Front Porch: Though he’s all grown up, he’s still her baby boy

This summer, our son, Sam, got sick.

Really sick.

ER visit sick.

He lives in Odessa, Texas, and teaches English at Odessa College. Nothing prepares you for having a sick kid, so far from home.

Thankfully, a friend took him to the hospital. Sam suffered through a miserable bout of gastroenteritis that antibiotics cured, but an MRI showed another issue. A large nodule had formed on the left side of his thyroid. Eventually, surgery became necessary.

It wouldn’t be his first stint in the OR, but it would be the first one he remembered.

Twenty-four years ago, Sam was born with congenital diaphragmatic hernia. A hole had formed in his diaphragm during gestation, allowing his stomach and intestines to move into his chest cavity, crowding his heart and lungs.

At 3 days old, he underwent surgery to repair the hole in his diaphragm. After a three-week stay in the neonatal intensive care unit at Sacred Heart, we brought him home.

His recovery was nothing short of miraculous, but any mom will tell you that the trauma of being separated from your newborn is one that lingers.

That’s why when his thyroid surgery was scheduled for Jan. 9, Derek and I immediately booked a flight and reserved a hotel room. Sam insisted that we didn’t need to come. It was outpatient surgery, and friends offered to drive him and care for him post-op.

You’d think he’d know me better by now. No child of mine is going to recover from an operation without my homemade chicken noodle soup to speed up the healing process. Maybe you can mail soup, but you can’t Fed Ex mom’s kisses and hugs.

Besides, I hadn’t been to his new home. Derek had moved him, but I longed to see his apartment and city. I wanted to visit his office and meet his colleagues and friends,

We arrived in Texas on a blissfully sunny day. While the temps in Spokane steadily dropped, Sam showed us his favorite haunts and took me on a walk at Odessa’s Memorial Gardens Park, where the thermometer topped 67 degrees.

The next day, we visited his workplace. We met his dean and the colleagues we’d heard so much about. The college sports a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and Anne Hathaway’s cottage on the campus. Shakespeare in West Texas!

That evening, I cooked a giant batch of soup – enough to see him through his recovery, with extra to stash in his freezer.

His surgery took place in San Angelo – a two-hour drive from Odessa. We met with the surgeon, who explained that the nodule would be biopsied while Sam was on the operating table. If it was cancerous, they’d remove his entire thyroid. If it wasn’t, only the left side would be removed.

I paced the hospital halls while we waited, beset with memories of my newborn, intubated, isolated, in a NICU room filled with machines that kept him alive. While I knew this surgery wasn’t remotely as serious, it was difficult for me to separate the images of my helpless baby from the independent 6-foot-2-inch young man he’d become.

Finally, the surgeon met us in the waiting room. He said the surgery went “perfectly,” and there was no sign of cancer. A blood check at his post-op visit will show if Sam needs to take medication or if his remaining thyroid would produce enough hormones.

A few hours later, our son was eating chicken noodle soup at home. His incision was sore, and his throat hurt, but other than that, he felt OK.

In fact, the next day, he insisted on taking us to his favorite walking trail at the University of Texas Permian Basin. He and I walked a windy 3-mile loop, pausing to take in the student-built Stonehenge replica, view the cactus garden and peer at the George H. W. Bush house. Bush moved to the 800-square-foot house in Odessa with his bride Barbara and 2-year-old son George W. in 1948. In 2004, the house was relocated to its current site at UTPB.

Sam slowed down a bit after that outing, but we spent plenty of time soaking in the warm Texas sun on his veranda and we got in a few more walks.

While he fretted about the time and expense of our trip, he was glad we came. At the airport, he enveloped me in a huge hug.

“Thank you for the soup and for taking care of me, Mom,” he said.

The truth is I couldn’t NOT be there. Though once he fit snuggly in my arms and now he towers over me, he’ll always be my baby boy.

Just don’t tell his students that.

Cindy Hval can be reached at dchval@juno.com. Hval is the author of “War Bonds: Love Stories from the Greatest Generation” (Casemate Publishers, 2015) available at Auntie’s Bookstore and bookstores nationwide.