Unprepared: Stories about unprepared parents

This week we present two stories from people who found themselves without the tools they needed.

Part 1: When Jack Walsh finds out his first child will be born in just a few days, he panics.

Jack Walsh is an Emmy-winning television producer, a generally engaging storyteller, a halfway-decent writer, and the world’s worst guitar player. He has performed at the Moth, the Atlanta Science Festival, DragonCon, and, strangely, a Yom Kippur service. A native of Canton, NC, he now lives in Decatur, GA, with his wife and two daughters.

Part 2: After experiencing hearing loss, Jeannie Gaffigan receives the startling news that she has a brain tumor.

Jeannie Gaffigan is a director, producer and comedy writer. She co-wrote seven comedy specials with her husband Jim Gaffigan, the last 5 of which received Grammy nominations. Jeannie was the head writer and executive producer of the critically acclaimed THE JIM GAFFIGAN SHOW, and collaborated with Jim on the two New York Times Bestsellers, DAD IS FAT and FOOD A LOVE STORY. Jeannie’s own book, WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU PEARS, debuted on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Jeannie, with the help of her two eldest children and some other crazy moms, created THE IMAGINE SOCIETY, INC., a not for profit organization that connects youth-led service groups. Most impressively, she grew a tumor on her brain stem roughly the size of pear.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Jack Walsh

My wife was in the hospital. She was pregnant so that wasn’t necessarily unusual but something was wrong, something possibly life threatening and I had a decision to make.

The day before, Michele had called me at work and she had had what was supposed to be a routine appointment with her obstetrician but all of a sudden she was inconsolable. And she told me doctor, hospital, blood pressure, something about clams, induced labor, help. That’s about all I can make out in between the sobs.

By the time I got to the hospital, she had calmed down a good bit and could explain to me that preeclampsia is a condition not uncommon to first time moms-to-be and the symptoms include dangerously high blood pressure and also elevated protein content in the urine, which also sounds dangerous. But, if not treated, preeclampsia can turn into eclampsia which can cause seizures, heart attack, organ failure, brain damage or death. So, obviously, you want to treat preeclampsia before it progresses and the single, most effective way that medical science has found to do this is just to go ahead and get that baby out of there.

Jack Walsh shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Highland Inn and Ballroom in Atlanta, GA in October 2019. Photo by Rob Felt.

Now, we hadn’t gone into the weekend planning to have a baby. That was on the eventual agenda but that was still supposed to be a month or so off. What we had planned on doing was going to see The Dark Knight, The Batman movie with the creepy Joker and all that, which had just opened but, obviously, plans had changed. The doctors wanted to keep Michele under observation for a couple of days before they made the determination about whether or not to induce labor.

From the start of all this, the idea of having a baby was just kind of something I went along with, much as I pretty much go along with anything my wife really insists on. “Sure, baby. If you say so. That should be fun.”

Not that I didn’t want to have a kid. I did. It was an exciting idea, but that was just something that was going to happen in the future. Abstract-concept baby was great. Possibly-tomorrow baby was, all of a sudden, a very panic-inducing idea.

I mean, they had told us at the infant care class that I could impale and kill our baby with a rectal thermometer if I wasn’t careful. I had never even changed a diaper before and we were supposed to have a month left. Now, for Michele’s body to throw us this biological curve ball, a dangerous one at that, had really shifted the timeline forward to an unnerving degree.

There’s that part in The Dark Knight where the Joker is going on about how people deal with things just fine as long as they're part of the plan. But the second you introduce a little bit of chaos, they lose their minds. So I was trying not to think about how real everything had just gotten, about how suddenly everything had changed because the alternative was to freak out.

Now, you might surmise from what I just said that I eventually got to see The Dark Knight. Eventually is a very relative term. Back to that decision that I mentioned earlier, while my wife was hooked up to machines peeing in a cup, possibly about to have our child, I decided to go to the movies.

I want to make it very clear here that it was Michele’s idea, or at least her suggestion because I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn’t occurred to me already because we were just sitting around with nothing to do. Her condition had improved somewhat and she seemed perfectly comfortable. Then if the baby did come, we’d have to wait for the movie to come out on video and someone might spoil it for me before then. Nobody wants that.

