Everything Happened | vol. 229

Breath control

Jane came home from her first ever day of pre-K and immediately crashed on the couch. I took a picture and posted it to my Stories, “Close Friends” which increasingly feels right for images of my kids these days, especially the ones I take secretly. I thought I was capturing a portrait of a four-year-old’s fatigue after an entire day at Real School, after years spending her days freeform playing with dolls and bossing around toddlers at her home daycare. I thought it was cute. But by the next morning she was wheezing and “belly breathing” and I couldn’t believe we were here again because she had hardly seemed sick.

My peds ER nurse friend Caitlin (hi Caitlin) (if I have ever given you wisdom from “my peds ER nurse friend” it was Caitlin) once made me feel better about being shocked by the trapdoor sensation of asthma attack onset. I was like, hey so am I stupid? Why does it keep happening? Why am I always taking my kid in for what ends up being absolutely nothing or taking my kid in when it’s almost too late? She told me that kids are phenomenal at compensating when sick. And then when they crash, they crash hard, and their grown-ups are left scrambling to catch up to reality.

This is also why I struggle to prevent asthma attacks, for example, via the oral steroid we keep in the fridge that we are supposed to start administering twice daily “when Jane starts getting sick.” Ok, for one, my kids are never not passing around a juicy Marlboro-Gold-100s-cough like it’s a damp joint, and second, are other kids giving their parents a decent runway when illness is coming? We don’t seem to receive a solid heads-up?

So Jane got sick again, and Nick took her to our local ER, because I thought no way was it going to be A Situation, we have done that too many times already. And I stayed back at home thinking about the untouched bottle of cold, pink prednosolone in the refrigerator and how she is missing the second day of school but at least she didn’t miss the first day, because I could not have handled the ocean liner-sized disappointment, hers or mine.

Our local rural hospital cannot admit children, isn’t set up for it, which didn’t matter because it was only supposed to be a quickie ER trip to get some meds because we are done with multi-day hospitalizations for asthma, already got our card punched, that is 2022 business and we are here in the latter quadrants of 2023 where we do not speak of such things.

Now I have a little blame kink I like to indulge in, where I pretend that there is a version of events where I know what happens in the future from the very beginning and act accordingly. And in that version I would have immediately taken her across the Bay or up the coast to a proper Children’s Hospital as soon as she started any wheeze-adjacent activity. But instead we “let it” get bad enough that of course we couldn’t strap a child in respiratory distress (respy d) into our own vehicle and go in search of adequate care.

By late that night, they needed to take her north to Wilmington via ambulance service, vitals boop boop booping away, alone except for some strangers in scrubs. Just like last November. At this point I can stage-manage the whole thing via headset because it always seems to happen the same way and I never learn.

But what am I supposed to be learning? That I could control a chronic condition through the powers of my vigilance?

The thing that I find particularly galling about asthma is how completely commonplace, basic, normal it is. Everyone grew up knowing a kid who was a little wheezy. My husband occasionally sucks from an inhaler in the winter. This means it’s well understood, which is a good thing when it comes to her care. But just because something is incredibly known doesn’t mean it’s not serious. Watching your kid gasp for air like they’re drowning on land? It is so bad. I haven’t known anything worse.

So just like last November, we waited hours for the ambulance to arrive and then I followed the ambulance in my personal vehicle. And like last November it seems these things can only transpire at 3 a.m. An hour that children and their parents are famously at their best.

The last time we did this, Nick did the hospital stay because at my advanced age (six years younger than Nick) I no longer tolerate imperfect sleep. And Nick has narcolepsy and can and does fall asleep anywhere, even standing up, and occasionally in the shower. Ok, he does have narcolepsy, but really it’s that I was still nursing the last time Jane was hospitalized, so Polly and I were a package deal.

I knew it was my turn to face the pain. Nick got home from the local ER and let me know that they had loaded Jane up and taken her away, into the night, all wreathed in tubes, nodding off, sweaty, dense like a kettlebell yet impossibly small.

So back in November, we had tried to ride in the ambulance with her so that she wouldn’t be afraid. The hospital staff made an appeal to pragmatism — then, in the middle of a devastating RSV wave, she was going to be nearly 3 hours away from home because nowhere closer had capacity. At discharge, you’d have no vehicle to get home, they said. It wasn’t worth it.

