Doctor Stradling

It’s done, by God. Adam Stradling is now Doctor Adam Stradling.

I think Adam was about fifteen years old when he realized he wanted to be a physical therapist. His dad cut off all the fingers on his right hand in a construction accident. My father-in-law is not a swearing man, but he did say “Oh, flip” and flick his fingers right after the saw went through the bone, spattering Adam with blood. Other than that moment, Dad was cool as a cucumber the entire time.

My husband spent a few frantic minutes looking for his dad’s digits, which he stashed in an empty sandwich bag. My father-in-law’s boss was on-site and drove them like a bat outta Hell to Payson, AZ, which had the closest ER. At some point the boss (also a Mormon man) put his hands on my father-in-law’s head in a priesthood blessing and promised that Dad would recover full use of his hand.

Because life is ridiculous and God is also good, the best hand surgeon in the state was in the hospital, doing rounds as a favor while he was up from Phoenix to escape the heat. In comes my father-in-law, with his baggie full of fingers. The surgeon said he wasn’t sure he could save Dad’s fingers, and Dad told him that he’d been prayed over and promised by God that his hand would be preserved. The doctor was non-committal but said he would do his best.

The surgery lasted six hours, the first hour of which Dad was watching with interest as the man stitched and pulled. (The surgeon, surprisingly, agreed to only use local anesthesia when Dad asked if he could watch.) At some point, things were getting complicated so the surgeon told my father-in-law he needed to knock him out. When my father-in-law came to a few hours later, his fingers were all attached. The surgeon said things had gone surprisingly well. Dad was unsurprised.

When they went back home, Dad began an intensive hand recovery regime, which was possible because one of the few PTs who specialized in hand injury lived in their same town and went to church with them. For months Adam drove his dad to his PT appointments and yes, Dad regained full use of his hand.

In 2008, we were newly married and Adam had just begun a semester of nursing classes at the local community college. I was talking about our finances and our future and Adam said, shame-faced, “I don’t think I want to be a nurse. I want to be a physical therapist.”

I was like, “Great! Drop out.”

“But we already spent the money on tuition,” he said.

“Who cares?” I said. (I was making $45K a year at the time and was flush with cash.) “No sense completing a class when you know you won’t use it. See if you can switch classes or just do some next semester.” And after that discussion, as Stephen King said in “On Writing,” we probably got friendly. The die was cast. Adam was going to be a PT.

He made the decision to be a PTA instead when he realized how competitive PT school was, and how expensive. There was a program in Phoenix and he was accepted in 2010. When we moved, I was about four months pregnant with our first child.

I delivered our baby in the middle of the next semester. We were in the hot tub at our apartment complex to try to induce labor, and I remember Adam putting his forehead to my belly and saying, “I have a long weekend, so you need to go ahead and come out now.” Our firstborn was earthside by the next morning.

Adam spent those years during his PTA degree leaving home at 5 a.m. to ride the lightrail to work an early shift at Barrows. Then he had classes from 9 to noon, then would sometimes go work a second shift, then come home around 6 p.m. Some days I would walk down to the lightrail station with a baby strapped to my chest and walk him back home again. We were so poor and so happy, and our baby was the best and smartest little guy who ever breathed.

Our son had a baby friend in our apartment complex (his parents were another set of lifelong friends). We would rotate making dinners in each other’s apartments, or take the babies swimming in the complex pool and then bathe them together. Once we borrowed a tandem bike from yet another set of friends who had a toddler so they’d installed a baby seat on it. We took our baby to Pete’s Fish and Chips, to the Mesa Temple grounds to pick some oranges, and then ended up at another friend’s house to chat and raid their fridge for sodas. Their daughter was our son’s other baby friend.

In 2012, Adam graduated with his PTA, then took the licensing exam. He held it all together until he knew for sure he had passed the exam, then had a panic attack. To calm down, Adam went out for a run along the back streets around our apartment and ended with a dip in the complex pool, fully clothed.

We decided to move to Virginia for fun when I was pregnant with my second kid. Financially that was a bad move, as Adam had a bad and dishonest boss who I will curse until my dying breath, but when we left VA two years later we were many friends richer. Back to Arizona, where I would deliver my third baby only 18 months after my second.

Now for Adam’s second round of school: an online bachelors degree now in preparation for PT school applications, and learning to hate online school. I delivered our third baby, and she came slightly dented from the factory. She almost died in the hospital the day Adam graduated with his bachelor’s degree, four months later. We spent the next fifteen months in a terrifying merry-go-round of hospital visits and doctor appointments while we tried to figure out how to keep her healthy. Eventually she got surgery and got stable, and I turned my high-vibration worry to Adam’s educational path.

“You need to keep going and get your PT degree,” I said. “You’re so close now.”

Adam refused. No matter how much I wept or cajoled or raged, he was adamant that he couldn’t do it. He could never go back to school.

I was so upset by this that I called my friend complaining, and she and her husband met me at a Freddy’s for dinner. I spent twenty minutes crying and swearing into my basket of delicious shoestring fries, and when I stopped for breath she said, “Adam is a really great guy, and he’s a really great dad.”

“Yeah,” I said, shoving in another three fries.

