The Chaos Test
Chicken and Broccoli
I wrote about the number. 240. The scale in the doctor’s office, the shame, the decision. If you read that, you know what happened next: chicken thighs, broccoli, butter. Every meal. Every day. The most boring system I could build.
What I didn’t tell you is why I started when I did.
Erin’s second spinal fusion was scheduled for that fall. C5 through C7, three levels this time. Her first fusion had been one level, and six weeks later she was cliff-jumping in Jamaica. This one was going to be different. More levels, more hardware, more recovery. I knew I was going to be the one holding everything together when she came home, and I knew I couldn’t do that while also fighting through keto adaptation. The headaches, the brain fog, the body being confused and angry for a week while it figures out new fuel. That had to be done before she went under. Not during.
So I started early. Got through the rough part. Built the system. Chicken in containers, pre-cooked, portioned, ready. By the time surgery came, nutrition was on autopilot. One entire category of daily decisions, gone.
That was the plan.
Then my daughter called.
Thursday night. 10:30. I’m in bed with Erin, half watching TV, about to fall asleep. My phone lights up. Ella, FaceTime.
When your kid calls from Christopher Newport at 10:30 on a Thursday, it’s not to chat. Something broke, someone crashed, there’s a problem to solve. I answered already knowing.
She was standing on the rugby field, ice pack on her face, stadium lights behind her. “Dad, I hit my head really hard and it hurts really bad. They said I failed the concussion test.” Then: “I do NOT FAIL TESTS!”
That’s when I knew it was bad.
The drive was an hour and fifteen minutes. I don’t remember what I was thinking. I just drove. When I got there, her teammates had been taking care of her. She was loopy. Kept saying the same thing over and over: “Don’t forget my wallet charger.” Mixing up two thoughts. Don’t forget my wallet. Don’t forget my charger. The concussion had jammed them together and she couldn’t tell.
I had a quiet laugh in my head. I’m kind of your wallet charger, kid.
The dad jokes don’t stop. Not even at midnight. Not even with an injured kid.
We took her to the doctor the next morning. The concussion seemed manageable, but her teeth weren’t lining up. Her jaw was off. They sent us for X-rays. That facility was closed. Broken equipment. So we drove downtown to VCU Medical because they had the best care in the area.
VCU is the only Level 1 trauma center in the region. The most severe cases end up there. This was still close enough to COVID that Ella had to sit in the ER waiting room alone. I was upstairs. She’s texting me: “This place is scary.” Men in orange jumpsuits, handcuffed to wheelchairs with armed guards. A woman screaming somewhere down the hall. My kid is nineteen, alone in the middle of that with a head injury.
The X-rays came back. Four skull fractures.
Orbital socket. Maxillary sinus. Zygomatic arch, which was the one pushing her jaw out of alignment. And a small fracture at the back of the skull.
Four. From a rugby hit.
The options: go home and come back to the clinic in a week, or check in and wait for an operating room. The surgery itself was minor. Small incision, pop the bone back, let it heal. But she was a junior at Christopher Newport, an hour and a half away. A week of waiting and another long drive wasn’t going to work. She had a semester to finish.
So we checked in. Over the weekend, the critical cases take priority. Everything else waits. They told us an OR probably wouldn’t open until Monday. It was Friday.
The shared room was rough. A woman on the other side of the curtain, crying out in pain. I had empathy for her. I also had a daughter who needed rest.
Erin had the cheat code. She disappeared for a while and came back with a private suite. Turns out the hospital had a set of them, basically a luxury hotel room attached to the building. Chef who cooked from a menu. Extra cost, about what you’d pay for a nice hotel night. We paid it. Worth every cent.
On top of the cheat code, Erin did most of the shifts with Ella. She was the one sitting with her, staying overnight, making sure she was okay. I’d come in, swap out, bring my containers of chicken and broccoli. The system didn’t stop because my daughter was in the hospital. The containers just moved to a different building.
Monday morning, surgery. When they wheeled her back in afterward, still coming out of anesthesia, she put both arms up and said: “What’s up, bitches?”
That’s my kid.
We got her home. Got her recovered. Got her back to school. She couldn’t drive for a while, concussion protocol. She finished the semester on the Dean’s List. She finished all five years of college. She’s a tough, smart kid, and I’m proud of her.