Now, you could suppose here that, in some way, I was with this trying to desperately, some might say, trying to prolong my child-free existence. That in a film about an orphan who dresses as a bat and beats up a guy dressed like a clown I perceived some escape from impending adult parental responsibility. I mean you could suppose that.

Anyway, I went to watch Batman and no one needs to hear another nerdy white guy giving his opinions on The Dark Knight so I will spare you my assessment of the film. It’s so good, you guys.

But then that night after the movie, I was back at home having a late dinner when the phone rang and it was my wife’s doctor who maybe should have explained things to me calmly instead of just turning the phone over to Michele who told me, “Blood pressure dangerous. Induced tonight. Come back.” Or something to that effect.

Driving to the hospital that night was like speeding headlong into the unknown, or really speeding headlong isn’t the most accurate choice of words. It was more like overcompensatingly slow and hypervigilant because I'd had a couple glasses of wine with dinner. But it did have the feeling of heading into a maddeningly uncertain future. I was going to be a father in a matter of hours. Or maybe my wife was going to have a seizure and die. Given the gravity of the situation I was really starting to feel bad about sneaking out to the movies.

The induction process ramped up gradually until, by sometime in the morning, the intensity of the contractions had rendered Michele mostly nonverbal and had left me feeling really powerless to help. Just as she was in the middle of a very severe way of just moaning and convulsed in pain, housekeeping arrived blowing in like a Category 5 hurricane of aggressive Southern hospitality.

“How you all doing?” She bellowed and bustled right into the bathroom and flipped on all the lights and got straight to work which, judging from the sounds, I could only guess entailed bashing a pair of crash cymbals against every metal surface she could find. But that was still not loud enough to drown out her singing. “What a friend we have in Jesus.”

My wife, who is Jewish, moaned along in a kind of agonized inter-faith harmony.

Now, obviously, what I should have done was ask the nice screaming lady to, “Hey, maybe come back and do that a little bit later then. Okay? Thanks.” But I think we've already established I wasn’t really making great decisions re: things not going according to plan, panicking, chaos, etcetera. So what I did instead was get a pillow and put it over my wife’s head, like I was trying to murder her.

In my mind I was blocking out all the light and sound and stuff like that as if she had a migraine or something rather than another human forcing its way out of her. As it turns out, she did not find this helpful and I got the message when she took a couple of swings at me.

Eventually, the housekeeper screamed her goodbyes and moved on to torment the next woman, and I went back to just kind of rocking helplessly beside the bed. From this point, though, it pretty much unfolded, I guess, the way we thought childbirth was kind of going to go, with a lot of pushing and attentive nurses and anxious grandparents rushing to the hospital. And eventually me cutting the umbilical cord attached to a tiny, shaking, crying, screaming, red person.

That night as my wife slept and I held the baby, I also found myself crying and shaking, although I did manage to stifle any screams. Here was this little five-pound thing that kind of looked like me, a little thing we named Stella, by the way. I was fully terrifyingly responsible for her for forever. Or at least as span of time that felt very much like forever in the moment.

And along with everything that hit me at once: joy, relief, love, exhaustion, came the overwhelming feeling that I was absolutely not ready to be a parent. I had finally let this catch up to me. Now, would I have felt ready several weeks later when the baby was supposed to come? Fuck, no.

My wife took instantly to parenthood. I did not. And I won’t enumerate all the struggles and frustrations and self-recriminations and lingering guilt and additional crying fits of the first several years of parenthood for me, but mistakes and learning from mistakes and therapy and also Zoloft had made me, if not a great parent, then at least more willing to forgive myself when I’m not always the best one. Or to thoroughly bastardize yet another part of The Dark Knight, I may not always be the father my kid deserves but I can usually manage to be the one she needs right now.

Not a day passes that I don’t still suspect that I’m not ready to be a parent, but with time and practice and experience and even a whole second kid who came in a completely normal, timely fashion, I have come to realize the no one is every really ready to be a parent. You just adapt moment to moment. And even when things sort of go according to plan, there can still be chaos and maybe you kind of lose your mind. But then they go to sleep and you take a deep breath and you do it again the next day. Until, at some point, you can no longer imagine your life without them. But you do suspect that you would get to go to the movies then a lot more. Thank you.

