Panic! Fear! Run for the goddamn hills my son and don't look back. No matter how good or blameless you are, you'll never be safe from the bastards who try to run you down. No matter how careful, conscientious or prepared you are, you cannot escape for ever the dreadful sound of trampling hooves, the cold breath upon your neck, or the sound of the Scythe as it snips off the tips of the hairs that stand erect on your head. No matter how hard you try, no matter how strenuously you endeavour to remain on the side of the good there are no guarantees that your number will not come up.

What began months ago as referring to the Boober as "skinny" quickly devolved into a frantic search for the cause of this skinniness. At first we attributed his slight frame to the result of having suffered several concurrent (if not at times, overlapping) colds over the winter months. In a day-care setting, either home or factory-farm, it is impossible to guard against ever becoming ill. Nothing short of seclusion or an N95 mask can truly guard against the possibility of picking up some ailment, and by God, we are not the type of people to worry ourselves over a few air-born bugs. We are, by way of fact, the type of people that will allow our 10 month-old to sample the ash-dirt mix in public campgrounds. His pediatrician, however, thought there might be something more ominous behind his extravagant weight loss, and because we have such great faith in his pediatrician, we too began to wonder at how he was transformed from a child comfortably at the 75th percentile for weight, to one nudging just barely above the 25th. I'd like to say that I've long held to the belief that his weight suffered the harsh effects or chronic winter illness, but not being an expert of anything practical, could not gainsay the good doctor with any argument more poignant than "because!"

No one likes to hear that their child might be ill in some chronic and permanent way. It is still worse to discover that one of those ailments might be Cystic Fibrosis. How did we get from some as-to-yet unexplained weight loss to CF? In the murky world of early childhood development not all bowel movements are created equal. The line which separates healthy bowel movements for those of questionable frequency is so slight: 1 - 2 is normal, and 3 - 4 is not normal. We long gave up the practice of tracking the number and types of Rowan's poops. Once we'd gotten past the very early stages of newborn stomach flora development we thought no more of checking. We'd always wondered, awed, at how alternately large, small, wet, dry, amorphous, rabbit-like, his poops appeared, but we attributed it to nothing more than a continually developing digestive system. We also supposed that, based on his diet, there would simply be very meal-specific appearances to his output - it appeared to be no different than when an adult consumes a large number of boiled beets. We examined his behaviour, his physical growth (other than weight), his ability to manoeuvre dexterously, and his cognitive development, and decided that if weight was the only X-factor in an otherwise supreme growth effort, then how could it be possible something was wrong?

Fear comes in many forms. We never expected it to come in the form of feces. The first test result we received regarded the percentage of fat in his poop. A high percentage of fat (anything above 5%) indicates a fat absorption problem. While the idea that you could eat a whole pound of fat, but not have it sashay its way to your hips sounds like to type of affliction with which anyone would love to be cursed. Yet you must understand that there are several, crucial, vitamins that are fat soluble, and only enter the blood-stream carried by fat; a person who poorly absorbs fat, will also be prey to poor absorption of vitamins, and this would have deleterious affects on growth. In an adult who has already developed, this is, perhaps less of a concern, but for an infant, who is still on a steep growth ramp, this is very troubling. Rowan's first fat globule poop test returned 20% fat, which is 4 times the safe amount. The nurse who called to tell us we might want to re-test his poop was uncomfortable - you could hear in her voice a kind of sad worry that she was delivering terrible, fatal, news. You could just hear whispered the words, "Cystic Fibrosis", each time she paused to find an alternate word, but we knew already what they were testing for, and each time she hesitated, I filled in the gap mentally. What a strange thing to be afraid to say the already-known, as if to say it would be to make it manifest, when in reality, all the testing in world would not change the outcome - either you are afflicted with a disease, or not. Being wholly ignorant of that bus bearing down on you won't change the outcome one way or the other. Still, we humans tend to be very superstitious, especially when it comes to tender moments of sympathy and sorrow, so to say it would have been to violate that understanding, that silence that itself screams. I acted as if I noticed nothing, and perhaps she believed me.

We since had the test re-done and it came back negative. Our boy, it seems, has very average poop. There's been no time in his short life that I've praying for complete mediocrity, but this was it. The lab to which we took the first sample ought to have rejected it because it was stale poop. Only poop that is no more than 4 hours old is fresh enough for this test, and our poop sample was over a day old, most of it in the warm ambient air of the house.  Why did they accept it? I can't say. Perhaps they are just not educated on this one thing. Whatever the reason, it caused us great stress and worry for a week while we gathered a second sample and waited for the results.

We are now (mostly) free and clear, but what does that really mean? We move, as elsewhere in life, from moment to moment, and crisis to crisis, where happiness and misery are interwoven in such terribly complex and beautiful patterns. It's better than being alone ...