Never Give Up

Never Give Up

          “It’s a boy,” the doctor announced as he raised a squalling newborn for me to see. In a few seconds, the baby lay on my chest, chewing his fist.

          “But . . . but, he’s so purple.” I touched the soft cheek, causing the baby’s mouth to search for my finger. The color wasn’t the pink or peach that my first two children’s had been. My baby’s skin was a dark bluish-purple. “What’s wrong? Something’s wrong.”

          “It’s just so cold in here that the baby hasn’t pinked up yet.” The doctor brushed my concerns aside as meaningless. Young and naive, I accepted the doctor’s evaluation, but still a worry settled in the back of my head.

          After the baby, Randy, had been weighed, bathed, and dressed, a nurse brought him to me as I lay in my hospital room. I cuddled him close in my arms, counted his fingers and toes, brushed my hand over his downy head. My husband stood close by, reaching out to touch the baby every few minutes. My hand touched the baby’s left ear and stopped. I turned Randy until I could see the ear that felt different.

          “Robert! Look!” I showed my husband the baby’s ear that, folded in half from top to bottom, pressed flat against his head. I gently pulled the top of the ear away from his head; the ear, so thin, had been flattened to the point it was nearly transparent. The top half of the tiny ear flopped back down as soon as I released it. “What happened? What caused this?”

          What we didn’t know was the ear was just an outward sign of brain damage caused during Randy’s birth. We wouldn’t know the extent of the problem until he was two-years old. We had no idea of the prayers and tears that would come in the years ahead.

          We did know our baby normally cried only when he was wet or hungry. He didn’t fuss or demand. He smiled at an early age and flashed that smile often. He enjoyed being cuddled and eating. He also didn’t have the normal immunity of a baby being nursed.

          Randy seemed to have a cold that kept getting worse. When I took him to the clinic, the doctor prescribed antibiotics and sent us home. Randy didn’t get better, but his condition didn’t worsen, until the day after his last dose of antibiotic. He couldn’t breathe and coughed until he choked.

          One neighbor told me, “This baby has whooping cough.”

          “That’s supposed to be impossible,” I replied. “He’s supposed to have my immunity since I’m breast feeding him.”

          “I know,” she answered. “But, I’ve seen people and children with whooping cough, and that baby has it.”

          A few hours later, Robert and I stood helplessly in the hospital emergency room as a medical team worked to get Randy breathing again. By the time doctor arrived, the infant was crying and kicking, not enjoying being alone on that hard surface and with an oxygen mask on his face.

          After we explained how Randy had choked while coughing and had turned blue, the doctor told us, “Oh, he probably choked on some milk or something.”

          “No, Doctor, this child was not breathing when they brought him in,” the nurse tried to explain. The doctor, however, wouldn’t listen.

          “Doctor,” I interrupted, “one of our neighbors has seen people with whooping cough. She says Randy acts like he has whooping cough.”

          “I doubt that very much, but to make you happy, bring him into the office tomorrow, and we’ll run some tests. All I see is him throwing a temper tantrum.”

          Robert gathered Randy into his arms and stomped to the door, with me closely behind him. We got into our car and started the fifteen miles back home.

          “Maybe the hospital at Guymon will do something,” he suggested as we headed south from Liberal, Kansas to the Oklahoma state line.

          We didn’t make it to Guymon, about forty miles from Liberal. We stopped at the funeral home and ambulance service at Hooker, half way there. We were loaned oxygen after the local doctor checked Randy, and we rushed back to the Liberal hospital, now racing against time to get our baby to help before he died. He quit breathing completely, and, although I had never heard of CPR thirty-nine years ago, I used it to save my child’s life as I silently prayed. We had to cross railroad tracks to reach the hospital, and Robert won a race with a train, our car scooting across under the nose of the engine as the train horn wailed. When we walked in the door to the emergency room, the nurse, who had been on duty before, met us. I laid my baby boy in her arms and burst into sobs.

          “I waited because I knew you would be back,” she told me before she turned and ran into a room.

