Working Day
by
Jeff Stimpson
Jeff's wife Jill
contributes this month's essay.
Here’s something I didn’t know: when you call an
ambulance for your child in New York City, they send the police.
It’s 6 am or so, and we’ve been up since about 5
with Alex, who is not well, but until now has followed his usual
pattern of being reasonably perky, jumping into bed with us,
coughing loudly, and expelling some mucus that he’s swallowed.
Expelling mucus really means gagging and vomiting, since he swallows
it, but it’s all mucus. For about half an hour I console myself as I
often do with the thought that we’ll eventually all go back to sleep
before the alarm goes off at 6:30.
Just as I’m feeling calm and reassured that it is
just the usual cough-gag-spit routine, he does something he has only
done once before: stops gagging, but becomes unresponsive and
vacant. He is unable to walk. The last time he did this, over a year
ago, I thought he was choking on something. I swept his mouth with
my finger, accidentally triggering his gag reflex and making him
vomit. The minute he did, he came back, rubbing my hand, eyes
closed. He slept peacefully after that.
This time he is silent. While Jeff holds him I try
slipping my fingers in his mouth but his teeth are lightly but
insistently closed. A few minutes later his arm starts to twitch. We
call his doctor and hit the button for the emergency pickup and
leave an urgent message for a doctor to call back. Now all his limbs
are twitching, and we stare at each other and call 911.
I make the call. While I’m explaining Alex’s
situation to the man who answers the phone, I’m aware of how calm I
am. While we’re talking call waiting beeps. It’s an associate of
Alex’s doctor, who tells us we should definitely bring Alex to the
ER. I think we tell him we’ll go to Columbia, and he says he’ll tell
them to expect us. I think. Things happen, and in five seconds
they’re forgotten as we are swept into more things, much more than
usually happens before we’ve had coffee.
Jeff is wearing sweat pants and a T-shirt, and I’m
in whatever I was sleeping in, so I throw on clothes and decide to
go down to the lobby so the EMT’s won’t have to stop at the front
desk.
The elevator doors are just opening on the ground
floor when I see the flashing lights and the approach of the second
vehicle, a police car. That’s odd, I think to myself, maybe they
have the wrong address, but keep walking outside anyway to find the
ambulance crew. I greet everyone -- two EMT’s, three cops -- and
they follow me in. One of the cops is a woman, and she’s the one who
stands next to me and asks me what’s been going. Does my son have
any unusual history? I pause, realize a pause looks suspicious, and
tell her I’m trying to think how to explain this concisely. Realize
that telling her I’m trying to think sounds suspicious. Tell her my
son has a complicated medical history, and that he’s had some
breathing problems, but nothing like this, which we think is a
seizure.
We come in – six adults – and I wish I’d spent
more time cleaning up. Alex is quiet now and the twitching and
shaking (five minutes? ten?) has stopped. Jeff and the paramedics
and I watch him sleeping. One muscle in his cheek is still jumping.
They agree it looks like the aftermath of a seizure, and then one of
them starts tossing around terms I know (grand mal) as well as some
I don’t (Jacksonian). I’m floored. We’re well-versed in problems of
the lung and the airway. We can banter about atelectesis and
reactive airway disease but we didn’t expect to be learning new
terms after six years.
Even though we’re 10 blocks from a hospital, I
dread having to deal with doctors and staff who are condescending
and unsympathetic. We ask if we can be taken to Columbia, where Alex
spent five months, but the three of us were treated with kindness
and respect, and the EMTs say they’ll take us wherever we want to
go.
The view of streets at dawn, two days before
Christmas, from the unexpected height of the back of the ambulance,
makes everything look unfamiliar. Though I’m 15, 20, 30 blocks from
home, I feel like I’m in a strange city. Alex sleeps.
When we get to the hospital, he wakes up briefly,
which I think is a good sign, but he continues to be drowsy and
cooperative as we meet nurses and doctors we’ll see just once.
First we see Kevin, a resident, who wants to know
a lot of details. Where did the twitching first start? Left side?
Right side? Did it stay on one side of the body, or move to both?
Feeling stupidly unobservant (had I been more worried about getting
dressed or making coffee or sticking a fork in the pot roast I’d
made in slow cooker the night before than watching my son have a
seizure?) I keep saying, “I think so, I’m not sure.” I seem to be
saying “uh...” even more than usual. Kevin says, “That’s all right.
