Ten Days (8 page)

Read Ten Days Online

Authors: Janet Gilsdorf

She rubbed her fingers against the hem of her nightgown. These questions irritated her. Eddie’s birth was six long months ago and had nothing to do with what had happened overnight. The only important thing now was that the doctors make her baby better, and these questions wouldn’t get them closer to that goal. Besides, Sunil seemed nervous; he stumbled over words as if unsure of their pronunciation. He was very young, inexperienced, an amateur. If she had to talk to him, at least he could know what he was doing.
“Which baby shots has Eddie had?” Sunil asked.
“All of them.”
“Even hepatitis B, the one he should have had right after he was born?”
“I don’t remember exactly which ones.” She felt exhausted. Her arms and legs ached. She was too tired to think. Her head throbbed, her chest hurt. She pressed her knuckles against her temples and coughed. “He’s had everything he was supposed to have.”
Sunil flipped his card over and stared at the chart on the back. He sucked on the end of his pen and then said, “Well, at age six months, he should have gotten the third hepatitis B shot, the third DTaP, the third polio, the third Hib . . .”
She twisted in her chair, straightened her legs, and then coughed again. “I said I don’t remember.” She closed her eyes. “Does this really matter right now?”
Jake stood, once again set Chris in the corner of his vacated seat, and stepped toward her. Chris scrambled off the chair and bolted after his father. “Daddy,” he screamed. “Daddy.”
Jake’s fingers—warm even through the layers of her nightgown and shift—kneaded her shoulder. “Honey, they need all of Eddie’s medical information . . .”
She shrugged his hand away, wanted the student to leave her alone. “Then you tell him.”
“I wasn’t there for his well-baby visits. I don’t know for sure which shots he’s gotten.”
“Well, I don’t remember right now and I’m tired of these stupid questions.”
She slouched back into her chair. “Just make him better. Just let me go in there.”
Sunil slowly backed toward the door. “Dr. Easterday, uh, will be out in a minute.”
Jake returned to his seat and scooped Chris into his arms. “Sunil and the rest of the doctors need to know everything about Eddie’s health.”
She felt tears run down her cheeks. “I was very tired. After I put him in his crib, I went to bed.”
“It’s okay, honey.”
“He didn’t cry at night to nurse. When I woke up, my breasts were sore and he looked dead. But, Jake . . .” She couldn’t read the look on his face. What was he thinking? “He wasn’t dead, just limp. And pale.”
Jake nodded. “It’s okay.”
Chris wiggled in Jake’s lap, opened his eyes, and stared into his father’s face. “Mommy made me come in my jammies.”
 
She glanced at her watch. Only two hours until class time. She’d need to arrange for a substitute. Cell phone. Where was her cell phone? In the charger on her dresser.
Sub. She had to get a sub for her class. She slipped a quarter into the pay phone at the end of the waiting room.
The phone rang twice, three times, four times. A sense of panic clawed at Anna. What if Elizabeth doesn’t answer? She couldn’t think of another way to arrange for a sub, didn’t have the phone numbers of the community college or the program coordinator in her purse. Please, Elizabeth, answer the phone.
She could depend on Elizabeth. They traded babysitting occasionally and carpooled together to faculty meetings on the main campus. Last summer, before Eddie was born, they had refinished an old dresser for the silent auction at the linguistics department. The memory of that day threaded through her tired mind. After applying the primer, they had painted the background, had smeared on layers of deep sapphire-colored enamel. Then Anna had tole-painted maroon and pink roses on the fronts of the drawers, had dabbed thorns on the stems and shadowed the edges of the petals and leaves in deep green.
At the beginning of the seventh ring, her friend answered the phone.
“Elizabeth, I’ll need a sub this morning.”
The seat of the chair at the pay phone was sticky, as if Kool-Aid had dried into the upholstery. She shifted her bottom to the edge of the cushion, tried to avoid the spill.
“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth sounded alarmed.
She didn’t know what to say, where to begin. What’s wrong? No one had done anything bad. What’s wrong? Everything. “Eddie’s in the hospital. In the ER.”
“Oh, no,” Elizabeth gasped. “Wh-What happened?”
She began to explain. Her chest tightened as if it were wedged in a clamp and the screw were slowly turning. She breathed in short little pants and her words were mixed with air. She clutched the handle of the pay phone.
“Anna, where are you?” Elizabeth asked. “Are you alone? Where’s Jake?”
“He’s here.”
“Are you at the hospital?”
“Yes, in the emergency room.”
Speaking was becoming easier. The clamp around her chest loosened and she took a deep breath.
“I’ll call Rob to line up a sub.” Elizabeth’s voice sounded settled, in control. “Bonita—that’s your aide’s name, right?—should be able to help. How independent is she, do you think? If nothing else, I’ll take over your class. Does the office have lesson plans?”
“We’ve been working on business skills—writing checks, filling out rental agreements and citizenship forms, that kind of thing. Bonita can be a big help. The kids seem to like her, especially the Spanish speakers.”
Anna pulled the moist Kleenex from her pocket, found a dry corner, and wiped at her nose. For a moment, she was back in her real life, a world of languages and students and workbooks and pronunciation exercises. Scenes from her class tumbled through her mind. Elena’s new haircut. The birthday card Ismael and Huang had made for her. Maria’s platform shoes and polka-dotted socks. Tran’s high, squeaky voice begging, “Mrs. Campbell, show me how,” repeatedly: how to say “hamburger” and “French fries” in English, how to make “mailman” into a plural word, how to give someone forty-three cents in change.
“We’ll arrange subs until you tell us not to,” Elizabeth said, just before hanging up. “You take care of Eddie and yourself and we’ll take care of your class.”
Then Elizabeth was gone. All that remained was the empty thrum of the dial tone. A sub would take over her class. All she had to worry about now was Eddie.
 
