After a five-hour surgery to remove seven millimeters of bone from his mouth, my son’s jaw had been wired tightly shut

“All right if I throw these away?” I asked my son as I held out a handful of syringes.

He raised his eyes at me with a look of confusion that would border on condescension, implying I was asking a truly stupid question.

Of course you can throw them away: They’re used, unnecessary, inexpensive items.

But they’d been so, so crucial just a few weeks ago that I was taken aback by their current uselessness.

I remembered the helpless near-panic I’d felt when my son waved a broken syringe at me. I wasn’t sure we had any left. How were we going to manage without any syringes?

After a five-hour surgery to remove seven millimeters of bone from his mouth, my son’s jaw had been wired tightly shut. Twenty-four hours after the operation, my son was hungry, and I wondered for how long he’d be left without any nourishment.

A perky nurse walked in and proffered my son a cup with a straw. It seemed a very logical thing to do until he actually tried drinking. He had zero feeling in his lips and needed a mirror to get the straw into his mouth. Even then he had no ability to suck.