People are going to ask you the same things over and over again.
Don’t worry about not remembering everything.”
Dr. Teng is the attending. He wants to know if I
need anything. Because he really seems to want me to want something
I say I’d like some water, and he says, I’ll get you a cup of water!
As Alex wakes up a bit and starts to want to
leave, Dr. Teng finds us a room with a TV. He has it turned on to
the Disney channel, and Alex, who hates anything unfamiliar, cries
and goes back to sleep. We’re in a much bigger cubicle now,
practically a room, and I start craving sleep, or at least coffee.
Jeff and I have talked by cell phone (how did we get through those
months of hospitalization without a cell? Better yet, why did we?)
and I estimate I have another 45 minutes before he arrives and I can
go out for coffee.
Once Jeff arrives I can go to the bathroom and
leave the hospital. Alex is glad to see him and continues to sleep
on and off, in part, I think, because he’s had a seizure, and in
part because life has suddenly become so strange that it’s wise to
just sleep until things go back to usual.
Before I left home I put in contact lenses, but
did not put on socks or stockings. Luckily it is unseasonably warm:
low 50s. So when I go out for coffee from El Presidente (reliably
fabulous) I do not freeze. Come back with coffees, two bacon and egg
sandwiches covered with gooey cheese (ugh), which Jeff loves.
Our neuro consult takes place with two fellows. We
estimate they were in their last year of medical school, possibly
interning, the year Alex was born. They ask the questions we’ve been
answering for six hours, then ask some general stuff about his
development. “Does he go to any kind of school?” one of them
wonders, hands apart, shrugging slightly at how improbable this
seems. I look at her, amazed. Does she think we keep him chained to
a bed all day? Or that no school exists that could teach my
deranged, semi-verbal son?
“What do you think? Of course he goes to school.”
I widen my eyes to the same degree as hers. Good, I’ve embarrassed
them. They start fumbling for excuses. “Well, you’d be surprised,”
they say. “We see all kinds.” “Yes, but look at us. Do we look like
we don’t send our son to school?”
Alex will have a CT scan today, and they want him
to come back for an MRI. “He’ll be sedated for that,” they assure
us. “Even normal kids need sedation for an MRI.” I just can’t let
this go, this “normal” comment, and I say, trying to smile
pleasantly. I think I succeed in looking merely civil. “Just a tip,”
I say. “We say ‘typical’ or typically developing.’”
Everyone always seems so official and important in
a hospital, but it’s just their working day. All around you are not
medical miracles or life-and-death struggles, but mundane events:
prickly parents, patients with complications of diabetes and
obesity, nurses on coffee breaks, the banal DNA of a weekday. We
spend eight hours in the hospital and never get the overruns of an
outbreak of hemorrhagic fevers or a devastating fire or train wreck.
I overhear a cop on the phone in the adult emergency room, where
we’re having Alex’s CT scan: “Can I use my husband’s employee ID
number on the phone to get the employee discount? No? Oh.” She hangs
up, disappointed. In the hall are several people on stretchers,
waiting, dozing.
In the emergency room, we’re suddenly homeless. We
have to take all our stuff from place to place, from cubicle to
cubicle to CT scan area. We do ordinary things in odd places. In the
bathroom I wash myself and change my underwear, which I’ve had the
foresight to bring with me.
The CT technician is impassive, consents to
letting me try to sing Alex to sleep for the CT scan. Ordinarily I
don’t like anyone to hear me sing, but Alex has requested a song, so
I sing the fairly creepy song “Down in the Valley” (valley so low...
bend your head low, dear .... hear the wind blow). I might be alone
in thinking this is being sung by a man in jail to the girl he
murdered.
Finally, leaving CT scan I am actually WHEELING
our stuff, which is now a pile of crap: two leather jackets, Alex’s
sweatshirt, the NY Times, Jeff’s baseball cap and a precious
Styrofoam cup from the kitchen area, Jeff’s bag, my purse, Alex’s
bookbag) in a wheelchair. I’m like an old woman with a ratty old
stroller or shopping cart.
The day is ordinary in many ways. We drink coffee,
read the Times, chat about this and that. Now it hits us why the
police would show up when you call 911 and say you need an ambulance
for your child. Observations about hospital stuff can wait till
later, and if Jeff sees the same things I see I won’t know about it
until he writes something.
Copyright 2004 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
