Helier and Hospitals

When Amicus was very small, he fell victim on several occasions to a particular viral syndrome which manifested itself in scarily high fevers and semi-acute respiratory distress. When he had it as a baby, it was called RSV; when he contracted it as a 2-year-old, it magically wasn't called RSV any more, because only babies get that, but the symptoms were the same: a fever around 104, and a fist-sized concavity appearing in the hollow of his ribcage every time he took a breath. "When you see that," our family doctor told us, "don't bother ringing me. Go straight to Casualty," ie the emergency room. As a 2-year-old, on more than one occasion, Amicus spent several nights in the bowels of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, being given breathing treatments and looked over by entire fleets of doctors, some of whom opined that he had developed asthma, while others thought it was croup. We took home with us not only a set of inhalers and a "volumizer," but also a number of books on asthmatic themes. Ben and His Wonderful Puffer was the title of one; another dealt with Darren the Dragon who couldn't breathe fire until he'd had some albuterol. We read these books aloud -- they were excruciating, and I think I just threw away the last one, to prevent for time and all eternity my ever again being impressed into reading it at bedtime -- and we did the inhalers, until gradually he didn't need them any more. The volumizer ended up in a toy drawer, until we threw that away, too. Over time, except for saying occasionally, in a fit of nostalgia, "Amicus, remember when you went to the hospital," we more or less forgot the whole episode.

Until last night, that is. We've had a sore-throat-stuffy-nose-cough-with-fever bug making the rounds of our family, and yesterday came Helier's turn to entertain it. He got up in the morning feeling punky and almost immediately went back to bed, in my bed, with the covers drawn up to his ears. He slept until noon, when he leapt from bed like the paralytic taking up his mat; he announced that he wanted not one but two peanutbutter sandwiches, and went outside to play. Better, are we, I said. Ibuprofen is a miracle drug. His Grammy came and brought him some popsicles and took away the other children, so as not to disturb him in his convalescence -- during the morning, while he was lying in bed, Crispina had kept trying to climb up beside him and jump on his stomach.

We had been invited to my aunt and uncle's houseboat for today, and we all wanted Helier to get well so that we could go. Nobody wanted this more than Helier himself. For him the words "Tennessee River" and "Uncle Jim's boat" call up visions of an almost mythic quality, mostly involving himself -- the doughty warrior -- a plastic Scooby Doo fishing rod, and the alligator gar which haunts the marina where my aunt and uncle keep their boat, and which both Amicus and Helier have sworn to hunt down and kill or die trying. It hasn't taken their legs off -- in fact, it's not done a blessed thing to them except appear and disappear tantalizingly through the murk while we stand eating our lunch on the stern deck. Nevertheless, everyone has to have a Quest, and this alligator gar provides for my boys a convenient Questin' Beast.

So Helier was supposed to be getting well. And I thought he was, until after dinner last night. He had eaten some scrambled eggs and gone back to sleep on the sofa when Aelred, returning from somewhere, looked hard at him and said, "Why's his stomach doing that?" I looked, too, and there it was: the dreaded fist-sized concavity between the ribs. He was hot and panting, and whimpering a little as he panted. So remembering our English doctor's admonition, we swept him up and drove him to the closest hospital.

Thus began a very long night. The first hospital we went to did not, as we learned, have any pediatric doctors on staff; however, they consented to assess him, and then told us that they couldn't let us leave with him. "Fine," we said. "We don't want to leave with him. We want somebody to help him." We were given a bed on the trauma ward, next to a Mexican woman who had been in a car accident: she had been wearing her seatbelt and, except for the airbag deploying in her face, would have escaped unscathed. As it was, the nurses were having to remove her contact lenses before her eyes swelled shut, a process which necessitated a lot of English-to-Spanish/Spanish-to-English conversation through her husband, and some kind of implement -- I couldn't see what it was, exactly, but they had to suction the lenses from her eyes, which made me grateful all over again that I'd given up wearing contact lenses altogether before Epiphany was born. Meanwhile, Helier, who between not being able to breathe and not wanting to be touched by strangers had worked himself into a barking hysteria before we'd even gotten him through the emergency entrance, had relaxed a bit and begun asking questions. Did the track on which the curtain around his bed travelled run all over the entire hospital? Why was there a light above his head? Why did his bed have those big rails? He informed the doctor who was listening to his lungs that he was going fishing for an alligator gar, with minnows and cockroaches for bait. He told the orderly who pushed his gurney to x-ray that he liked making up stories about Batman. He persuaded the x-ray staff to write, "Anakin Skywalker Under Here" on a little blanket which they draped over him. If we hadn't left when we did, he would have been signing autographs -- more likely, he'd have talked someone else into writing "Helier" for him, and made them feel that he was doing them a favor.

The diagnosis came back: pneumonia. Good grief, we thought, he's THAT sick? The other piece of unfortunate news was that they couldn't keep him at that hospital and had called an ambulance to transport him to another, with pediatricians on staff. At this, Helier dissolved. "I don't WANT to ride in an ambulance," he kept wailing. "I want the ambulance to take me to the BOAT." He wailed as the ambulance drivers buckled him onto the stretcher. He wailed all the way to the next hospital, clutching my hand, pausing in his wailing only when the EMT riding beside us asked him if he'd like to hear the siren. "Is it on now?" Helier asked. No, it wasn't. "I want to go to the BOAT," he cried again.

Still wailing, he arrived at the new hospital, and they put us in an examining room. More doctors, more nurses, more listening to Helier's chest and trying to jolly him along. It was well past midnight by now, and what stopped his crying was a nurse's wishing us "good morning." "Is it morning already?" Helier asked. "Whoa . . . " He was given breathing treatments, one with epinephrine, which made him sleepy and a little goofy -- "Now I'm really Darth Vader," he told the nurse, breathing in and out as loudly as he could. Next he had an albuterol treatment, which was like a serious infusion of caffeine and speed. At four in the morning he was up off the bed, jumping from square to square across the linoleum floor, trying to raise and lower the head of the bed, trying to stand up in the stirrups at the other end, and so forth. Around five a new diagnosis came back: not pneumonia, but viral bronchiolitis. Amicus all over again, we said to each other. The doctor prescribed some inhalers and gave us a new volumizer, and at six they let us go home.

As I was typing the previous paragraph, I saw Helier run past the window with a mop handle in one hand and a plastic bucket in the other. Look out, all you yard gars. He didn't get to go to the boat today, but bronchiolitis can't keep this Ahab down.