You and your reader need a book structure, but how do you choose...
when it came to choosing how to organize Loving Large...this structure idea lost out...
As I hit the Eureka! button and wave my pompoms that I have confidently nailed my next book’s structure, I’d like to share a few “cutting room floor” things I found while I was thinking about my first memoir Loving Large (Dundurn, 2020)
I really dig structure, readers do too. This one would have been a zinger. I could have been chronological but curating content around the decisions, medical quandaries and themes provoked by each call. But this structure was the runner up. The structure I chose…well, you’ll have to read the book for that. (available everywhere, or you online buyers in the US, can do this)
Five phone calls, folks. Five phone calls and with each one, we drifted farther off course…
There were five watershed phone calls during the snapshot of time that Loving Large takes place in. The impact of these calls moved us from one stage of survival to the next. There was never good news but what we got, we managed.
In February 2009, an assistant called from my son Aarons’s pediatrician’s office and asked me to come in. I thought she meant us, as in me and Aaron, but she said, "No, Patti. Come without Aaron, this time." That sentence, those words, was a bomb that blew up my family’s world. My then-husband Rick and I, and our two sons have never been able to return to the wondrous state of oblivion--that luxurious denial that most people live in where they think nothing bad could happen to them.
A second phone call launched me into a two-month depressive episode that rendered me useless emotionally, numb to everything happening around me. I heard the words, delivered casually and blunted, "Your son is incurable." The months after that call are lost to me still. I did not respond with action but rather with retreat and paralysis. It wasn’t fight or flight, but simply freeze. The news thrust me into a pit of self-loathing because, in my mind, that incurable status Aaron was facing, was my fault. I should have been able to do more. Or so I ardently believed.
The next call was from a world-renowned specialist who had agreed to take over Aaron's case. He told me that there was an outside chance of, and I paraphrase, "getting this kid to thirty." I remember the exact chair where I sat in the breakfast diner when I pressed answer on the Blocked ID call. The doctor’s somewhat cavalier expression and that call pulled me from self-blame, and any time mired in denial was terminated for me. At that point, I knew my energy needed to be poured into buying time for Aaron, by immersing myself medically, taking things that I believed the medical system couldn’t provide for him upon myself.
The fourth call came late one Sunday evening. With a thick eastern European accent, she introduced herself and said she was calling from London, England. "I received your email inquiry through our website. You have a son with gigantism," she said. I learned that evening that my son was likely a genetic descendant of the Irish Giants of legend and that she had just released a study reporting the discovery of a genetic anomaly linking people with gigantism to centuries-old DNA. It could explain a genetic explanation for the disease, which could help in treatment but more impactful for than us was that testing Aaron could identify other members of the family at risk of gigantism and acromegaly, including and especially, Aaron’s brother, my younger son, Justin.
I took the fifth call on my cell phone while I was Christmas shopping. It was a receptionist advising me that Aaron's radiation appointment had been moved up. This would have been helpful except we had not been told that radiation was the only option he had left or that his surgical team had decided to not operate again, moving instead to radiation immediately. We had no idea he was even a candidate for radiation, nor that he had been identified as needing it. We had no preparation at all for the risks involved for any of us, mentally, emotionally or physically.
The phone calls blew us off course, bounced us like pinball flippers into a medical mystery, consideration of risky intrusive treatments and the acceptance of grave news about Aaron's future, and ours as a family. Those calls were the benchmark of endurance for me, like Aaron's height marks on the wall, they were both achievements and lines that once crossed forced us to face more drastic consequences.
I see Loving Large now as the book that might have made me notice the coalescence of symptoms sooner, had the story been told to me. I am not unique. The details of the medical journey may be with my son Aaron, but the emotional journey could be anyone's. Like each person who is hit with what was once considered unthinkable, I scrambled, and I tumbled. I grasped for any branch I could on the way down and used every skill possible to climb back up. In the process, I learned to live deeper, love harder and milk every experience for what solace it might bring. For the parents who read my story, I wish for a smoother road, with more self-solace but just as much rich relationship building with your child.
Do you know someone who is struggling with organizing their book…
