Right now my eyes are heavy with sleep and I feel disoriented and dizzy. The last 36 hours have been scratchy, raw, vulnerable, fast, frantic, and filled with waiting in hospital rooms. Teddy started complaining of stomach pain on Wednesday afternoon after eating Burger King. It came and went all afternoon but I thought it was just maybe a minor stomach bug or just gas, constipation, or from eating Burger King. The beginnings and endings of things are not clear. He ate a normal dinner, so I thought it must not be stomach flu and maybe he just had some gas. He ate so much mac and cheese, I was reassured. I would later see that mac and cheese on the floor of our darkened hushed bedroom, trying to decide with my husband what to do as he thrashed in our arms. I would see the mac and cheese another time too, later, at the hospital, in the ultrasound room. He fell asleep easily at bedtime but started thrashing thirty minutes later. “My stomach hurts,” he said, “owie, owie, owie!” He screamed and writhed for ten minutes, then fell asleep for another twenty, this pattern repeating itself before we gave him a glycerin suppository and made him sit on the toilet till he pooped. I was convinced now he would go to sleep; it was just constipation. And he did go to sleep again, briefly. Then woke again, crying, “owie, owie, owie, my stomach hurts,” and then, “DADDY, can you fix it!?” The desperation in his four-year-old voice scared me. “Scary, scary, scary!” he cried. I knew now that it wasn’t constipation, and I went to put on my pants, get coffee, keys, toys, change of clothes, water, snacks, insurance card, phone, charger.
After an IV, exams, ultrasound and Xray, the nurse told me he had, “intusussusception,” a word I couldn’t pronounce and kept thinking of as “interruption.” The phone autocorrected the text to my husband. “He has interruption. Something that sounds like interruption.” And when the nurse left the room, I quickly googled, and saw, one part of the intestine telescopes onto another part, folding itself under, causing ischemia, pain, and “without fast treatment, in 2-5 days, the child will inevitably die of sepsis.” Cause? Unknown! Or a virus. Or anatomy. One of those three. I scanned the list of other results and saw the words, “uniform fatality.” I imagined fatality blanketing all of these children suffering from this small problem, their intestines simply folded up. Was it such a crime, for one small part of your intestines to fold under another part? How could that kill you with such speed, precision and insistence?
I breathed in and out and in and out and looked around and said to myself, “be here, where your feet are,” a trick that’s worked in the past, in other waiting rooms and hospital rooms. I looked at the wall of this ER room, the blue paint, and the tubing in the wall. And I thanked God for the tubing in the wall and whatever role the tubing was playing in keeping Teddy alive. And I imagined a woman whose baby had intussusception, but who didn’t have access to world class medical care in a ten minute drive, whose baby was pooping red currant jelly and throwing up coffee grounds, whose baby was lethargic like mine, weak in her arms, like mine, but, whose baby was going to die, inevitably, uniformly, in 2-5 days, unlike mine. “Red currant poop is a later stage of intussusception.” The ER doctor said we caught it early, after only twelve hours. It hadn’t been going on for a full day. One day, I thought. One day was late stage for this.
“A simple procedure that involves pumping air into his colon will fix the problem in 80% of cases. The other 20% are surgical,” the ER doctor explained to me. “Will we do the procedure tomorrow?” “Oh no,” he said, “the team is getting called in now.” At 3 in the morning.
I could feel this woman with no access to medical care for her baby, with me for hours. She listened as the doctor told me there was a 5% chance of Teddy’s bowels rupturing with this procedure. I felt her watching when I held Teddy’s arms down while the radiologist stuck tubing inside of him and inflated air and popped his intestines back out while watching on a screen. I saw the shadowy rolls of his intestines connect as the radiologist exclaimed, “That’s it! That’s perfect. Beautiful. No rupture. The intussusception is reduced."
I felt the other woman without access to medical care noticing how satisfied the doctor was with his own hands and his ability to steer this boy of mine away from the river of certain death with a piece of plastic tubing and what looked to me like a hand pump. I understood then the beauty of medicine. The ability to reach inside this rag-tag collection of bones and muscles, this clanking hunk of junk we call the people we love, to reach inside and fix something quickly and easily, to reach inside and change a life forever. To make a life possible. And I felt the other woman’s terror and desperation of health being withheld when it means everything.
When Teddy was born, he lost 90% of his blood in a freak accident inside my womb and suffered significant oxygen deprivation injuries to his brain and kidneys. I didn’t trust bodies for a long time. I looked at my children and saw that they were merely a collection of potential mechanical problems that would devastate me if they failed. A walking jumble of machinery that clanked and squeaked and could, at any point, fail in a small but devastatingly significant way. I checked their breathing multiple times a night for years. Recently, four years out from the birth accident, I had started to imagine the kid’s bodies more like sleek robots, their parts lubricated and designed to last for decades without planned obsolescence. I was healing, I thought.
But tonight, one small part of Teddy’s intestines telescoped onto another part. Without intervention, this would have killed him quickly. He would have been dead by the weekend. When he was at Vacation Bible School on Wednesday morning, while I drank coffee with my friend and talked about graphic design, generative AI, books, motherhood and the pandemic, something sinister was already inside my son. A ticking clock was inside his stomach that whispered, “if you don’t fix this, your son will be dead in 2-5 days.”
After the simple procedure of pushing air into his intestines to unfold them, Teddy farted copiously in my arms. I carried him in my arms down the hall as he cried and farted, his intestines no longer ischemic, no longer folded under, no longer obstructed, no longer at risk of perforation, sepsis, inevitable death devastating all of our lives. No longer at risk. No longer at risk. I felt the other woman watching me, now bereft, her empty arms, looking over my shoulder at Teddy, her desperation, her banging on the door of the procedure room, and being turned away as I took this procedure greedily and breathed in the smell of my boy’s curly red haired head.
I whisper to him now as he lays in bed beside me asleep, sweaty, warm, four years old in soft pyjamas. I whisper, more to myself than him, you are safe, you are safe, you are safe. You are mine, you are loved, you are alive. I will always keep you safe, I tell him.
But the truth is, that is a lie we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night, our fragile children curled into our own fragile, fleeting arms.
