The Greatest American Hero

Someone much smarter than me once said, "You pay for your raising when you have your own children."  If that is true, my first born is paying a huge debt right now. 
Kyle Michael Childress came into this world at 12:41 p.m. October 10, 1978.  I was well versed in the horrors of childbirth thanks to my mother and grandmother.  I think they were in a contest to see who had the hardest labor and delivery.  Granny had my mom on March 2, 1927, there was 3 feet of snow on the ground.  The doctor rode a horse up a hollow to her house, he said in some places the drifts were up to the horses belly. Then her story went on to the pain part and it sounded unbelievable, but if Granny said it, it must be true.  Mom's birth story was equally as horrible.  She was in labor all night before she went to the hospital.  They put her to sleep, so she doesn't remember me being born.  When she woke up, her blood pressure had dropped and the nurses were talking loudly to her and raising the window blinds up and down. I assume they were trying to excite her in order to raise her BP.  The obstetrician who was supposed to deliver me had gone to the Ky. Derby so another doctor delivered me.  He wasn't even an obstetrician, but a orthopedic surgeon.  That would be horrifying enough right there.  So when I woke up on the morning of October 10, with a little discomfort in my back, I wondered if it was labor.  But, I thought it was going to hurt way more than this.  Mike insisted that I wasn't in labor because he thought I should be screaming like they did on t.v. so he decided he wanted to go to work and would take me to moms until I felt better.  I agreed, but when I got up off the sofa to go get dressed, my water broke.  Now, Mike is one of nine children, he's actually number six, so you would think that he knew when a pregnant woman's water broke there was no turning back, but he still insisted I wasn't in labor.  I finally convinced him that maybe we should go to the hospital and let them check me out.  This is where our adventure with Kyle comes into play. 
Naturally, I was indeed in labor.  I went through the process of being admitted and endured the awful prepping that was required back in 1978.  Back then epidurals were for the wealthy or the ones with really good insurance, so that meant I didn't get to have one.  Things progressed normally through the morning, but around noon the nurse announced that my baby, we didn't know if it was a boy or girl back then either, was going to be born feet first, which is called a footling breech. The doctor sent me   for a x-ray, something else I bet they don't do today, to see how big the baby was and if I could have it without a C- Section.  From that x-ray, he determined my baby was going to weigh about five pounds and he was going to try to deliver it first and if things went wrong, he would then do a C-Section.  The nurse who examined me asked me if I wanted to now the babies sex, I said, "Sure, how can you tell?"  I'll never forget what she said.  "I know what it is because I can feel him."  Since a footling breech was rare and the mom delivering naturally was even rarer, I had several doctors and interns in the delivery room with me.  Mike opted not to go in so it was me, a nurse and six doctors.  Kyle literally walked into this world left foot and leg first, left shoulder second, next his head, right shoulder next and finally his right leg and foot.  He weighed 5 pounds 4.5 ounces and was 18 inches long. When I think back on it now, I don't know if I should have thanked the doctor for not jumping in and giving me a C-Section or if I should have sued him for malpractice for the trauma Kyle and I went through.  

When Kyle was 6 weeks old, he developed colic.  I would say a severe case of colic, but any case of colic is severe.  He cried for what seemed like 24 hours 7 days a week for about two months.  Thank goodness Mike has a big family because it took a lot of people to walk around carrying one screaming, tiny baby.  We tried catnip tea, a Coca-Cola to make him burp and whatever other remedy we heard about.  Oh what I would have given for gas drops or gripe water that's available for colicky babies today.  Finally, about Christmas time, he quit crying, but he still didn't sleep.  He never sleep through the night ever.  He's 34 and his wife says he still can't sleep through the night.  I was so used to getting up with Kyle 2 or 3 times a night that when I had my second child, I thought something was wrong with him because he actually slept.  Kyle didn't sleep during the day either.  He might take a fifteen minute nap if we were lucky.  You had to be completely silent because the slightest little sound would have him up.  When he was three, he woke up at night to drink Kool-Aid.  I was thrilled when he was big enough to drink his Kool-Aid without waking me up to tell me about it.  

