electric mist

pins & needles & milestones

Sometimes I look around, and I wonder how on earth I got here... a woman with two grown sons. I'm too young for that. (No, really. I started at two.) (Well, okay. Twenty. I had Luke when I was twenty, and to this day, I am amazed they let me take an actual living, breathing child home with me, as clueless as I was. Utterly, totally, clueless.)

I read things like Lizbeth's entry about how difficult parenting can be sometimes and how reading other blogs helps, or how dooce talks about fighting off depression amidst the joy of having a child, of constantly worrying if you're doing things right, or doing enough, and trying so hard not to lose yourself in process... and I am comforted. I wish women like these, and Tamar and so many others had been online when my kids were little. Hell, I wish there had even been an online. Amazing how ancient that feels, when it was really only a few years ago.

What I remember most is the isolation: it seemed almost complete as soon as I had Luke. I was a very young mother, and we moved away from the small town I had grown up in and into the city, in a neighborhood of middle-aged people with grown kids, and lots of older people and only a handful of young parents sprinkled throughout... and most of those were way more corporate than I could be (or wanted to be, I so rebelled against the corporate structure). I was so constantly alone with the kids, and trying to work from home (both doing the books / answering the phone for our fledgeling construction business and trying to write... both solo types of tasks), I sometimes felt like I had gone for days and days without any real interaction with other moms. Mostly, I just felt scared -- scared that I was going to screw up, scared that I wasn't going to do a good job as a mom, scared that in some way I wouldn't know what to do when it was critical.

It's every mother's nightmare, I suppose, and I remember the morning it hit home with the force of a nuclear explosion. Jake (4) and Luke (8) had eaten with Carl's parents the night before, and my mother-in-law noticed that Jake was cranky and his left eyelid looked "heavy." Not swollen, or anything obvious -- she was worried that maybe in one of their battles (and at that age, the boys had taken to a lot of battling), Luke may have bopped Jake in the eye. We looked at it, decided that it was nothing, and they went home. Carl was out of town, and there I was with two cranky, grumpy boys, trying to convince them to get to bed early without knocking each other senseless (they shared a room). It took a while (baths, battle, bed, battle, begging for snacks and milk, finally bed)... and I collapsed in exhaustion.

The screaming woke me up.

Just after six a.m., screams pierced my consciousness, and I slammed out of bed on a dead run before I had even opened my eyes. A second later, I was standing over Jake, trying to grasp what I was seeing, and for a long moment, my brain just wouldn't accept the image or allow it to form into any sort of comprehension. And then suddenly, I saw: Jake's left eye was completely swollen shut; it was purple and black and he was burning up with fever. I took his temperature -- not easy with a screaming four-year-old -- and the temp was 104. Freaked does not begin to explain the surreal feeling of absolute shock that tightens every muscle, shutting down the lungs until your brain screams at you to get moving, get something done.

I frantically called the doctor; Patti had been my friend through high school and we'd grown up in the same neighborhood. I'd been in her wedding, and when she went into medicine and announced it would be pediatrics, I knew I'd bring my kids to her as soon as she opened her doors. She is the type of person who flat does not accept second best as a possibility, and knowing that about her made me feel safe with her guarding my kids. Of course, at six a.m., I got the answering service, who transferred me to a nurse... who told me I was being over-anxious. That 104 isn't that horrible for a kid, and I just needed to give him some children's Tylenol. The earliest appointment she could give me was for 11:00 -- and she was going to have to "work me in" even at that time (translation: I would sit in the office until 12:30 when Patti had finished with everyone who'd had appointments.) I didn't think 11:00 was early enough, but she assured me it was probably just a bug bite, that "you young mothers" all just worry over nothing.

I hung up feeling like a moron, and feeling... insulted. I was young, yes, but Jake was my second child and I wasn't the total novice she thought. So I seethed... but I followed her instructions and gave him the children's Tylenol. His fever kept going up. I called Carl, who was freaked out himself but trying to be calm to help me not panic. He reminded me about putting Jake in a cool bath to bring it down, which worked -- temporarily. And the fever started spiking up again. I gave him alcohol rubs, and it would cool him off a bit, but the fever would climb. By 7:30, I noticed he was getting unresponsive, which scared the absolute hell out of me.

I called the nurse back, and she was more than a little annoyed. I insisted that he wasn't doing well, and she just as forcefully insisted that I come in at 11:00 and they would check him over.

I hung up, took his temperature again, realized it was still going up in spite of everything and decided, fuck the nurse, I was bringing Jake in.

He passed out on our way over there. Luke was in the back seat, quietly freaking out because he thought Jake was dying, and I was trying to drive in morning rush hour traffic to get Jake to Patti's office. When I walked in with him limp in my arms, the same nurse greeted me -- and on hearing my name, was pissed that I had come in at 8:00 instead of 11:00 as she had instructed me. She told me to have a seat and she would let Patti know I was there.

I kicked the door open to the doctor's area and started shouting for Patti. Patti came out of a room and took one look at us across the vast nurse's area... and ran.

Patti never runs. She's got a degenerative spinal disease, and running is horrible for her. But she ran, and scooped him out of my arms and starting hammering me with questions -- but she froze a moment when she saw the eye.

I explained when I had first called... and what the nurse had said. The nurse was standing there apologizing... to Patti -- for "letting a patient interrupt her"... (I heard Patti fire her later when I was leaving).

Patti suspected meningitis, and she was worried that we had waited too long to come in. Apparently, one of the warning signs of a child having meningitis can be a swollen and/or discolored eyelid, and as she told the nurse, "it's one of the true pediatric emergencies" and that the nurse should have known that.