“Dr. Campbell. Mrs. Campbell.” The nurse touched her shoulder. “Dr. Easterday decided to intubate Eddie”—she felt the pat on her arm as the nurse continued—“to help him breathe more easily. We’re ready to move him to the ICU. Just waiting for them to prepare a bed.” The nurse’s hand pulled away from her shoulder. “You can go see Eddie now.”
She scrambled out of her chair and dashed through the doorway into the hall. She heard Jake’s footsteps behind her.
When they reached Eddie’s cubicle, she heard Chris call, “I wanna go home.”
“We’ll go home in a little while,” Jake said.
There he was on the gurney, unmoving as if asleep, but his body lay at all the wrong angles. His pudgy legs splayed like a bloated frog’s against the sheet, and his arms, L shaped and unmoving, seemed locked in surrender. A saucer-sized yellow-brown circle stained the sheet beside his waist. His hair was arrayed in a halo around his head. She ran her fingers along their tips. Silky and fine as cobwebs—same as usual.
She felt Jake behind her and leaned back against him. She closed her eyes to escape this sight, but then opened them again. She couldn’t bear to see her baby like this but couldn’t bear not to see him. Plastic tubes ran into him from bags of fluid overhead. One, two, three. One to his right hand. One to his groin. One to his left wrist, limp beside a dime-sized spot of blood on the sheet. A tube, protruding from his mouth like a thin, hideously long, ivory-colored plastic tongue, was attached to a coil that ran to a machine humming beside the gurney.
She stretched her hand toward Eddie, but it hovered midair like a storm-tossed bird. “Is he alive?” she asked in a whisper.
“Yes,” Jake said. “The ventilator’s helping him breathe. You can touch him. Just don’t pull anything out—the tubes and stuff.”
She ran her fingers slowly, tentatively over the pale skin on Eddie’s shin. What if she hurt him? A tear tracked down her cheek. Then another. Her breaths came out in little sputters.
“Anna, I’m going to find Dr. Easterday,” Jake said. “I’ll take Chris, you stay here with Eddie.”
She felt the edge of the chair against the back of her legs. She perched on the seat, rested her head on the gurney, and stroked her baby’s foot.
Chapter 10
Jake
 
 
 
 
 
