Fear
Eli threw up last night about 11:30.I had just turned in a few minutes before and drifted off into a light sleep when I heard a commotion outside the door. I got up, walked into the hallway, and saw an eight-foot patchwork of vomit on the carpet.
Eli doesn't get sick, really. Compared to his peers, he's the healthiest kid in the world. He's really only vomited two or three times in his life.
Well, before last night, anyway.
At midnight, he had a bad bout of diarrhea, the kind where he couldn't even make it to the bathroom. At 12:30 a.m., he had another. At 1 a.m., he threw up again. We were going through clothes and carpets at an unsustainable rate, but every half hour, he did one or the other. Or rather, one or the other was done to him. All night.
He tried taking a sip of water twice during the night, and both times he threw up within fifteen minutes. I was this sick once--when I had food poisoning--and we were wracking our brains trying to figure out if he ate anything that could have been bad.
I don't think he slept more than fifteen minutes at a time at any point during the night. We didn't really sleep, either, and this morning, he was totally washed out and his face was more than a little ashen.
Gloria took him to the doctor for a 9 a.m. appointment, and I ducked into my study and posted the gaming links I wrote up last night. It was probably a stomach virus, I thought--a bad one, but once he saw the doctor he'd be on the road to recovery. And I was so relieved that he was going to see the doctor, because it seemed like the sickest he'd ever been.
I decided to go ahead and take a shower, then came back down to check my e-mail.
The phone rang.
"Honey, I'm at the doctor's office, and Linda is concerned about Eli's breathing, and she thinks we should go to the hospital." Gloria's voice had a quiver in it, and she wasn't far from bursting into tears.
"The hospital?" I asked.
"And she's calling an ambulance," Gloria said.
It's hard to describe how much fear you can feel in any single moment. I can't put a number on it. I just know that in that split-second I was suddenly more scared than I'd ever been in my whole life.
I don't rattle easily, and I'm not a crier (I can't remember the last time I did, actually), but I felt like I was just one moment away from bursting into tears.
Here's the catch, though: I couldn't. If Eli saw me break down, it would terrify him. So I was shaking inside as I was driving to meet them, but I had to be able to act like a five-year old being taken in an ambulance to the hospital was nothing less than the coolest thing that ever happened.
I met them at the emergency room, and when the ambulance pulled up, I could see Gloria's face inside. Two people wheeled Eli out of the ambulance, and the stretcher swallowed his tiny little body. He had an oxygen mask on, but they took it off, and he gave me a little wave.
And both of the medical people said, almost at the same time, "He's going to be just fine. His breathing is great."
We sat in the waiting area for a few minutes, and when it was time for us to go back, Eli was so tired and weak that he got into a wheelchair and we pushed him back. He was dehydrated and exhausted on top of that. But he was so tough that when they started an i.v. to get some fluids in him, he didn't cry. I could see it really hurt him when the needle went in, but he sucked it up.
I don't expect five-year-olds to suck it up.
They drew blood and all the other kinds of things they do in emergency rooms, and they also gave Eli a little tablet that dissolved on his tongue to help him stop throwing up. And he did stop.
The first doctor who saw us told us that the most likely suspect was a rotavirus. If you don't have kids, you might have never even heard of a rotavirus, but they can be brutal. Some illnesses are like cold fronts--they take days to develop, and their progress is very gradual--but a rotavirus is like a tornado. No warning, no progression, just the roof flying off your house before you even know what hit you. They can cause such severe vomiting and diarrhea that dehydration can reach dangerous levels.
We were in the emergency room for about four hours, enough time for two treatments of fluid through his i.v., and later, a tiny amount of Powerade every fifteen minutes (about a tablespoon). The second doctor, who seemed to be much more experienced, agreed that a rotavirus being the most likely cause.
Once Eli got some fluid back into him, a little color came back into his cheeks, and when he could finally drink something (after six hours of not being able to have even a sip), he started talking just a little bit. After about ninety more minutes, when he didn't throw up the small amounts he had been drinking, the doctor let us go home.
And I was still afraid, just absolutely numb with fear, even as I was asking questions to the doctor and joking with Eli. I'm still afraid now, even though he hasn't thrown up once and, except for a fever, is doing very well.
I wrote a post a few months ago about "the ghoulies," moments when I am suddenly seized by all kinds of irrational thoughts about bad things that could happen to Eli. Those moments always pass, but before they do I always have this quick gasp of fear.
I don't think I really understood until today that sometimes the ghoulies are real.
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