Part 2: Jeannie Gaffigan

Hi, everyone. I’m so happy to be here at the last gathering of a lot of people in New York City. I'm really honored.

So, yes, I have this book called When Life Gives You Pears, and the title has to do with the fact that I had, in 2017, of a pear-sized brain tumor removed. It was actually the size and shape of a pear, an inverted pear. So I'm going to tell you a little bit of the story but not the whole story, because I want you to read my book. Shameless plug.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to just start out with was just something that has really been on my mind lately, which is the fact that I really went through a period of time when I was about to have brain surgery, because I had like discovery-to-brain surgery was like three days, because it was kind of an emergency.

A thought occurred to me when my husband and I were rushing to the ER after we saw the film from the MRI that we couldn't get our hands on. But we knew that like my ENT, I had a hearing loss, sudden hearing loss. I went through like a month of taking FLONASE and resting and it didn't go away. So I ended up getting an MRI and the MRI revealed that I had this giant thing in my brain.

The ENT was like, “Peace out, you need to go to brain surgery.”

So on the way to the ER, we chose a hospital that’s like an hour away because we Googled what's the best place to get brain surgery in New York and it wasn't like across the street. And we went to the ER there because my friend, who I grew up with, is a neurologist in Milwaukee. I was given an appointment to see a neurosurgeon in about three weeks and I just couldn't get the diagnosis of brain tumor and wait three weeks. So I needed to get it checked out.

So I sent the film, which I couldn't read on my computer because I didn’t even have a disc drive on my computer anymore. I don't think anyone does. My husband FedEx‑ed the film to my friend in Milwaukee and he, the next day, put it into his hospital computer and texted me. He was like, “You need to go to the hospital.” He said, “If you were here, I'd put you in the OR today because you're like a ticking time bomb.”

Jeannie Gaffigan shares her story with the Story Collider audience at (le) Poisson Rouge in New York City in March 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.

So we Googled. He said, “Just go to the ER and they're going to look at the film and send you to general surgery. They're not going to be able to do anything with it. But you need to make a plan.”

So as we were speeding up FDR, I had this observation. And then I'm going to continue the story, but I want to just… this is what kind of struck me. So I’m setting the scene. We're going up the FDR.

We passed the old-fashioned Pepsi-Cola sign across the East River in Queens. It reminded me of Mimi, my mom's grandmother. I had never met her but every time my mom comes to New York City and we're on the FDR, she brings up being in Mimi's Tudor City apartment as a child and looking out at that sign behind the water.

My mom's memory was now my memory. I wondered if I was going to be able to have memories anymore. What would that be like to not be able to have memories anymore? My kids might not have a mom who gifted them her memories.

So I just wanted to start there because there was a certain point where I just realized that I didn't know what was going to happen to my brain. And my brain is me. So if I'm alive and I don't have a brain, am I me?

So we get a little bit closer to the hospital and my phone rings and my ENT, when he found out I was on the way to the ER instead of waiting to see the neurosurgeon that he recommended, he called Mount Sinai and had a colleague call me before I went into the ER and had some sleep-deprived intern open up my skull with a rusty butter knife or whatever he thought was going to happen.

I wound up waltzing right into the Head of Neurosurgery office without my insurance card. And I was used to like being put on hold and it was like I call it the parting of the Red Sea. I don't know what happened but all of a sudden I walked into like the top neurosurgeon’s office without them knowing my name. It just was like a series of little coincidences and miracles.

I had my film and he put it into his computer. His whole office had big monitors all over it because the way they do things now is very technologically advanced. It's like there was my scan and there was this giant thing in my brain.

And when I saw it, all of a sudden, I felt like I could kind of feel it, even though I had been walking around just like I can't really hear out of this ear but completely high-functioning.

So I was like, “How is that really… how am I looking to my brain and seeing this thing that is in there that's not supposed to be in there?”

And he's like, “Are you having headaches?”

I'm like, “Well, I have allergies, so yeah, I do get a lot of headaches.”

Then he's like, “Are you ever dizzy?”

