Muffling the bad doesn't outweigh settling for just hearing about the good

The hardest thing about living in New York is being away from my family.

And being away from them is even harder during the times that I feel not like I want to be there, but like I need to be there - like on someone's birthday, to celebrate a graduation or other milestone, or when someone is sick or in the hospital.

I know there will be other birthdays and milestones, but it's when someone is sick or hurt that I seriously consider booking plane tickets.

This week, my dad had knee replacement surgery. While I know there can be complications and the unexpected can rear its ugly head, it's not like anyone was anticipating he wouldn't come out of it just fine.

While I knew he would be in good hands, with my mom, brother, and sister in town and available and all, it was the fear of the unexpected that had me questioning whether I was making the right decision by asking my mom to keep calling me with updates instead of being there at the hospital to hear them first hand.

I'm a total "what if?" ridiculous kind of worry-wart, and have been since I was a kid. What if the surgery goes wrong, what if he gets an infection, what if he's not OK, blah, blah, blah. My friends knew something was wrong all day when he was in surgery and my husband knows me well enough to try to alleviate my fears, but since he can't know what would happen, it didn't help.

It turns out that although the surgery went beautifully, the doctors didn't immediately give him a nerve blocker, so according to my mom, he was in an intense amount of pain. Because just hearing about that made me really upset, in a way I was glad I wasn't there to witness it first-hand because seeing my big, strong daddy in pain would be ten times more unsettling. That's not to say that I'm glad I didn't go home - because I wish I had been able to - but living far away really muffles some of the bad because you're not living through it: You're just hearing about it. You're not at the hospital waiting for some news from the doctors, but living your life hundreds of miles away and hearing about how it went later.

Sadly, that's also the same with the good times. You're not living through the games, company, and laughter, but hearing an overview about how much fun it was later from someone else. You're not there for the small details, which I've learned are so important. It's not often that I get to sit down and just talk to my dad, and all the waiting and need for any patient to be distracted would have been the perfect time for that. The phone call later was great because I got to talk to him and hear that he was OK, but it was so much more impersonal than my being able to be there with him holding his hand. But my dad is OK and I thank God for that.

I can see how living so far away could be the easy way out of having to deal with a lot of pain, but that certainly doesn't outweigh settling for just hearing about all of the good.