the anniversary

The photo is just an ordinary Instamatic type snapshot, taken by a total stranger. The content is nothing unusual, either. It shows a young boy and a painted up clown both smiling straight into the camera in a generic room. Ordinarily, this photo lives in my file drawer, in a folder marked personal. Sometimes I take it out just to look at it and run my finger across it. Occasionally, after a rotten day I'll find it to remind myself of what is and isn't really important. Always on September 15th, the "anniversary", I hold it close to me and say a silent word of thanks.

But even tucked away, I always know it's there, always a reminder, always tangible evidence of the time I honestly thought one of my children was going to die. A time when events spiraled out of control at warp speed. And there was nothing I could do about it...


Sasquatch was six years old and it was the year the Film Geek was in Michigan teaching. He had been gone one month, with nine yet to go. Gumby and Surfer Dude, at almost three and one respectively, were home with me all day, being too young even for preschool, and Sasquatch was a couple of weeks into first grade. When I picked him up at school one day, he said he didn't feel well and before I could even answer him he was sick all over the car. I took him home and put him in bed, figuring that our luck with the stomach flu that was going around school had just run out. For a day and a half he ran a fever and was unable to keep anything down. I called our pediatrician who said to keep him as hydrated as possible, give him Tylenol for the fever and just let it ride its course. Not really anything else you can do, she said, these damn viruses are everywhere right now.

It had been a Monday when he first got sick. I kept him in my bed to keep an eye on him and noticed during the night Tuesday that he was burning up. I woke him up around five Wednesday morning to give him some Tylenol, which promptly came right up, just before he slipped back into sleep. At seven thirty he called me in and said the words that still make my stomach clench, nine years later.

"Mom, my neck really hurts."

I wasn't a nurse then, and I ran to get the kid's medical book I always had handy. Looked up the meningitis symptoms, and realized, running down the list, that the only two he didn't have were seizures and death. Took his temp. 105. Called my mother. Get here now. Ran to our neighbors and asked them to stay with the younger two until my mom got there. Put Sasquatch (who was pretty much unresponsive at this point) into the car and drove hell-bent for the Emergency Room.

And got stuck in bumper to bumper rush hour downtown Los Angeles freeway traffic. Every now and then Sasquatch would briefly rouse long enough to retch into a plastic grocery bag that I found on the floor, before lapsing into a semi-conscious state. Every time he moved his neck he would cry. I called a friend from the car because her husband was a big computer geek and they had a great program to give very specific directions and I said this is where I am and this is where I need to go and can you get me there on side streets NOW? She couldn't make the program work and map quest then wasn't what it is now, so I sat on the freeway, fully expecting that any second my kid was going to go into the next thing on the checklist - seizures. I tried not to think of the lone symptom left. All around me people in their cars were singing along to the radio, eating their breakfast, putting on their makeup and doing all the other things people do when they know they're going to be in stop and go traffic forever. I was about an inch away from totally losing it.


Why didn't I just call the paramedics? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, and foremost, is that we were with an HMO that insisted you come to their hospitals for all your care. Of course the closest hospital was in Hollywood and we were in South Pasadena, eleven (LA) miles away. The paramedics would have refused to take him to our HMO. Never mind that I had a Level One trauma center a mile away. Or that I had to drive past a Children's Hospital on the way to "our" hospital. In hindsight I should absolutely have taken him to the one nearest me. At the time it never even occurred to me. This particular HMO - Kaiser Permanente - is such a major force in California that they can pretty much do things any way they want to. And they like to exert their power at every chance. When we moved to Kansas, in a perfect illustration of the Stockholm Syndrome, I was beside myself that we actually had to get a different health care plan because Kaiser wasn't available here. That, my friends, is brainwashing.


Things sped up considerably once we got to the hospital and before I knew it we were being seen by an infectious diseases specialist. He examined my son, who at that point was lying face down on the bed, not moving at all, and said


"We'll have to do a spinal tap to make sure, but I'm virtually positive he has meningitis."


Never before had I really understood what people meant when they said that the room spun. I kind of fell backwards into a chair. The doctor continued


"However, I'm also pretty sure he has viral meningitis, not bacterial, and that's a lot less dangerous."


I asked how he could tell. And he said


"The bacterial kids look a lot worse than this."


I looked at my unconscious, yet still retching kid, able to feel the heat off his body as I stood next to him, and asked how they could possibly look worse than this. He paused a minute and then said


"You don't really want to know."


to be continued...