“And he really likes you, a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said, frowning. I didn’t like where this was going.

Here she pointed one finger across my table. “And you’d better not do anything to screw that up.”

I sat back in the booth, chastened. She and her husband tag-teamed through their story of hardship and going-back-to-school and finding satisfaction and success on their own, and independently of each other. She made me see how selfish I was being, and how hard Adam had tried, and that I needed to leave it the hell alone.

I went back home and put my arms around Adam’s neck and apologized. I said I’d never bring up school again, and I didn’t. For three years.

We had another baby, who came not fully cooked. I spent a month on hospital bedrest, then a month on regular bedrest, then a month after her delivery living in a Ronald McDonald house, then a month commuting from one town to another while she learned to swallow in our local hospital. I prayed fervently to the Lord to please be done having babies, and He said, “You’re good, you did your time.” I gleefully gave away every baby thing I had.

In 2017 I started googling military PT schools, as cost of PT school had been a deterrent to us in the past. I found there was one in Texas, in San Antonio. I showed my phone screen to Adam and said, “I promise you I’m not emotionally attached to this, and you can say no. But what do you think about trying for this program?”

Adam’s face lit up. “I’d say yes, I want to try it.”

We were set up for round three. The first half of 2017, Adam lived 100 miles away from Monday to Thursday so he could work part-time and do classes at two different community colleges. (Most of his prerequisites had expired at this point.) He rented a room near one of the colleges and experienced the Sleep of No Responsibility three nights a week, which he badly needed. Then he would come home Friday afternoons and we would play and snuggle Daddo all weekend until Monday morning.

In 2018, we ran off to Texas without a job or a place to live. Looking back, we were so sure that we needed to rush out of town and that, with the Lord’s help, we would stick the landing. We felt that calm and confident.

We did not, in fact, stick the landing. Adam’s promised job fell through and we spent three weeks holed up in a seedy motel while Adam looked for work. He got a job, and we got a house to rent just down the street from the school. We also got a dog. Adam continued piecing together classes at another local community college, and in 2019 he began to apply to PT schools.

It took three rounds of applications, but Adam was accepted at the end of 2019 to a school in Austin. We decided to move and buy our first home, which we did in two months into lockdown in 2020. (To be frank, that’s probably how we qualified for the loan; for once, the banks were desperate.)

Adam sat me down right before classes started in May 2020. “Honey, I can’t work and go to school at the same time,” he said. “I need you to go back to work.” I agreed, and with my brother’s help I started networking. My very first networking call was to a friend of my other brother’s, and I knew it would be okay to call him, but I still crawled into bed and sobbed for a while in fear before I dialed his number.

The call went fine. Subsequent calls to other, scarier people went fine. I was eventually offered a job, which I gratefully accepted.

I had been working about two months when Adam contracted Covid. He spent a month in bed upstairs. If he stood too long or walked too far or climbed the stairs, he would go grey in the face and shaky and sweaty, and have to crash on the couch for a nap. I white-knuckled through that summer, trying to get back to working all the while fearing that Adam was on his deathbed.

A month later, Adam made like Lazarus and started to begin recovery, a process which is not yet completed. A few weeks after that, I realized I was pregnant again. Through tears of rage and fear I yelled at God, because I believe on a fundamental level that every day is a good day to yell at God. “You promised me! You said I was done!”

“Don’t worry,” He said. “You’re in for something extremely normal.”

God was right. I had a textbook pregnancy except for a bit of high blood pressure right at the end. I delivered her in a comforting glow of drugs, my first epidural baby. She was fat and pink and perfect, and bald as a jug.

I was still nursing her when I left my first job and dove into my second, better paid and sexier job. That was a whirlwind year-and-change, where I learned that I am a good project manager, and also that I was not cool enough for that job. Which: fair.

I had learned skillz at my sexy job, but was let go with severance, and the clock started ticking. Somewhere during that time Adam dipped too far in his grades and was kicked out of school, and we spent a few months in a haze of grief (Adam) and anger (me) until, miracle of miracles, Adam was re-admitted. Around the same time I got my third job, much less sexy and more corporate, but where I am happily ensconced today, doing my little job behind the scenes.

Which brings us to today.

Today (yesterday, technically), I walked with Adam across the stage. He knelt while I hooded him. We smiled with the dean for the camera. I held back my sobs until we were safely back in our seats and we clapped for our graduates.

If there is one man on this green earth who deserves his laurels, who deserves to be showered in good chocolate and medium-rare steak and a decent pair of running shoes, who deserves financial stability and a chance to rest, it’s this man. It’s my Adam, who kept sloughing through for so many years, continuously denying himself while still raising up our family and paying the bills. Becoming a working mom was a necessary shift for me, in that it made me a better and less insane mom, but it’s been one of the greatest honors of my life to financially support my husband during this time.

Now please clap, dammit. Clap until your palms tingle for Dr. Adam Stradling, the oldest student in his cohort and the one with the most children by at least a factor of two.

Give it up for this man!

Also if you want to bless him with cash, you absolutely can on Venmo @laurie-stradling, Paypal, or CashApp. If you don’t have those apps or whatever you can DM me, because I am serious about spoiling this man. He never spends money on himself and I want to buy him a fancy pair of running shoes.