Escape Points (17 page)

What I didn’t know, and Brendan told me later, is that minutes after the ceremony Powell said to him, “You need this more than I do.” He handed Brendan his own team state first-place medal.

“The memories are enough for me,” Powell said. Weeks later he had Brendan’s name engraved on the team state trophy that stood at least three feet high.

“
P
owell is sick.” Colin told me when he came home from wrestling practice. “He told all of us after practice he has a bad disease.”

I had known for a few days through the wrestling family grapevine that Coach Powell found out after team state in late February, after the wrestling banquet at the end of March, that he was diagnosed with a muscular degenerative disease. He was exhausted, but anybody would be with his schedule. A few parents who knew kept it quiet. We waited for Powell to tell all the wrestlers. I had not told my boys.

“What did he say? How did the boys take it?” I asked.

“Even the kids who say stupid things didn’t say anything stupid,” Colin said. “No one said anything.”

Brendan told me Powell was able to bench press 350 pounds before, and now he could do only half that. He was “gassed,” as they called it, not his usual self. Powell’s schedule was grueling, but normally Powell never seemed to wear out. He had a biopsy of a section of his shoulder muscles and the results were in. He sent an e-mail to the wrestling family listserv.

I talked to Weldon, who had been in touch with a few of the wrestlers from his varsity team. He called Powell immediately.

“Coach Powell looks like a fourteen-year-old boy, Mom,” Colin said. “He is so skinny.”

The next evening I was driving a few of the wrestlers home after practice. They did not act like they normally did—loud, laughing, kidding each other.

“Coach Powell is real bad,” Ellis said.

“What are we going to do?” Jake asked.

At a freestyle/Greco Roman tournament a week later, Powell looked much thinner, his calves the width of broom handles. He walked like an eighty-year-old man—with a cane—and needed a folding stadium chair to sit in as he coached the matches.

“I’m starting to feel better,” Powell said. “If all my prayers are answered, this will be OK.”

I asked him if the parents could pitch in and get him a dog walker. He said no. I asked him if we could get his meals delivered. He said no. I asked him if he and Elizabeth needed a housekeeper, and he said he had one. I asked him if we could go grocery shopping for him.

“No, I want to do as much for myself as I can,” he said. “But thanks.”

“For goodness sake, you have held us all together and helped us raise our kids,” I wrote him later in an e-mail. We all wanted to do something. But what we had to do was wait.

“It has and always will be my honor to have coached Weldon and Brendan (and now Colin),” Powell responded in an e-mail to my own message of thanks.

Powell went to Akron, Ohio, with the off-season team for a regional wrestling championship. He went downstate with the team for a freestyle/Greco Roman state tournament, where Colin competed. Powell continued to plan for the off-season; he was the soul of the team. The weekend before Mother’s Day, Powell sent an e-mail to everyone on the wrestling families listserv. It read:

Of course my sons’ lives have included so much more than wrestling. But there was no single endeavor that meant more to them as boys and as young men. And I was down on my knees grateful that they found this to fill them up; believe me, I knew the possible alternatives. The sport itself taught them rules, discipline, and humility. It taught them to know that most encounters produced a winner and loser, and that there was logic to the equation of action and consequence. And that the start of every match produced new possibilities. Effort led to desired results. Lift weights and you would be stronger. Eat well and you would be leaner. Pay attention to your coach and you would wrestle smarter. Go to the wrestling room every day and you would have a battalion of friends who relied on you and respected you, and you would have coaches to respect and emulate. Work your hardest evenly throughout the match and if you get bonus time, pull out all the stops.

The boys also learned about uncontrollable factors—injuries, bad referee calls, rotten timing, illness—all converging into the mercurial serendipity that produced the end game. It was Powell who taught them to internalize all of it. He was the most important man in their
lives, and he was a good man. He was teaching them lessons of true strength.

And for my sons, Powell was a good man in their lives every day. Their own father had disappeared, and this unlikely hero took up residence in their lives and in their hearts. I was not enough for them, I would never be enough. I was not who they wanted to emulate.

