Chapter 31
Anna
“A
nna, I think we have the answer.” Dr. Farley stood before her, his body framed by the confusion of the waiting room. Bags of flesh hung beneath his lower eyelids and chronic worry etched his face. Yet, his eyes danced in the shadow of his brow. He seemed upbeat, almost whimsical as he scratched his elbow through the sleeve of his white coat.
She searched her memory for the meaning of his words and came up empty. “The answer?” she asked. “What was the question?”
“Eddie’s fever. We have an explanation.” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head slightly to the right. The faint smile that dawned on this face was that of a supremely confident man. He shoved his hands into his pants pockets and said, “He has a urinary tract infection.”
She knew about those, had had bladder infections when she was in college. “How’d he get that?”
“Most likely from the catheter that drains his urine.” He rested one arm against the end of Eddie’s crib. “See, bacteria can crawl up the tubing and set up a bladder infection.”
She looked away from him, didn’t like what he was saying. He seemed pleased to have this explanation for Eddie’s fever, but she thought it was awful. Germs crawling up the tube into her baby. Growing inside him. Germs, like gray-green mold on old bread, inside Eddie. First they were growing inside his head with the meningitis and now inside his bladder.
He patted her shoulder. “It’s not all that bad. Happens all the time. The bacteria—”
She interrupted him. “So, what do we do?” She didn’t want to hear any more about germs crawling around inside her baby, no more about the infected catheter.
“Well, the bacteria are most likely resistant to the antibiotic—the, um, ceftriaxone—he’s getting for the meningitis. Tomorrow we’ll know if that’s true, but in the meanwhile, we’ll add another antibiotic. And we’ll take out the catheter.”
“Which antibiotic?”
“Gentamicin.”
“Gentamicin,” she repeated. At least they had a plan.
“And, I have good news.”
His impish grin was disarming. He wasn’t taking this new infection seriously at all.
He stepped closer to her and seemed almost buoyant. “We tried Eddie off the ventilator for a while this morning and he did well, so we’re going to take out the endotracheal tube.”
Take out the tube? She leaned her head against the back of the chair. That tube was how he breathed. The ventilator was his life raft, the tube the safety line. The rhythm of the machine as it blew air into his lungs had been, to her, audible, musical assurance he was getting oxygen. “Are you sure that’ll be okay?”
“Well, of course we’re never absolutely sure, but he’s required lower vent settings for the past two days and seemed to tolerate being off the machine very well.”
She studied his face, examined his stance. He stood tall, his eyes rarely blinked, his breathing was steady. No twitches of uncertainty. No sideward glances.
“Maybe you could leave the tube in for a while but let him breathe on his own.” She wanted to take baby steps toward this big move. Without the tube he might stop breathing and they might not be able to get it back in again. He’d turn blue. His body would become limp and still, again. He’d die.
“That wouldn’t be a good idea.” He folded his arms across the front of his white coat. “See, the tube is quite a bit longer than Eddie’s windpipe—about twice as long—so a lot of his breathing effort would be used to move air up and down the long tube rather than in and out of his lungs.”
She envisioned little molecules of oxygen racing up and down the inside of that plastic tube.
“We’ve also lightened up his sedation and discontinued his paralyzing medicine,” he said. “He’s quite the little wiggle bug.”
“He’s moving?”
“Yeah. Go see him.”
The tube was gone from his mouth. His face looked empty, as if the couch had been moved from the living room. She leaned over his crib and stroked his cheek. He turned his head a tiny bit toward her. She laid her finger across his palm and his fingers wrapped around it. His chest was rising and falling under the flannel blanket, without the machine. His nostrils flared ever so slightly with each breath. He was getting better. She could tell. He was really getting better.
Maybe they’d be able to take him home, after all. Maybe he would walk, go to school, sing drinking songs, toss a football. Maybe he’d grow up.
Or, maybe he’d be handicapped, be a baby forever even as he grew taller. What would next Thanksgiving be like? And Christmas after that? No matter. The most important thing was that he would probably be home for all the upcoming holidays.
Chris nestled beside her in the waiting room chair, wedged between her thigh and the upholstery. “When can I see him?” he asked. “Does he cry a lot?”
She answered the best she could. “You can see Eddie later, after he’s better. He sleeps a lot, and he doesn’t cry much.”
Poor Chris, she thought. He was just a little boy, full of worry, full of wondering. When she looked back over his three-and-a-half brief years, a series of adversities—most, thankfully, were small, but a few were bigger—littered the view. His two visits to the emergency room were anxiety-filled illnesses that turned out to be minor viruses. He’d lost his precious teddy bear—the caramel-colored one with a tomato soup stain on its belly—when Jake laid it on the roof of the car and drove eighty miles before discovering it had disappeared. Chris had spent too little of his childhood in the company of his overworked, chronically exhausted doctor-father.
Until now, his worst adversity must have been when Eddie was born. While she was in the labor and the delivery room, he stayed with Rose Marie. She hadn’t thought much about it then, but now realized he’d felt betrayed, deserted. He would have sensed a hole in his life while she was away, a huge, gaping abyss. He wouldn’t have known what to call that feeling; he hadn’t yet learned the “missing” word. And when she reappeared, she’d brought competition . . . the brother.
She thought of the hours of peekaboo she played with Chris when he was a baby—the diaper she tossed over his face, the way his arms and legs stiffened in fear, the sound of his deep, terrified gasp. And then after she pulled away the diaper and called, “There’s Chris,” how he had collapsed into total body pleasure as his muscles softened and giggles erupted from deep inside him. In that game, her absence had been fleeting. She always returned.