When Kyle was four my grandmother, the woman Kyle called NaNa and loved dearly, passed away.  She was having chest pains, but insisted it was indigestion.  Finally, we talked her into seeing a doctor.  Kyle came with us out to the car wanting to go with us.  I remember she told him that he better stay home and play.  She said she and I would be right back and we would bring him something. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. She was admitted to the hospital on Thursday and died in her sleep on Sunday.  Kyle could not understand why she didn't come back like she promised.  We were at a loss for the right words.  It became apparent that he was experiencing severe anxiety about her passing, he was a different child.  One night, just two months after my grandmother died, Kyle woke Mike and me up screaming.  We assumed it was a bad dream, but he started having them regularly and they were very disturbing.  He didn't even look like himself, you couldn't wake him up, he spoke words that were not words at all, just a lot of gibberish.  He would look right through me and scream, "No Mom No" over and over.  He wouldn't stand still, we actually chased him from room to room trying to hold him hoping we could calm him some.  These episodes were pretty frequent and were having an effect on Kyle.  He would be tired for a couple of days after.  Once I couldn't wake him at all so I actually took him outside and sat him down in the snow which finally woke him up.  We took him to a pediatrician who ordered tests to see if he was having seizures.  Those tests came back negative.  The diagnose turned out to be Night Terrors.  We had never heard of this, but after reading up on it, we realized it described Kyle to a T.  Everything said he would outgrow them.  He finally did, but he was 13 before he stopped having them.  I still think they were triggered by my grandmother's death.
So now you know that Kyle and sleeping did not go hand in hand and it turns out he had bad luck when it came to automobiles also.  When Kyle was 22 months old, I took him to Mt. Vernon to the Dairy Freeze for an ice cream cone.  In those days it was not mandatory that a baby be in a car seat.  I was driving a Plymouth Valiant.  Sometimes the door handle didn't latch and if you didn't notice it, you could drive until you went around a curve and your door would come open before you realized it wasn't latched.  That day at the Dairy Freeze, I put Kyle in the front seat, locked the door and gave it a good slam.  I even checked to see if it latched.  Kyle was standing, yes I said standing, beside me eating his ice cream when we went around a curve and the door flew open and Kyle looked like he was actually sucked out the door into the street.  I felt like I was in slow motion.  It seemed to take forever before I could stop the car.  I remember looking and no one was behind me or coming in the opposite direction.  When I looked through my rear view mirror, Kyle was standing up in the middle of the road crying.  Some nice lady had saw the whole thing from a side street and had gotten to him before I did.  She handed him to me and said, "I think she will be okay."  I told her he was a boy and thanked her.  I headed straight to the hospital.  He stopped crying as soon as I held him.  All I could see wrong with him was his diaper was tore off and his little white shoes that all babies wore then, we scraped.  He had one little knot on his forehead.  He didn't like the Doctor very much so his exam was hurried.  The Doctor told me to watch for internal bleeding and a concussion.  If he developed these I was to bring him back.  Duh!! I just wanted to get him home.  God was riding with us that day.  Kyle was fine and I kept him buckled up from then on.

When Kyle was barely 3, his brother Neil was born.  That delivery was a piece of cake.  Still no fancy epidural, but he didn't walk out and he slept.  Things were good.  The day after we brought Neil home, my grandmother was staying with us.  She drove a 1974 Gremlin.  It was bright yellow.  She had bought it for me when I was in high school.  When I got married, I gave it back to her.  Our drive-way was on an incline and Granny parked at the top of the drive-way.  Our neighbor had come down to see the new baby.  While we were busy talking and holding Neil, Kyle got away from us.  When the neighbor started to leave she said, "Hallie, who in the world is driving your car?"  We both said, KYLE! at the same time.  Sure enough Kyle was driving that Gremlin.  He had pulled it out of gear which started it rolling back down the drive-way.  When it was going too fast for him and he didn't know how to stop it, he decided he should just jump out of the car.  So he jumped. The car made a turn and ended up in the tobacco patch.  God was with us that day too.

Bryan Houk, Jason Brown, Kyle Childress 

8th. Grade Dance.

 Kyle has a cool mullet.

