding waiting and hoping our courage prevails

our dreams reveal

a pearl in place of peril.

RELATED ARTICLE: I Don't Feel

I don't feel like doing anything except the things I need to do to survive.

I eat, sleep, dance and look for comfort in the presence of friends I care for

The rest of my world, the part composed of responsibilities, is piling up around me untouched

as mountains reaching toward heights I wonder if I shall ever breach.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Quilt

A Requiem Whose hands will make the quilt

whose hands will lovingly stitch the fabric, fold the cloth

color in details of the faces long since gone, of our children who died young, from cancer?

What field will lie covered

by great squares laid out open to the mercy of a

fickle wi nd that may at any moment crumble our memories, as it has their lives?

Whose hearts will lie open in sorrow

disbelief at the premature harvest of life whose hands thrust deep into pockets

or held tight behind backs will hold tears of sorrow at the injustice of our loss.

This poem was written after viewing the AIDS quilt.

RELATED ARTICLE: Kites

When it hurts, do you ever try to think of kites tied not to tubes but to strings?

And about how one of these strings, one slender thread of white against the blue, dips down from

Above, lifting you and your hand up out of bed, calling you to run free to a place where leaping sideways

You can dance laughing in the shadow of their tails?

Father's Voices is a regular feature of Exceptional Parent magazine. This column, coordinated by James May, Project Director of the National Father's Network, focuses on fathers' experiences rearing children with special needs. Your contributions to this column are encouraged.

For more information about the National Fathers' Network (NFN) or to receive teir newsletter, write or call: National Fathers' Network, The Kindering Center, 16120 N.E. Eighth Street, Bellevue WA 98008, [phone] or [phone] (fax). Funded by a Maternal and Child Health Bureau grant, the NFN provides networking opportunities for fathers; develops support and mentoring programs; and creates curriculum promoting fathers as significant, nurturing people in their children's and families' lives.

Galen Lowe lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine with his wife, Janice, and stepdaughters Nikki, 13 and Julia, 12. Galen's children, Brennen, 13, Sierra, 7, and Kelsey, 15, live alternate weeks with Lowe and his former wife, Linden O'Ryan. Brennen's hobbies include soccer and competitive swimming as a member of the Mt. Desert Island YMCA swim team.

Editor's Note: As Exceptional Parent was going to press, we learned that Brennen had suffered a relapse of leukemia. Doctors hope he will be able to undergo a bone marrow transplant in the coming months.