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Alex ricochets around this exam room just as he's ricocheted around a lot of
exam rooms. He dumps all the little plastic animals from the bucket; he pries
the cover off the radiator; he fiddles with the really expensive looking lamp.
He breaks my clutch and bolts for the door, demanding to be let down the hall,
where he spied a lot of cool toys when we got off the elevator a moment ago. He
grabs the phone of the doctor, who has stepped out of the room. I move to stop
him. Jill stops me. It's been so long, I forgot that the bigger pest your kid
is, the faster you receive medical attention. The doctor returns and continues
with the questions. Her questions probe various levels of our history with Alex.
What was his birth weight? What was the pregnancy like? How long was in the
second hospital? Is he on any medications now? How does he sleep? Does he have
any vision issues or food allergies? Alex sails by me; he gets to the door
handle crying, "Toy! Out the door!" I have a q! uestion: Why did I have to spend
a weekend filling out that four-page neurology department questionnaire that
asked all these same questions? I've forgotten a lot about doctors. This one
finds it hard to believe we haven't brought Alex in before, but only a few
nights ago did we sit down, Jill over a pad and me over a beer, and rake back
over the times in the last two or three years when Alex might in fact have had a
seizure.
There was that time in school, right after a nap. Those times on the bus.
"Alex was having one of his moments," the matron said. That time during
the bug movie. Our eyes grew wider over each memory as they added up. That nap.
That coughing.
On our own little Day of Infamy, Alex crawled into our bed at maybe 5 on a
morning last December, dozed off, then woke up coughing. I held him, and could
feel him go gradually limp. His head locked to the right. His eyes seemed to see
nothing. Jill and I checked all the signs of respiratory distress we've been
trained -- maybe "conditioned" is a better word -- to check for: blue lips, blue
fingernails, the deep dimple of retractions under the ribs as a former preemie
tries to suck air. Nothing. Alex hung there like somebody we'd never known, and
his arm began to jerk. I don't remember which arm started first, but the other
soon followed, then the legs, like hiccups of all four limbs. Still no noise.
Still his even breathing, still he didn't cling to me or sag off me. Just
nothing, nothing we had learned to watch for. But he was not with us.
"Call an ambulance!" I told Jill. The ambulance crew and three cops showed up
-- that happens when the call is "kid in distress," we later learned: one cop to
hold the dad, one to hold the mom, one to rescue the kid. I trust that all this
crew saw that morning was a careworn mom and dad wondering, without even the
benefit of morning coffee yet, what new sluice run of healthcare they were about
to descend.
Yes, always the same, we tell the doctor: About 10 minutes into sleep he
wakes up coughing. Alex will keep coughing, and apparently strain to clear
something from his throat as his eyes grow more and more blank, his head goes to
the right, and he slips away. He usually barfs. One in October, the Bad One in
December, another in February that Jill seemed to have headed off with a whiff
off the nebulizer. In general, Jill is getting more and more what the business
world calls "proactive" regarding seizures. These nights, for example, she keeps
a clean towel and a basin right under Alex's bed.
Always vomiting? the doctor wants to know.
Yes. Always. Then he goes to sleep. Jill hates vomiting like I hate spiders.
So next we have an MRI. I had one once. I liked it: very relaxing if you have
earplugs against the banging of the magnets, and if you keep your eyes closed
and don't notice that the top of the MRI tube is about an inch in front of your
nose. While I was in there I tried to not think of what my casket is going to
feel like. Alex will be sedated for his MRI. We'll also have to spend a night in
the hospital, where presumably after he falls asleep they'll paste pads to his
head, and his brain will make little needles jump faster than mom and dad jumped
for that ambulance in December. Jill and I haven't decided which of us will stay
with him. I guess I'd like to, but he likes mommy singing him to sleep these
days.
Jill thinks the tests will reveal nothing. She says the signs are all there
that she read about -- the correct age, the sleep bringing it on -- for this to
be only the last and more obvious of a stage that Alex has passed through. She's
often right about these things. I cling to that.
Jeff Stimpson's articles and essays can be found on his website at jeffslife.net Jeff has also written a book entitled: Alex: The Fathering Of A Preemie.
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