Also when he was three, we noticed his left eye was turning in when he looked at things that were close.  I really noticed it when he ate.  Every time he looked at his food on the fork before he took a bite, his eye crossed.  Then the teachers noticed it when he was coloring or looking at books. After a really good Opthamalogist examined him, it was determined he had two different conditions.  Actually he had very little vision in his right eye which caused the left eye to strain to see, when the left eye got tired, it gave up and crossed toward Kyle's nose.  Surgery wouldn't cure it, it wasn't a "lazy" eye.  Wearing a patch for awhile and getting glasses was the plan.  So at three Kyle got his first pair of glasses.  He loved them.  We never had any trouble making him wear them.  He could see so much better that he didn't want to even take them off to go to bed.  They were always dirty or falling down on his nose, but he didn't take time to fix them.  One time he lost them and Mike ran over them with the lawn mower.  I can't count the extra lenses we've had to order.  When he played sports he had to wear goggles.  He didn't care much for them, but a lot of the pros were wearing them so that helped.  He went through a stage where he was very embarrassed to take his glasses off.  His eye crossed immediately and the kids in his class made fun of him.  When he was a freshman in high school, he got contacts.  He looked so good in them that nobody ever made fun of him again.  
That same old Plymouth struck again later that year.  By now, he didn't like to wear clothes.  His daily outfit was Star Wars under- roos and cowboy boots.  No shirt. He also wore a towel around his neck for a cape and loved to climb trees.  He thought he was the Greatest American Hero which was a TV show that was on at that time.  The main character was a Superman type man who didn't have all the powers to be a true super hero, so he would try to fly and end up hitting the wall.  Kyle hit every wall in the house several times when he played Greatest American Hero.  We tried to make him stop because he was hurting himself.  Thank goodness the show ended.  
The summer before Neil was born, the boy hero decided he was also going to be Tarzan. One day I found him in our yard at the very top of a maple tree.  He wouldn't come down saying he wasn't done yet.  I was 7 months pregnant as well as being only 5'2''.  I didn't threaten to spank him because I knew that wouldn't work with him, I planned on coaxing him down and then spanking him.  One of our friends, who just happened to be a Ky. State Trooper, drove by the house and saw me in the front yard talking straight up to a tree.  He knew Kyle too well.  He turned around and came back, he yelled, "Is that boy up that tree?"  I shook my head yes.  Kyle really liked the policeman so he came right down for him.   By the time he got down from the tree, I was too tired to even spank him.  God was with Kyle that day.
Kyle also had a knack for falling and needing stitches.  The last time he needed stitches, I didn't even take him to the E.R.  I used steri strips and put him back together myself. 
When he was in the eighth grade, he played on the high school baseball team.  Each year the team would travel to Cocoa Beach, FL during Spring Break. My mother, my son, Neil, my cousin, my friend who had a son on the varsity team, and myself followed the team down to Cocoa one year. The eighth grade didn't get to play very much so they had time to pass the ball some or watch the varsity game. We were watching the varsity play while Kyle and one of his friends was in the dugout with the team or so we thought.  I noticed that Kyle wasn't around us very much, he hadn't even asked for money which was a big tip off that something was up.  On the way to the car after the game, I got a good look at Kyle and his eye was swelled shut, a huge knot was above his eye and the print of the seam on a baseball was embedded in his forehead.  "Kyle, what in the world happened to you?"  Turns out him and his friend were messing around with the pitching machine, Kyle walked in front of it just as the friend sent a 95 mph pitch out of the machine.  They said it didn't knock him out, but I think it did.  Dr. Karen Saylor was also on the trip.  She looked at his eye and forehead and said if the ball had hit him from the side, it would have driven his skull into his brain.  He looked like Frankenstein the rest of the week.  He had a ball scaring all the little kids in the pool.  Also that year at Cocoa Beach, NASA was sending up a rocket.  All the parents and the team were going to meet on the beach to watch the launch.  It was about 10:00 so it was dark.  Kyle and a friend walked to the beach with the rest of us, but after that, he disappeared and so did his friend.  At first, I wasn't too worried since I knew he wasn't alone.  I just thought they walked down the beach, but when the friend came back without Kyle, then I started to panic.  Seems they had gone for a walk down the beach by themselves, but the friend started thinking about mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and had got scared and turned around and came back.  Kyle did not.  We all started walking down the beach calling Kyle's name. After it seemed like we had walked miles down the beach, we saw a group of hippies gathered around a campfire singing folk songs.  Something lead me to get a closer look at that group and sure enough, sitting right in the middle of their circle was Kyle.  When I asked him what he was doing there he said, "I don't know, I didn't know where you were and that bunch of people looked like people you would hang around with, so I went to see if you were with them."  
Kyle got his driver's license on a Friday and drove to Louisville on Saturday to a Metallica concert.  The first time he drove on snow, he slide off the road and landed in a field.  When he was in college, he was in charge of the lights for a New Year's Eve party at Berea College.  It was 1999 and all the talk was that the world would end at midnight.  Berea College Alumni were gathered in the gym for the party and Kyle thought it would be so funny if he turned the lights off at midnight.  He did and 200 elderly folks about had major heart attacks and strokes.  His boss was not amused. 
He worked weekends at Renfro Valley as an usher for the country music shows.  One night all the ladies in the bathroom started screaming.  Someone ran in to see what the problem was.  It seems a snake had found it's way in.  Kyle got all the ladies out, got a gallon jar and picked the snake up to put it in the jar when it bit him.  It was just a little Garter snake, but management insisted that he go to the hospital and take the snake with him.  He was humiliated, but went anyway.  It was determined that he was fine, but the snake died right after it bite him.

I just realized this story could go on and on.  Trouble has always followed Kyle.  Even on his honeymoon.  He and his bride flew to Jamaica.  He got water in his ear while he was snorkeling and suffered with an earache the whole week.  God was with him through all that too. 
In spite of being born under a rain cloud and he may be a little jinxed, his dad and I are very proud of the man he has become.  He graduated college with a degree in Industrial Technology.  He works in the Graphics Design Dept. of the Trane Co. in Lexington.  He's stays busy, he still can't sit still.  He works out faithfully with weights at the gym at Berea College and also jogs. He still loves Metallica, loves concerts and loves going out on Saturday night with his wife to the movies. He helps his wife clean house, helps with his children.  He's a little OCD when it comes to his cars.  They are washed and detailed every Saturday.  He can do a little bit of anything.  He helped build his own house.  He laid the ceramic tile and the hardwood floors himself.  He's good with technology and occasionally he will even change diapers. He has an eye for fashion. He usually picks out his wife's clothes and she's always satisfied.  He loves his huge Childress family.  Doing things with his family is very important to him. His son idolizes him and I'm sure his baby girl will also. God has blessed us all with Kyle. 
As I wrote this, it dawned on me that most of this wasn't Kyle's fault, but rather ours, his parents.  We should have had a car seat, we should have had safer cars, we should have been stricter, and we should have never let him out of our site.  God, please continue to be with Kyle as he now has two children of his own to raise. 

Jack  Brody and Layla Wade