For all of the young men on the team for the last several years, they wrestled because of Powell, for Powell. It was the family that he built who needed to return the favor.

I
was back at my desk following an hour lecture to a group of about sixty university freshmen, at least a dozen of them not paying attention. The first week of any quarter you could spot the students who didn’t care so much about the class; they didn’t take notes, they didn’t ask questions, sometimes they ate lunch during lecture and chatted with each other, like they were sitting at the movies or something. Some passed notes back and forth. One young woman always played with her hair.

No matter what quarter it was or what course I taught, I always felt sorry for the parents of some students. They took out loans, mortgaged the house, did everything they could to pay tuition, to make sure this child had everything needed to succeed, from mini-refrigerator to laptop to tins of homemade cookies. I could picture the tear-filled drop-off at the dorm or overpriced apartment with the new sheets and towels, the plastic Target dishes in the school colors, the suitcases filled with outfits earnestly bought that the kids would never wear. And the parents dragging bags and bins and boxes onto
elevators or up narrow stairs, wearing the school T-shirts, the students anxious for them to go home. I could almost hear the parents arguing at the dinner table about what would get postponed because tuition was due. And here were some students doodling in class, or arms folded across their chests, or asleep—impenetrable. And their parents would never know.

My office phone rang. “How fast can you get here? Colin needs to get to the hospital right away,” the high school’s athletic trainer said after introducing himself.

“What’s wrong?” In the seconds before he responded I pictured the worst possible outcome—Colin’s neck broken, an arm hanging awkwardly, him lying on the floor motionless; can’t help it, it’s what I do.

“He has an infection on his leg, and it’s warm to the touch. I drew a circle around it, but you need to get him to the hospital.”

The red mass was spreading past the indelible black marker circumference drawn on Colin’s right leg along with the time: 3:00. It was probably MRSA, the acronym for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. And if it accelerates, it is dangerous, really dangerous. Because MRSA does not respond to most antibiotics, unchecked an infection of this type can rage out of control quickly, become systemic, spread to your organs. Kill you. There’s a reason people start to freak out at the mention of MRSA.

The wrestlers get it from the mat, each other, or close contact with both. Weldon had it at least three or four times, on his leg, his back, his arm. Brendan once. It starts small, a bright red spot the size of a dime, which looks different from ringworm or impetigo. The wrestlers get that too. But with antifungal cream, ringworm and impetigo go away quickly, in a few days.

MRSA requires an immediate trip to the dermatologist. You have to go after it right away, can’t wait, can’t let it get better. Because it never does without swift intervention.

With MRSA, patients are prescribed the right kind of antibiotics—Bactrim works—advised not to share towels at home, and told to cover the site. The dermatologist we go to on North Avenue always
sees the boys quickly after I call; sometimes he fits one of them in between other booked appointments. He’s a much older gentleman—his certificate on the wall from medical school is from the 1930s—and he wears a snug knit cap in the winter and thick goggle-like lenses in all seasons. He usually flirts with me and always jokes with the boys that they should take up chess. Wrestling is bad for the skin.

You can’t wrestle with MRSA; you can’t pass the skin inspection before the tournament or dual meet. Weldon’s infections were never more than the size of a quarter and never interfered with his competing; they cleared up before the matches. But they worsened quickly. In a day an infection could grow deep and look like a red, blue, and black plastic relief map. In the nursing home, my mother contracted MRSA at the wound site on her leg where the doctors extracted veins for her bypass surgery. It wasn’t the cause of her death, but it didn’t make her any better. In small amounts, MRSA is manageable. It’s in your nostrils in microscopically small amounts, it’s on all the wrestling mats. Every sport battles with the contamination. Some sports more than others.

I knew exactly what the trainer was talking about, and now I was really mad at myself. The boys are always accusing me of mother hysteria, always telling me to chill, always saying it will be fine with some ice or some heat or some something. They say they are not wimps. But my instincts usually are spot-on. So I was furious that I allowed Colin to do his man-up routine and tell me it was a bump, and I didn’t know about athletics and injuries, and I am not a wrestler. And now because I listened to him and not myself, he could really be in trouble.

