For Gary Riekes

In 2014, my son Wilson broke both of his arms — wildly displacing one of them — at his twelfth birthday party. Instead of cutting cake and opening gifts, we spent the next seven hours in the Stanford Emergency Room. During our time there, doctors straddled the gurney and yanked Wilson’s arm bones back straight, took X-rays, and applied temporary splints. They also worked on another twelve-year-old boy, who had attempted suicide, on the other side of our…