J
ake leaned against the edge of the table. An EKG strip, anchored by a half-full bottle of Diet Pepsi, looped over its side and coiled toward the floor. He cradled Chris in his left arm. The boy seemed to be asleep. On the far wall, a hand-printed sign read:
Foreign bodies found in vaginas and rectums:
Baby bootie, hand knit
The last time he read this sign, he had found it funny. The objects and the body cavities were comically incongruent, the way things were in the ER. Now, it wasn’t funny at all. He now considered the dissonance to be ugly, a violation of something he couldn’t quite describe.
The phone beside him rang. The receiver lay upside down on its cradle, signaling that someone had placed a page to this number.
“ER. Staff room, Campbell speaking,” he said. He looked around the room. “Not here,” he said and replaced the receiver on its cradle.
The door opened and June Easterday walked in. Jake stood up. She gave him an uncomfortable smile.
“I wish this hadn’t happened to your son.” She peeled off her surgical gloves and tossed them at the trash can. One landed inside the can; the other hit the metal rim, slid off, and puddled on the floor, its fingers twisted against the linoleum like a grotesquely deformed hand.
Jake nodded. “I don’t know what happened last night. When I talked to my wife about nine o’clock, she said Eddie had a fever. They both had colds and, as she described it, he didn’t sound particularly ill to me.” He swayed from side to side and patted the brightly colored balloons printed on Chris’s pajama top. “Any of the labs back yet?”
Sunil looked up from the computer screen. “The spinal tap results just came in.”
Dr. Easterday peered over Sunil’s shoulder. “Let’s see,” she said. She tapped the tip of a pen against the screen as the lab values scrolled up. “CSF white count is forty-three hundred and the red cell count is thirty.” She slid the pen back into her breast pocket, nestling it beside the tongue blades and her flashlight. “Um . . .” The letters and numbers rolled off the top of the screen as soon as new ones appeared from below. “Diff on that is ninety percent segs.”
He leaned his cheek against the top of Chris’s head. The white count said it all—too many cells, almost all neutrophils. Meningitis. He closed his eyes, envisioned the oceans of pus that were swirling over Eddie’s brain, strangling its cells, un-wiring its neural networks. He might not survive, ran a fair chance of not being normal. Several former patients who had meningitis, now shadowy, nameless figures, marched through his head. He remembered the brain-damaged ones, those with uncontrollable seizures, severe mental retardation, twisted limbs, empty minds. Eddie could join their ranks.
“Gram stain?” he asked. He wanted more details, more medical information. Yet, he knew all he needed to know. Eddie had meningitis.
Sunil continued scrolling the electronic pages.
“Here it is.” Dr. Easterday jammed a fingernail against the screen as if to trap the words before they disappeared. “ ‘Numerous polys present.’ ‘Moderate Gram positive cocci in pairs.’ ”
“That’s the end of the report,” Sunil said. “Glucose and protein are still pending.”
“I’d guess pneumococcus,” she said. “That, as you know, can be a nasty bug. But we won’t bet the ranch on the Gram smear. We’ve started both ceftriaxone and Vanco.”
Jake patted Chris’s top again. “What’s the risk to Chris?” he said.
“No risk if it’s
Strep pneumo,
because that isn’t contagious. You’re right, though, about other bacteria. Meningococcus, for example, may spread from person to person.”
“But you don’t know for sure yet that he has pneumococcus,” he said.
“Right, again. We won’t know that for a day or so. But, the bacteria are Gram positive—and the Gram stain is usually correct—so they would be
S. pneumo
.”
He hugged Chris. At least this son was safe. Or, likely safe.
“Here’s his chest X-ray.” She pointed to a film on the view box. “Normal.”
He looked at the radiograph, at the ladders of ribs that ran up the sides of his son’s chest. The alabaster blob in the center was his heart. Little Eddie’s little heart. He couldn’t see it beat on the X-ray, but obviously it was still beating. Between the ribs were the charcoal-colored lungs. Whitish bone, blackish air— Eddie in varying shades of gray. His son’s insides had been captured by the zap of an X-ray beam, his baby reduced to a static, colorless, two-dimensional image with no apparent depth.
 
Jake followed Dr. Easterday back to Eddie’s cubicle. She pulled aside the curtain. Anna sat curled into a chair beside the gurney, her head resting on the sheet next to Eddie’s shoulder, her hand on his thigh. She seemed to have tied herself into the smallest possible knot. Maybe she wanted no one to see her. Or, maybe she wished to be an insignificant dot that had no relationship to the surrounding events. She might be willing herself to a place far, far away. Sometimes she did that . . . bundled up her feelings and disappeared. Like the time she went for a long walk, alone, after learning her grandmother had died. She said she didn’t want to talk about it.
He sat on the remaining chair beside the gurney and laid his hand on Eddie’s foot. It was cool. The skin was pale, almost gray. Poor perfusion. He wrapped his fingers around Eddie’s toes, trying to warm them. Chris held on to Jake’s shirt like a burr.
“We have the results from the spinal tap . . .” Dr. Easterday began.
Anna lifted her head.
“It shows many, many white blood cells, meaning he has meningitis.”
Anna groaned. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they wore the glaze of desperation, the blur of terror. She stared into Dr. Easterday’s face, then into his, then back at Dr. Easterday.
The doctor continued. “We also know the fluid has Gram-positive cocci in pairs . . .”
“What’s that?” Anna’s voice was hoarse.
His wife wouldn’t understand medical terms. “That means they see bacteria in his spinal fluid,” he said.
“Most likely the germ causing his meningitis is
Strep pneumo,
” Dr. Easterday added.
“Is that bad?” Anna whispered.
“Well, he has a very serious infection.” Dr. Easterday paused a moment.
Jake recognized the carefully chosen words. She wanted to convey information to Anna without confusing or unduly scaring her. But Anna was already maximally scared.
Then Dr. Easterday continued. “He’s already received the first doses of the antibiotics we use to treat this infection. He got them in his IV.” Then she turned away from Anna, back to him. “So far, his vital signs are fairly stable.”
“What do you mean, ‘so far’?” Anna asked. Her voice was like poison.
“We hope his vital signs will stay stable forever,” Dr. Easterday answered, “but this is a serious infection and—”
“Anna, look,” he interrupted. “Eddie’s very, very sick. He may even die. We have to be prepared for that.” He heard his voice waver. He looked to the floor.
Anna was sobbing now. She sucked in great gulps of air and clawed at her cheeks. Then she buried her face against Eddie’s leg and whispered, “Don’t die, Eddie. Please don’t die.”

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