          Randy nearly died that night. Finally, tests were run and whooping cough diagnosed. He didn’t have the immunity he should.

          As Randy grew older, I noticed things that weren’t ‘normal.’ If he started crying, he didn’t seem able to stop. At times, he couldn’t stop laughing. He would destroy things and not know why. If he ran a fever, it kept rising higher and higher. No one would listen to us. We were just over-protective parents.

          One day in January, 1969, I had just returned from taking Randy to the doctor. My two-year-old wanted me to rock him and sing his favorite song “Cha Baba,” a lullaby I had sung to all my children. As I sang and held him, his body starting jerking, and his eyes rolled back into his head. In a panic, I grabbed him tight and ran with bare feet through the stickers to the house next door. We didn’t have a phone, and I knew I needed help. The elderly woman next door held Randy, who now lay limp and still, while I tried to call Robert at work. I told my daughter to run home and get my shoes as I dialed the number. The line was busy. I called the local ambulance service (a funeral home just a few blocks away) and tried Robert’s work again. When the line was still busy, I called the operator and told her I had an emergency and needed to reach my husband. When the ambulance pulled up in front of the house, I slammed the phone down. My neighbor told me to go, that she would watch my other two children.

          My mind never registered the car sitting in front of our house. I had taken my husband to work so I could use the car that day. Later Robert told me that felt something was wrong with his family when the operator broke into the conversation on the shop phone. He had a coworker rush him to the doctor's office.

          The doctor told us that Randy would outgrow having seizures with a high fever, that many young children had that problem. Again we were told we were being over-protective parents, this time because we had lost our infant daughter just six weeks before. No one would listen to us.

          I called my mother, had her make an appointment for Randy, and took my baby somewhere he would receive help. I knew that Dr. Nelson realized he would have to prove to me that Randy was all right.

          Finally, someone listened. Tests showed that Randy had brain damage in a motor control center. Any more seizures could have killed him, left him a vegetable, or resulted in his having epilepsy. The doctor prescribed medication to calm that damaged area and medication to keep his temperature in the normal range.

          The years that followed held many challenges for Randy. He had a very difficult time getting his body to do what he wanted it to do. He was awkward and clumsy. He had to work and practice and struggle to do what other children found easy, but he never gave up, never quit. As a freshman in high school, he and the rest of the freshman and high school football teams had to jump rope 100 times after practice before leaving for home. Everyone else would be finished and gone except Randy and his brother, who waited with him. The coaches would leave with the doors ready to lock, telling the boys to be sure the doors were completely closed when they left.

          “Come on, Randy, we can leave. No one would know you hadn’t jumped 100 times,” Bob would beg.

          “No, I have to do this,” Randy would answer.

          The summer between his sophomore and junior years in high school, Randy went to the school gym to work out every night. As a member of the faculty, I had keys so that I could let him in and supervise. I watched with great pride as he jumped more than a 200 times a set, whipping the jump rope through the air, even doing fancy moves, and never missing a step.

          Randy also has a form of dyslexia that makes reading word by word difficult, but he learned how to grasp the information from a page. A nearly photographic memory, as well as diligently studying, helped. He graduated in the top four of his high school class. He graduated from Oklahoma State University with a B.S. in political science, from the University of Central Oklahoma with a Master’s in political science, and from the University of Texas with Ph.D. No one knows the many times he prayed for help and strength.

          He taught himself to build, rebuild, and repair computers. He learned how the software and hardware interfaced. He built networks and became an online trouble-shooter. That knowledge helped Randy work his way through graduate school and now is the basis for his position as the information technology director for a private school, where he also teaches debate and/or another class each semester.

          Randy coaches baseball and football. He provides leadership, guidance, and challenges for his three sons and other children and young people on the playing field and in the classroom at the high school and at the college levels. He practices his faith in the God who gave him strength to endure.

          He’s a father, a teacher, and a coach who doesn’t accept anyone saying, “I can’t.”

          “You can, if you’re willing to do the work necessary,” he answers. “You can succeed only if you never give up.”

          Randy never did give up.