The week before, Colin had placed first in regionals, wrestling varsity as a sophomore at 119 pounds, winning all his matches. That Saturday I had a 5
PM
flight for a business trip to San Francisco, so I could watch him wrestle until 2
PM
before leaving for the airport. I was co-leading a convening of The OpEd Project at Stanford University. I had started giving seminars, conducting workshops, and leading fellowships in thought leadership that year. It was remarkably rewarding work, and I could do it in addition to my university
teaching load. I
needed
to do it in addition to my teaching load; I was paying for college for the next seven years, many of them double-tuition years for the boys.

I had watched Colin win his first two matches, but I had to leave before the match for first place. But he won it, and Caryn texted me the photo of him beaming on the winner’s stand.

The following Saturday was sectionals. Colin was not doing well and did not place in the top three. He placed fifth, so he did not make it to state. Since sectionals, Colin’s calf had a red mark that looked as if it was left over from a slap or a slam on the mat. The boys were usually pretty banged up after tournaments, like prizefighters, sometimes with split lips or scratches, or black eyes from an errant elbow. Colin and Coach Powell both thought it was a shin bruise; I urged Colin to ice it. By Sunday it was a bump the size of a golf ball and wasn’t receding. It didn’t start as Weldon’s MRSA encounters did, not with the small red mark. Still, I knew it was odd.

“Let’s get it checked out at the drive-through doc,” I said Sunday afternoon. That’s what we called the immediate care center a few blocks away.

Colin didn’t want to go. Coach Powell said it would be fine. The trainer looked at it Friday. I didn’t see it on Monday; he was icing it and said it was getting better when I asked. It wasn’t.

Now it was Tuesday and the size of an eggplant—dark, purple, and otherworldly looking, like he had swallowed a mango and it showed up whole on his leg. That’s what can happen with MRSA; the site fills with the infection because the contents are so toxic and aggressive. This is one of the reasons that hand sanitizers are available throughout hospitals now. There are no hand sanitizers in wrestling rooms.

“I’m an hour away,” I told the trainer. “I’ll get there as fast as I can.” It was a little after 3
PM
.

I rushed down the hall to one of the lab classrooms where Caryn was teaching a section of the Multimedia Storytelling class, the lab for the lecture I just finished. We carpooled and I was hoping she could leave with me right away. Her students were working on an
assignment, and she could keep in touch with them by cell phone and e-mail. Class would be over in another fifty minutes.

I walked into her class, apologized to the students, and asked if she could be ready to go.

“Colin has to get to the hospital,” I whispered to her.

She was in my office in less than four minutes. Traffic wasn’t as congested as it usually is; sometimes the trip takes close to two hours door to door. I dropped off Caryn at the high school where her two sons, Ben and Sam, were waiting. Caryn and I laughed at how long it takes just to get home.

“We could be in Michigan by now. On the beach,” I said.

Colin got in the car. He looked worried, which was rare. We got to the emergency room at Loyola University Medical Center in another twenty minutes. The entire ride I kept telling him it would be OK, and yes, that next time he should listen to me when I say we need to go to the doctor.

When I said “MRSA” to the triage nurse, everything moved pretty quickly compared to our other ER visits for Colin—the broken collarbone, the chipped elbow, the time Brendan dared Colin to swallow a nickel and he did. Still, we sat in the waiting room for a half hour or so. I texted my friend, Sue, an orthopedic nurse at this hospital; she was still at work at another end of the building. I texted Paul.

A dozen or more patients were sitting in the green plastic and metal chairs in the ER waiting room, including an eight-year-old girl encouraged by her mother to practice her recorder. Everyone with a child in elementary school has had to listen to the scales crucified on that cheap plastic flute. But this would not be a good time to practice. Every sick and anxious person cringed—the older Asian couple, the young Hispanic woman with the two-year-old child in her arms, the woman with the piercing in her nose. No one had the nerve to be direct, though we all gave each other eye-rolling smirks.