A couple of weeks later, it was time for the surgery we’d been bracing for since summer. Erin’s spinal fusion.
Three levels. A surgeon going in through the front of her neck to work on her spine.
I thought I was ready. I’d planned for this. Built the food system early specifically so I’d have capacity when this moment came.
I wasn’t ready.
Ella’s situation had used up the reserve. I didn’t know I had a finite amount of “handle it” in the tank, but I did, and the surprise crisis had drained most of it. By the time Erin’s surgery came, I was running on fumes and pretending I wasn’t.
Here’s the thing about Erin. She’s an empath. She knows when something’s off before I say a word. So the brave face doesn’t work. It never works with her. If I tell her everything’s fine when it isn’t, that’s worse than the truth, because now she’s reading two signals and they don’t match. That costs her more energy than honesty would.
So I told her. I love you. I’m worried about losing you. You’re going to be okay. This is just anxiety talking.
She’d had surgery before that went sideways. A shoulder procedure that was supposed to be a quick fix. She woke up and they’d done a full rotator cuff repair because what they found was worse than what the scans showed. Six-month recovery instead of six weeks. That history was in the room with us. She had reason to be nervous. She was braver about it than me.
Sitting in that waiting room, the fear hit places I don’t usually let it reach. Tight chest. Mind running scenarios. What if something goes wrong. What happens to the kids. I lost my mom young. My dad too. The fear of losing someone isn’t theoretical for me. It knows where I live. And when you’re already running on empty from the last crisis, the basement door doesn’t hold as well as it usually does.
I kept it together. Mostly.
She came through. The surgeon was the best in the area, someone we’d found through a chain of connections that started with a coworker’s wife. That helped, knowing she was in the best hands available. But knowing doesn’t stop the feeling. The feeling runs whether you want it to or not.
The relief when they told me she was okay. I don’t have a word for it. A full-body exhale I’d been holding for hours.
Getting her home was hard. Getting up the stairs was hard. The neck brace, the doctor’s appointments, the food, helping her wash, helping with everything. Weeks of it.
None of it was a burden. I want that on the record. Taking care of her was the whole point. That’s what I was there for.
But here’s what I noticed. The fear became an anchor. On the days when patience wore thin, when the caregiving was exhausting and the house was chaos and I was running on nothing, I’d remember the waiting room. The tight chest. The “what if I lose her.” And the frustration would shrink. Not disappear. Shrink enough to keep going without being an ass about it.
No one has infinite patience. But the memory of almost-loss is a hell of a recalibration tool.
The food system, boring as it was, turned out to be a kind of comfort. Not the food itself. The absence of decisions. I didn’t have to think about what to eat. I didn’t have to plan meals or shop for myself. That cognitive space went straight to the things that actually mattered. Taking care of Erin. Taking care of the kids. Keeping the house standing.
The system didn’t hold because conditions were right. Conditions were terrible. The system held because it was simple enough to survive conditions being terrible.
Life ran a chaos test on my system. The system passed because there was almost nothing to break.
That’s the design constraint most people miss. They build plans that require motivation, clear calendars, and optimal conditions. Then life hits and the plan collapses, and they call it a discipline problem.
It’s not a discipline problem. It’s a design problem.
Jocko Willink lays out his clothes the night before so he doesn’t have to think at 4:30 in the morning. He just executes the plan. That’s not about being tough. That’s about being smart enough to know your future self will be tired, distracted, and looking for an excuse. So you do your future self a favor. You remove the friction before it arrives.
That’s what the chicken and broccoli was. A favor to a version of me I couldn’t see yet. A version sitting in a hospital room, running on empty, scared of losing his wife. That guy didn’t have the bandwidth to figure out dinner. He just needed to open a container.
People tell themselves they’ll start when things settle down. I’ve said it too. But things don’t settle down. There is no steady state. There’s just the next thing, and the next thing after that, and the thing you didn’t see coming at 10:30 on a Thursday night.
If I had waited for the right time, I wouldn’t have had the system running when my daughter broke her face. I wouldn’t have had it running when my wife went in for spinal surgery. I would have been trying to build the plane while it was already on fire.
Your future self is counting on you. Don’t make him clean up your mess.
Simple things that are difficult. We make them needlessly complicated. Start boring. Start now.
There is no right time. There’s just time.
Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.