She ran with Jake back to an examining room and after checking him, pulled me into another room.

I used to make mud pies with Patti in our back yard when we were kids. We were perhaps five (me) and seven (her) and we would make these elaborate pies and try to figure out a way to con the boys into buying one. Never in my life could I have imagined that one day I would be sitting across from her as she explained to me that she was going to have to do a spinal tap on my child, and that there was the possibility that she could hurt him -- and that the possibility meant she had to explain to me that she could cause him to be paralyzed or have brain damage or any number of things. Or even die. She didn't believe it would happen, but she felt sure that the meningitis was too far along and she needed that spinal tap now -- there wasn't enough time for them to order it at the emergency room.

The world lost focus while she talked. Everything went hazy, and the sound traveled for miles and miles before it reached my brain. My baby. My baby was screaming in the other room and I had to give permission to my friend to put a big needle into his back, draw spinal fluid, and possibly hurt him permanently. How was I supposed to think in a moment like that?

I couldn't. I called Carl to tell him what was going on, and he was out of his mind with fear -- because he didn't know Patti the way I did, and he didn't have that same level of trust, and he was out of town and could hear Jake's screams from the other room over my phone.

They wouldn't let me in the examination room when they did the spinal tap. When I was anywhere near him, he would wrench away from everyone with such force trying to get to me, it took four of them to hold him, and Patti needed him absolutely still.

I died out in that hallway, hearing him scream with such force.

Patti came out, handed me the spinal tap container and said, "You have to go to the pediatric emergency entrance at the Lake. It's on the second floor -- DO NOT stop to go to admitting or anywhere else, and don't let anyone slow you down. Look, Toni, run red lights -- just get there as soon as you can. We don't have time to get an ambulence here to get you and bring you. Do you understand?"

I nodded. I carried Jake, who was sobbing and still burning with fever. Eight-year-old Luke -- in shock, I am sure -- carried the spinal tap container with the full appreciation of how careful he had to be.

I ran red lights. I had my flashers on, and someone had handed me a white handkerchief on my way out of the doctor's office, and I would wave that and honk the horn and people would get out of my way. I made it there in stunning record time and we ran to the pediatric emergency entrance.

Patti had called ahead, and they were waiting for us. They grabbed Jake, they grabbed the spinal tap container from Luke and ran. One of the doctors there ran out to me and said, "Look -- we're pretty sure it's meningitis -- the question is only if it crossed the blood/brain barrier and if so, by how much. We'll know how brain damaged he's going to be when we get that report back. Meanwhile, we've got to start an IV in him -- we're going to give him the strongest antibiotic there is in a drip to stop it wherever it is. Do you understand?"

how brain damanged... floated around me, spinning, spinning, and I nodded. how brain damaged...

I had called my parents when I had left the house for Patti's... and Carl called them back to tell them about the spinal tap and me having to hurry to the emergency room. My dad had left work right then and gotten there just a second or two after the doctor explained the need for the IV, and the nurse came out to tell me they couldn't get an IV in Jake -- that he was screaming so hard and wrenching himself away from them so much, they had decided that if I was there, holding him down, maybe that would work. Dad came to the back with me (and I think poor Luke was back there, too, because I had nowhere to leave him) and I honestly think if Dad hadn't been there, we wouldn't have gotten that IV in. Dad -- 6'2" and extremely strong -- had to take all of his strength to hold Jake down and calm him, as I was trying to do.

We got the IV in, they started the antibiotic drip, and we had to wait for the report to come back. We were moved to a room, and it seems like I had been there for a lifetime, watching the too-still body of my exhausted, sick child swallowed in this huge hospital bed, when the doctor finally came in.

It was definitely meningitis. And of the two bacterial types, it was the worst one -- the most aggressive. Had he been younger, the doctor said, he probably wouldn't have made it through the night. But at four, his body's immune system was stronger, and that was the only thing that had given him a fighting chance with this particular bacteria. It hadn't crossed the blood/brain barrier at the back of the eye. It was right at the barrier -- and he showed me some MRI scan they had done apparently when we first arrived, pointing out the infection and where it was and where the barrier was, and my god, it was not hardly a splinter of an inch away from permanent damage.

"It's lucky you came in when you did," he said. "Another few minutes, and it would have crossed over and there's no telling what kind of damage it would have done."

I suddnely thought of how intimidated I had been by that nurse, and how I had almost waited. I shook. I shook so hard, I couldn't even speak clearly to Carl on the phone -- I think Dad had to take the phone and explain it to him. We were in the hospital for four days, and not until late into the third did Jake start perking up and acting like a normal boy again.

It's amazing, really, when you make it through these things and you wonder how on earth you did. I write this tonight while Jake is out at his senior prom. He told me before he left that they weren't meeting up with one particular friend since he'd been bragging all week about how drunk he was going to get, and Jake didn't want to be anywhere around it. His girlfriend's cell phone accidentally dialed here a little while ago, and I couldn't figure out who it was or what was going on, until I heard them all laughing -- they seemed like they were having a good time (and sounded sober, yay). What can you do? As a mom, sometimes nothing. Sometimes, run like hell to beat the odds. Most of the time, it's somewhere in the middle with no real map. But it's very very nice to have others on this same path writing into the night, sending out their stories into the electric mist. It reminds me I am not alone.

Jake and Elise, taken in our backyard just before their prom.

Posted by toni at April 18, 2004 11:59 PM