The first time one of your children is seriously ill or hurt, you pass through a portal into a new world. You learn to recognize fear in its purest form—hot and metallic.
My son was just 6 years old the first time we took him in for surgery. The miraculous fractalization that transfigured a tiny clump of cells into our baby boy had also trapped a certain type of skin cell in his middle ear where it didn’t belong. In this tiniest of the body’s canals, the skin cell grew and, like a towel soaked in acid, began dissolving anything it touched.
First, it dissolved my son’s ossicles, the tiniest bones in the human body and the tuning fork that carries sound from the eardrum to the cochlea. Silently it advanced, glomming on to and consuming the drum itself, masking its brutality by conducting enough sound that our son passed his hearing tests. Then it wrapped itself around the facial nerve running through the middle ear.
At our son’s birthday checkup, our pediatrician pulled away from the otoscope she had stuck in my son’s ear, then went in for a second look.
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Abigail Shrier is the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.
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