Colin politely asked the mother to have her child stop.

“No one wants to hear that right now,” he said.

She balked.

“Don’t you think my daughter plays beautifully?”

“It’s beautiful, but everyone in here is sick.”

The mother gave Colin a dirty look. The little girl remained quiet and a few others thanked Colin and smiled at him.

Colin and I were ushered back into a curtained “room,” and soon after the doctor saw Colin, he admitted him for overnight intravenous antibiotics and observation. It was very serious.

“What do you need me to do?” Paul texted.

I walked alongside the bed as an attendant rolled Colin to the pediatric floor, all five feet ten inches of him. When the doors opened, a plastic statue of Ronald McDonald greeted us. The halls were brightly colored, with large alphabet block letters on the floor. There was a central nurses’ station, and a family kitchen area to one side. It was very quiet, just after 6
PM.
Once Colin was in a room, the nurse started the drip for intravenous antibiotics. Colin asked for a sandwich; the staff obliged. Then he asked for two more. He wouldn’t need to make weight and he was starving.

The doctors later lanced the wound, which was extremely painful for Colin in spite of the morphine and the local anesthetic shots he received. From the abscess site, the doctors extracted about ten cubic centimeters (cc)—equal to about a cup—of pus and blood. Colin took a video of the process on his phone. I told him not to put it on YouTube.

“You think I want this to be associated with me the rest of my life? I’d be the MRSA guy.”

I walked down the hall to the family galley to get a glass of water or tea. A young woman about thirty was also in there, pouring herself a glass of juice. We smiled at each other and exchanged kindnesses, the way you do when your heart is softened by circumstance.

She told me her son had been there a week. I didn’t ask her why. She said the hard part was that she had younger children at home and she had to keep shuttling them to relatives, worrying about where they were each day. She looked tired.

I felt lucky.

Weldon began his life in pediatric intensive care. He was premature, born at thirty-seven weeks from induced labor, and his lungs
were not fully developed. He was released in a week, but anyone who has had a child in a similar situation knows that while you are there, watching, waiting, your world shrink-wraps around your child, that hospital, those doctors, those nurses. There is nothing more important than what happens moment to moment in that universe. Your concentration is adrenaline-charged, and all you can think about is how fast you can get your child out of there, how soon it will be over and just be a story you tell to friends.

You feel selfish when you watch the parents who cry in the hallways or push children past in wheelchairs; or when you peek in open doorways, adults huddled around a small figure in a bed, tubes and machines accessorizing the scene, balloons with teddy bears and smiley faces bouncing in the artificial wind from the vents. You want them all to get better. You want them all to go home and be fine. But you know they all won’t, they can’t, and then you pray that your child does get better quickly, that your child doesn’t stay, that if there must be a choice, let it be your child who leaves fine—gosh, did you say that? This makes you feel small. And no matter how kind the nurses are—and they always are—and how many times they smile and reassure you, you never want to see them again, ever. You never want to come back. And it makes you feel reckless to feel this way; it makes you feel shallow. It makes you question what gives you the right to expect it all to go well all the time. It makes you question why it never goes well for some—not just for children in other parts of the world dealing with violence, war, hunger, poverty, and disease. Because you know children die in your suburb. They get sick, have tumors, have cancer, get in car accidents, overdose on drugs. You know you are lucky. Some children die. And that’s just one reason you cry when you walk back into the room.

The hospital halls were empty this night. The pediatric floor was on lockdown, the nurse explained. Only parents can visit after visiting hours, a brief window that had already passed.

Coach Powell called my cell phone. He wanted to visit Colin and said he would be there later in the evening. When I told Colin Coach Powell was coming, he was elated.

“Really? He’s coming to see me?”

“You’ll have to say you are his father; only parents can visit,” I told Coach Powell on the phone. I explained what door to use to enter after-hours and what room we were in.

At about 9
PM
, after practice, Coach Powell walked in the room; the doctor was checking in on Colin again. They chatted about Colin’s leg and about wrestling.