What, Me Worry?

Wanderlust seems to be a hereditary condition. My grandfather had a severe case that did not abate until late in life. An otherwise responsible citizen, he would disappear for weeks or months, leaving his wife to care for a slew of kids, then pop back into their lives as if he had just gone to the corner store for a loaf of bread.

Worrying may also have a hereditary component. My mother was a professional. She trained me so I became a semi-pro. But my son, Matt, cured me of it. 

He joined the army out of high school and we were off to the races. After his first tour, he finished college and medical school. A martial artist from a young age, as a medical student he boxed at a gym in inner city Norfolk. Me, a neurologist, with a son participating in a sport whose aim is to concuss your opponent. Neuroirony.

He was also a kickboxer and came home to Richmond once for a fight. He caught a foot upside the head that knocked him out cold. After his normal CT scan, I sat with him on the couch all night, where my suddenly hyperactive son said every five or ten minutes, “Let me get this straight. I got kicked in the head by a bad to the bone Thai fighter.“

What, me worry?

After internship at Walter Reed, he spent a tour delivering combat casualty care at a forward base in Iraq, where he earned a Bronze Star. He suffered another concussion in an explosion from an IED carried by a five-ton truck that blew a massive hole in the compound where he was staying. 

After he left the Army, the Peruvian guards at the American embassy in Baghdad recruited polyglot Matt as one of their docs. He’d worked hard at mastering Spanish and it now paid off. He would work three intense months then have three months off, when the game truly became Where in the World Is Matt. 

I’d get a phone call out of the blue. “Where ya been, Matt?”

“In Brazil, studying judo with the Gracie brothers.” Or, “In Borneo, working at a mountain camp. There’s three of us: a cook, a maintenance guy and me. My job is to take tourists out at night to see the big cats.” 

Or, “In Bangkok, learning kick boxing from the masters. These guys are good. One of them kicked me in the chest so hard it fractured a rib and partially collapsed a lung.” “Did you go to the hospital?” “Nah. Those things usually heal on their own.”

During one call, months after the episode, he told me about a week spent sweating and shivering through a bout of dengue fever, alone in his bunk in some jungle somewhere. Untreated. A disease with a potential mortality of ten to twenty percent.

What, me worry?

At other times, he would pop back into our lives, just like my grandfather. He’d stay a while then tell us he was taking a trip, either not saying where or giving us some destination we thought ersatz but could never be sure. This was a man, after all, who’d once gone to Kazakhstan to work as an English teacher, where he was served sheep’s eyelid, a local delicacy, as the honored guest at a banquet. There was no destination too exotic or outlandish for our Marco Polo man. Then he’d come back.

“Where ya been, Matt?” “Colombia.”  Or, “Where ya been, Matt?” “Cuba”

Jesus.

He’d long ago proven to me, I thought, that fretting was futile and useless. Then we received an email saying, “Ya’ll don’t worry but I’m in Liberia taking care of Ebola patients.”

The wanderlust at last seems to have mostly abated. He is now contently settled down with a job practicing medicine and a wife, she a fond and lasting remembrance of a past trip.