So that was the choice we made, last year and this time too, yet there was a faint vapor of shame around this anytime I had to describe sending Jane as a solo rider to someone after the fact. (When I later asked Jane if it was scary, she was confused. “No? It was cool! I got to ride in an ambulance.”)

I followed the path of the ambulance, adrenaline slicing through my veins like a luge team. The sky, which had been soupy and green all day, now fractured into a biblical rainstorm, flashes of lightning unmasking the night and revealing that some of the trees along the highway were already getting fall color. I hate driving in a downpour, I’d rather deal with snow or ice. I once hydroplaned my friend Rick’s Toyota into a swamp in such conditions. I did not want to experience my minivan as an air hockey puck.

Then, unfortunately, I bore witness to something supernatural. As they beat angrily against the storm, the driver’s side windshield wiper curled into a cashew shape as though by invisible hands. It made a horrible sound as it dragged against the glass, but the main thing was that I could no longer fucking see. I tried leaning hard to the passenger side to see where the still-operational right wiper blade was toiling away. It worked, kind of, enough that I could pull over to the shoulder and gain my bearings. Now, if you know me, you know that my phone was at 7%.

Twinkling in the distance was a gas station, the kind that has a deli and like, clothing in it for some reason, and I thought I might have a chance there at replacing the wiper blade. It wasn’t just that the rubber casing was shot, the entire metal framing was now shrapnel.

I quickly scanned the store before the guy behind the counter told me what I already knew: no wiper blades, no car stuff at all.

“But the Wal-Mart across the road opens in 2 hours and they should have it.”

This obviously transpired in the place where dreams go to die, the state of Delaware.

No one is coming to save me, I thought. It’s a thought I have had many times since becoming a parent. Because the main person tasked with my rescue, according to our emotional and legal arrangement, is somewhere having to manage 1-3 of our children!! I can only save myself.

So I did what you have maybe already thought to do: I took the cursed wiper blade off the driver’s side. Then I switched the passenger side blade for the driver side blade. I popped the naked metal wiper arm into the air to keep it from dragging pointlessly across the glass. And I pulled back onto the highway, knowing that even though my phone would probably die, I could get there on vibes and big blue H hospital signs.

All the lights were still dazzling ninja stars in the rainy dark but I could see through my little driver’s side portal. The passenger side wiper arm wagged accusingly at the sky, like an angry antenna. I am drenched from doing car surgery in the storm.

I got to Jane’s room as the sun was rising. She was very asleep, and probably wouldn’t remember much of the night. I was pleased to see she was on nasal cannula oxygen only, and not bipap. This meant she was doing better than I feared. Maybe we’d be discharged that day after all.

By 8 a.m. I was drinking hospital coffee and deciding to stay up for the day. Jane was on “room air,” with spot checks by staff. She was bored and blaming me for it.

I explained to my little 2019 baby that the hospital TV could not be manipulated to access limitless episodes of every program that interested her across 6 streaming platforms or whatever. (I did not explain to her that a different type of mom would have an iPad at full charge, with one of those marshmallowy rubber cases and a pair of headphones. But that she has a mom who only owns a cracked Kindle Fire from 2014 that is so annoying to use that no one ever bothers, and a phone that is always about to die.)

The child life specialist offers her a unicorn coloring book, which is extremely up her alley, only for her to throw it across the room in a rage. Perhaps we can blame the steroid treatment she had been on for 12 hours for this Hulking out moment. I was speechless and tired enough to just laugh as the staffer walked away politely to give her space.

We were discharged right before dinner, and stopped at Chipotle per Jane’s request. She asked if we were going to do anything special before going home, and I said, what did you have in mind? Because probably not, you’re still sick.

She is furious, because she has been through an ordeal and is also on ‘roids. Next to the Chipotle is a strip mall pet store, a.k.a. one of the saddest retail environments imaginable. We admire the fish, the chinchilla, the turtles. The whole place is blue fluorescent and smells like warm lizard skin, which you don’t realize is a smell you know until you smell it. The pet store visit is deemed acceptably special. We chart a course for home.

The storm has passed but the sky is still moody and gray with fingers of celestial sunlight lasering forth into the flat flat farmland like Wolverine’s claws. Maybe it’s that I haven’t slept, but I suddenly feel so lucky to be alive to see this that my eyes well up. Even Delaware can be beautiful. I can handle my life. I can save myself. I can tolerate imperfect sleep. My sick kid has access to what she needs and we can afford to keep her alive. She even has Netflix.

yr mate,
Evie
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