And I'm like, “Yeah, but I don't drink enough water.”

“Do you get head rushes?”

And it's like, “Well, when I stand up sometimes after sitting, but I should really get one of those standing desks that everyone's talking about.”

Then I realized that I had been compartmentalizing all my symptoms. When they all were told to me together it was like, whoa, I guess I have the symptoms of having a brain tumor but I wasn't really paying attention to myself.

Of course the question that I asked first was, “Is it cancer? Do I have cancer?” Because you hear brain tumor and you think cancer.

And he said, “I don't think that it's cancer.”

And I said, “Well, why would you say that?”

He said, “Because if you had a cancerous tumor that was that size, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Because cancer grows very rapidly. Cancer cells grows very rapidly and this tumor, from the way that you're reacting right now and the way that you're just walking around, I am pretty sure that this tumor was growing insidiously for about 10 years. And the reason why you're able to just like walk and talk and do all this stuff is because…”

They compared it to like if you put an elephant on a clothesline. If you have a clothesline and you hang an elephant on it, the clothesline is going to break. But if you slowly, over 10 years, keep hanging different things on the clothesline and eventually put an elephant on it, it's really not going to feel the stress as much.

So it was really kind of interesting for me to think of this tumor as an elephant in my brain, because all of a sudden it kind of felt like it was an elephant in my brain.

So what happened was he said that he was going to have to take a lot of pictures. I was going to have a full day of scanning. And then he was going to create a virtual map of my brain so he would be able to look through this kind of VR surgery technique where they can take away blood vessels and show where the nerves are. Because, as one of our other performers mentioned, the cranial nerves, there's 12 of them and they all do really important things.

One of the location was on my brainstem, so it was in a really vital place. What was running through the tumor was my facial nerve.

So he said, “I don't know if I'm going to be able to save your facial nerve, but you're going to live.”

And I was like, yes! I'm going to live. And I was like, “Oh, I don't care about my facial nerve.”

He said, “Well, you’re probably going to have facial paralysis.”

And I was like, “I already have a husband.” Like I would be alive, right? I could be a head in a jar and I’d be like I’m winning.

So I had like a couple days after the scan, I had two days to sort of get my things in order, which I did nothing of. Went into the hospital and I had an incredibly successful surgery. They got like almost every single piece of that tumor out. My facial nerve was saved because of this amazing VR surgery and this incredible team of surgeons I had. Everyone was super happy.

I'm going to read to you another observation that I made when I woke up from brain surgery, if I can find it. Okay. Here we go.

I guess I had brain surgery. I mean that's what they told me, but I can't be certain because I wasn't exactly conscious. Again, no Post-it sign. That's a callback from later but you have to read…

All right. When I first opened my eyes, I was propped up slightly and I saw the stark lighting of the hospital and medical people walking back and forth. I couldn't move, or maybe I could but I just didn't try. It took a couple of seconds for me to realize I was awake and the surgery was over.

Immediately after that, I realized that I realized I'm me. I remember thinking I was me. What a simple thought. And how horrifying that if I hadn't had that thought, if I had been brain-damaged, I never would have thought that. So that's really like I think therefore I am, because what would happen… I mean, I would have never, even if I was alive, I wouldn't be me. And it was just like this unbelievable feeling to realize that I was me.

I couldn't tell anyone, “I’m me, I’m me.” I couldn't move. I couldn't talk, but everything was there and I knew that I had brain surgery. So this was an incredibly happy moment for me.

And then I remember nothing. All of a sudden, lights out. And I woke up and all of a sudden it was a completely different situation. I was in a different room. I had tubes coming out of me. There were machines everywhere beeping and everyone was running around in a panic. And I was like, “What happened?”

Eventually, I realized that what happened was that my brain had gotten used to having this big pear in it, and so when it was gone, all the nerves kind of got all like wiggly. That's a medical term. And my breathing and my swallowing, which we take for granted because our brain does all sorts of things that we don't even have to think about, got all intermingled and sometime during the night I had breathed in my saliva into my lungs. Enjoy your cocktail.