His past adversities were minor, though, compared to his current difficulty. She’d been gone again, now. But he was older. Could he understand it any better, six months after the other absence? But, a three-and-a-half-year-old couldn’t rank trouble. Whichever problem he faced at the moment—a lost toy, a denied request, a reprimand for bad behavior, now a sick brother—would be the worst ever. For him, previous hurts had been forgotten, future agonies would be beyond imagining. His world was tethered in the moment.
“Why’s he here?” Chris asked again.
She wanted to be patient with him, wanted him to understand. “Because he’s very sick. The nurses and doctors are helping him get better.” She had told him that several times. He must need reassurance.
“What’s wrong with that man?” he called, his voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the waiting room, including the man with the stump.
“He hurt his leg and the doctors had to cut it off.” She watched for his reaction. No horror. No fear. She wasn’t sure how to explain an amputation to a child, didn’t mention that his father did that to people.
The questions kept coming. “Did you cut Eddie’s fingernails in here?” he asked. When he turned toward her for the answer, he knocked his elbow against her still sore breast.
She patted his arm. The fingernails? Of all things to remember about his brother. The first time she had trimmed Eddie’s fingernails, Chris had watched with, at first, great interest. His eyes widened as she approached Eddie’s thumb with the manicure scissors. When she took the initial clip, he had buried his eyes in his hands and screamed, “Don’t cut it off.” He couldn’t remember, of course, that she had also trimmed his nails when he was a baby.
He squirmed beside her in the chair. “I wanna go home,” he whined. “Where’s my daddy?”
“Daddy’s working. He’ll come soon and take you back to Grandma and Grandpa.”
She wanted him to be quiet for a while. His voice, earlier angelic and melodic, was now irritating as it rose above the sounds of the waiting room to grab her attention, to demand a response from her. He asked the same questions over and over, even though, over and over, she had answered them. She tried to use words he would understand. Maybe he didn’t like the answers she gave. Maybe he just wanted to hear her voice and this was his way of making that happen. Still, she needed quiet; at least she needed a reprieve from the nonstop questions.
She pulled a page of newspaper from the pile at her feet, folded it into quarters with a Lord & Taylor ad on top, and rummaged in the bottom of her purse for a pen.
“Here, honey.” She set the paper in his lap. “Fill in all the
o
’s. Remember the
o
’s?”
“Yeah.” He made a circle with his thumb and pointer finger and thrust it toward her chin. He then searched her face for approval, begged for it, insisted on it. She tried to smile. He grinned back, seemingly satisfied, and reached for the pen. He took a deep breath, pursed his lips, and began filling in the
o
in “Lord.”
A moment later his body stiffened. “Uh-oh,” he said. Two short blue lines had escaped the edges of the
o
. He rubbed his finger on the page, trying to make the errant lines go away. “Get the eraser,” he commanded.
“You’ve got a pen and we don’t have an eraser for pen ink.” She patted his head, felt the silk of his hair. It smelled like pears. Her mother must have given him a shampoo. So much of his life was happening now out of her view. Baths, meals, playtime, excursions to the grocery store. Her mother had taken her place with him at home.
“It’s okay the way it is,” she said. “You don’t have to stay inside every
o
.”
Of course he couldn’t understand the complexity of her words. He was trying to learn the ways of the world and needed rules. He didn’t know yet about exemptions, hadn’t learned that certain situations call for exceptions, that some rules may be applied
most
of the time and not necessarily
all
the time. To him, the solid ring around the
o
was an absolute that meant the ink was supposed to stay inside the boundary. Always. Otherwise, why have a boundary?
He looked up at her again, seemed to be checking in with her every few seconds. She nodded and said, “It’s okay the way you made it.”
He shrugged and started on the
o
in Taylor.
“Almost done, Mommy,” he shouted. The newspaper page was pocked with ink dots. Again he stared into her face, searching for something—probably praise, likely reassurance.
“Good job, sweetheart.” She patted his leg and spotted Dr. Farley walking toward them.
“Hello, young man. You must be Eddie’s big brother.”
Chris smiled shyly and returned to his work on the newsprint.
“Would you like to see him?” Dr. Farley asked.
Chris’s eyes widened. “Yeah,” he yelled. His hand, gripping the pen, stood suspended midair.
She stiffened. “Is that wise? He hasn’t seen Eddie. Not since the baby got sick.”
“He seems excited about it. Undoubtedly he has all kinds of ideas about what has happened to his brother, most of them much more terrible than reality.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Right now?”
“The nurses will let you know when they’re ready. We don’t ordinarily allow young children into the ICU, but we’ll make an exception this time. It’ll be a quick visit.”
She nodded. This would be one of those elusive exceptions.
Chris was wordless as she carried him through the doors into the ICU. He turned his head from side to side. His eyes darted from gurney to bed to portable X-ray machine to resuscitation cart, all of it foreign to him.
As they approached Eddie’s crib, he lifted his chin and said, “It smells funny.”
She sniffed, didn’t smell anything odd.
“What does it smell like? Smoke? Rotten potatoes?”
“Just funny.”
She stopped at the foot of the crib. “Here’s Eddie’s bed.” Slowly, she moved along the crib rails.
He leaned out of her arms and pointed. “Is that him?”
“Yes, honey.” She felt sick to her stomach. Bringing him here was a mistake. She hadn’t had time to prepare him for this place. She looked at what he saw . . . his baby brother, pale, puffy, and unrecognizable, lying in a metal crib that looked like a jail. Plastic tubes snaked into his body, weird machines surrounded the bed, electronic tracings streamed across the faces of the monitors, lights blinked like robot eyes. Occasional high-pitched beeps sang from the IVACs and the telemetry unit.