It Finally Hits Me

I like to think of myself as a guy's guy. I was always raised with the belief that men don't cry, women cry. Men have to be stoic and in control of their feelings.

Up until this point, I had only cried once in front of my wife. That occurred right after my mother called to tell me that my grandfather, Ilya (a man who had been like a surrogate father to me), had just died. He had been sick for a long time and we all expected it to happen, but it still hit me like a ton of bricks. This happened a year before Dylan's birth. As per Jewish tradition, Dylan was named for Ilya.

Dylan had been in the NICU for a few days. I was sitting in the hospital cafeteria with my wife, taking a break from being in the NICU with Dylan. We were talking about everything the doctors were telling us and what Dylan's latest prognosis was.

That was when it finally hit me.

Until this point I had believed that in the end everything would be all right. I truly thought that that doctors would fix any issues that Dylan had and we could take him home and he would grow up to be a happy healthy normal child.

I just started telling my wife that we needed to face reality. We could no longer live in this fantasy world that everything was going to be eventually okay. We needed to be prepared for a reality that our son could very well die, he may require a kidney transplant to survive, and that I was going to give him my kidney if that is what it took. We also needed to be prepared for the very real possibility that if Dylan survived all that, he was very likely to be deaf.

As I finished telling her this, I just started uncontrollably sobbing. It embarrassed me. I covered my face with my hands as I didn't want anyone to see me like this. I tried to stop, but I couldn't. All the bad news of the last few days, all the tension, all the anguish and worry, I just couldn't keep it bottled up any longer. I just let it out in this sobbing cry that lasted for what felt like an eternity but in reality was probably more like a minute.

After it was over, I have to admit I felt better letting it out. My wife was amazing. She sat there and cried with me. She understood how difficult it must have been for me to have to let out my emotions like that in front of her.

We held hands silently for a few minutes and then we went back upstairs to the NICU to be with Dylan.

We really needed to hear some positive news because up until this point all we had heard was bad.

What came next was a mix of both...