And I aspirated and I developed double-lung strep pneumonia in the hospital. And that bacteria, I mean it's like coronavirus shmaronavirus because it was really gross. And I was intubated. So I had a tube down my throat, I had a tube on my nose, I had tubes in my arm, I had machines everywhere beeping and I was pissed. I wasn't scared. I was so angry.

I was like, “What? I just got through brain surgery and now…”

I want to get up and I couldn't talk. I couldn't express myself. I was like, “Boy, this would have been so much better if I was brain-damaged.” No, I never had that thought.

Anyway, long 300 pages later, I get to get out of the hospital and go home but I have a tracheotomy, a PEG tube and five kids at home waiting for me. So I wasn't really able to resume my normal life because all sorts of things happened that took me a long time to recover from.

The biggest challenge, I think, of my recovery was the fact that I could have nothing by mouth. I could have no water, no food, nothing. And because I have five kids and I'm used to being under like a pile of them all the time and they were not allowed to come to the ICU, where I was for a while, and they now could not touch me anywhere, I started to experience this feeling of starvation from food and from affection at the same time. So I was kind of nervous that once I was able to embrace my child, I might accidentally eat them because I was so confused by all these feelings I was having.

So for me not being able to eat, I wouldn't have known it was going to be so challenging but it was it was extremely challenging, especially since almost every single person that I knew that loved me, that wanted to express their concern for me, sent huge amounts of food that looked and smelled really amazing over to my house.

And my kids loved it. You have to understand like I am married to a man who's made a career out of eating. So he would help me out by eating all the food. So that was very nurturing.

But the other thing that would happen is that I would get really emotional when I would smell food. So he would be so kind to like sort of hermetically seal me in my room and stuff towels under the door and have like essential oils so I wouldn't smell the constant flow of lasagna that was always cooking in my house.

So during this period, I had a lot of therapists coming over, like physical therapists helping me walk again with a walker and occupational therapist that was basically there to help me resume things like buttoning and all these things that I had to relearn doing. I'm a really hard worker so I worked really hard at it. I buttoned and unbuttoned my clothes so many times I felt like ingénue in Hollywood before the Me Too Movement.

Anyway, at a certain point, the occupational therapist said, “Okay, I think that now you're ready to do something meaningful to you, around your house that you can kind of accomplish and feel like you're part of life again.”

And I said, “I want to clean up my basement storage because nobody has put the bikes away.”

And she was like, “No, no. That's…”

And you have to understand who I am to understand that that's really what I wanted to do. She was like, “No basement storage.” So she was like, “How about making breakfast for your children?”

And I was like, but food, it was kind of an ex-lover that you can't see or don't want to run into anymore. But I agreed to make the food, to make breakfast.

Anyway, when I make scrambled eggs, I don't scramble the eggs in the pan. It's just not my way. I sort of fold them over with a spatula, so they're kind of like big fluffy bites and not like little bits, and that's the way that my kids like them.

So Katie, my daughter was like 7 at the time, she said to me, “Mom, I just really want to learn how to make eggs like you make them because nobody made eggs like this.”

So I got really into making the eggs. And I taught her how to make the eggs. And we had this really fulfilling moment where I didn't need to be eating or experiencing food in the same way to sort of nurture my child with this food. It was this really amazing experience. So that night, I felt like I was getting back to normal. I was so happy even though I still had like tubes at a tracheotomy… you know tubes sticking out of my throat that had to be suctioned out. It was lovely.

I got into bed and I was like, “Wow, I just feel like this…” I got into bed. I wasn’t getting out of bed. I was getting into bed. So it's like getting out of bed used to be like a big treat, but now getting into bed was a treat because I was actually up doing things in the house and I felt so good.

And I looked out at my hand and I had these big blisters all over my hand. And I was like, “Jim, what is this? Did I get bit by a radioactive spider? What is actually happening?”

And he said, “That looks like a burn.”

What I realized was, and this is later we kind of figured this all out, there's something called the spinal pathic track. I don't know if any medical people here know what that is. But the right side of my body was not sensitive to temperature or pain suddenly. And so when I was making the eggs, I like put my hand on the stove and I didn't feel it.

So then I realized that, okay, back to normal is going to be a new normal. So right now I'm living my life very well, but I'm in a new normal. Thank you very much.