This is the Reason Losing A Child Affects Us All

Saturday mornings hold a certain magic for me. I get up early, watch a soccer game, drink my first of many cups of coffee, reflect on my past week, and plan out my weekend to get in as much as possible. Saturday mornings have always held magic. I recall getting up early as a kid, waking up my parents, watching Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, having a great breakfast from my Mom, and looking forward to accompanying my Dad on a carpentry side job he would do to make some extra money. Later in life, Saturday mornings meant being awakened by my own kids, making breakfast for them, and watching cartoons with them.

A Somber Saturday Morning

Yet, this Saturday morning seems different. I am sitting, writing this article, an article I have been wanting to write for months. My family is asleep. I still get up early, have several cups of coffee, and watch the recorded US versus Trinidad soccer game (the result of which I have carefully stayed blind to even though it was played days ago).  And, perhaps because Saturday mornings seem to have such a childlike magic to them, I have set my mind to writing about children. Sadly, my topic is the death of a child, the death of children.

On April 4, 2017, according to multiple reports, Syrian government jets bombed civilians with organophosphate gas, leaving at least 92 people dead. Included in the dead were children. I had seen the videos, but I had to see them again. The appearance of the children brought back the description of symptoms I had learned in medical school, second-year pharmacology. SLUD – Salivation, Lacrimation, Urination, Defecation.

Add to this GEM – Gastrointestinal distress, Emesis (vomiting), and Miosis (pupil constriction) and Muscle Spasm. This combination of symptoms arises from a massive outpouring of parasympathetic neurologic function. Put more simply, a deadly loss of bodily function about sums it up. Death from suffocation in one’s own secretions. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. This is a tough watch, but I encourage those of you who can to view the video on the Daily Mail website.

The Death of a Child: The Death of a Promise

When I see videos and pictures like this, I instantly am reminded of the promise and hope of childhood and of the vacuum that is left behind with the death of a child. So often are children the innocent victims of violence. So often are they the casualties of war, terrorism, domestic violence, and sexual assault. So often are they the smallest pawns in wars between political or religious factions, conflicts between ethnic groups, or terrorist acts by extremists.

I’m old enough to remember Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl in the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken June 8, 1972, who was immortalized running naked from a South Vietnamese napalm attack, her back severely burned. My mind also goes to more recent photos, such as that of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who washed up on a Turkish shore, his family trying to reach Greece in an attempt to escape their war-torn country. Another life snuffed out.

I did not expect, as I was assembling this article in my head months ago, that I would be driving home from an emergency at our hospital, listening to the BBC, and learning that there was an explosion at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. We would soon learn that this extremist terrorist attack would claim 22 lives and injure 59 more. Many of the victims, including the dead, were children, the youngest being eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos.

I know the excitement of taking my kids to their first concerts, the pleasure of sharing an event with them that, at that specific moment, is the greatest thrill of their young lives. For that to become the last moment of their entire life is – appalling, repulsive, sickening – I cannot come up with a word to describe the true sadness that I feel in these situations.

I have relatives and friends who have lost children at a young age. Cancer, accidents, suicide, and overdose – I can put a friend or relative to each of these. I have diagnosed children with lymphoma, osteosarcoma, and leukemia. One of my most memorable cases was a 15-year-old who had a cancer of her frontal (forehead sinus) that was entering the frontal lobe of the brain. We did everything we could – craniofacial surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and more chemotherapy.

Four years later, four years spent mainly in hospitals and outpatient treatment rooms, she was dead. So much promise and hope lost.

Each of these deaths takes a piece of me, a piece of all of us. For me, any loss of a child is devastating. Early this morning, our local news reported on the trial of the parents of Baby Doe Bella Bond, her two-year-old lifeless body discovered near the Deer Island Sewer Plant in Boston, MA. Evidence of child abuse leading to her eventual death is being presented, discussed, and debated. The sadness our community felt for this child is immense.

The sadness we feel for the multiple victims of the Syrian chemical strike, the Manchester bombing, the death of eight-year-old Martin Richard at the Boston Marathon bombing – these take this sadness we feel over the loss of one child and increase it exponentially, perhaps infinitely.

What Can We Do?

When I see and hear these stories, I can only come up with questions. Why? Why do these events occur? Why are the children affected? How? How can someone be so cruel, so callous, so evil, as to think (if they even are capable of thought) that killing children is justifiable? When? When will it all end? Let’s be honest: history tells us it won’t. From concentration camps to enslavement of children to the deaths we have already discussed – there are always those who see children as simple objects that are dispensable and disposable.

The hardest question for me is: “What.” What can we do? Some will say fight back, others will say look for compromise, for diplomatic solutions. Some will pray or follow whatever means of hope in which they engage. I truly have no idea, and I feel bad writing this lengthy editorial with nothing more than questions to offer.

Perhaps my one solace is that I believe most of us do want to do something. We do want to find the answer to the question: “What.” Perhaps therein lies the hope that we all believe in – that there is something that ultimately can be done.

In the 1980’s, Sting released a song, Russians, in an era when we were still living with the Cold War, with the Soviet Union as our greatest threat. In that song, Sting’s chorus innocently illuminates the wish we all have: “I hope the Russians love their children, too.”

The love of a child is endless and unconditional. May it drive us to seek solutions, to fulfill the promise of childhood, and to ensure the future of generations to come.

 

Arthur M. Lauretano, MD, MS, FACS

June 10, 2017

My book, Do the Right Thing: A Surgeon’s Approach To Life is now available on Amazon! Read an excerpt here.

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