Kelly (3yrs), Molly (7yrs): Two weeks after her appendectomy
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. Havelock Ellis
“YOUR DAUGHTER NEEDS AN EMERGENCY appendectomy,” the ER doctor said.
I glanced around the children’s hospital lobby. Surely this man, this boy, had the wrong mother. Emergency appendectomies happened to other children not Molly. See that couple holding on to each other on the couch there. They look like they’re prepared for a child who needs her appendix removed. I have the seven-year-old daughter who’s been throwing up for four days, unable to eat. Molly has the flu, right? All she needs is liquids and antibiotics, and we’ll be on our way.
“With a ruptured appendix there’s bacteria—”
“Wait,” I said. “Slow down.”
I studied the man in the white coat and the stethoscope roped around his neck. Although he looked like a doctor, he had to be a first year resident. I read his name tag ready to demand a real doctor who knew what he was talking about. But his badge said Dr. Smythe.
“Mommy,” Kelly, my four-year-old, said. “Look. There’s Santa Clause.” She tugged on
my hand to get closer to the costumed jolly ol’ Saint Nick who ho, ho, hoed across the ER’s waiting room.
“Kelly. Let. Mommy. Talk. To. The. Doctor. Please.
“A ruptured appendix?” I said to Dr. Smythe as if by repeating this out loud my brain could play catch up.
“With ruptured appendixes we need to get in there and clean out the bacteria. We don’t know when it burst but we know Molly has bacteria in her gut and now in her bloodstream. We need to ensure she doesn’t go into septic shock.”
Septic shock? This wasn’t making any sense. I’d brought Molly in a half an hour before because her pediatrician had taken one look at her and said, “Go to Children’s.” Molly just had some virus. Didn’t she? She’d had all the classic symptoms: throwing up, stomach pains, and lethargy.
“Where is Molly?” I said. “I need to see her.”
I held Kelly’s hand as we made our way back to Molly. Out in the waiting area, I’d been in denial about where I was or the seriousness of what was wrong with Molly. Watching Kelly dance and pull on Christmas ornaments hanging on the fake tree, I’d been distracted from the reality of the situation. But the smell of rubbing alcohol and Pine-sol, the beeps and noises of the heart monitors and blood pressure machines, and the soft moans and cries from the sick children made this real.
Molly.
There, lying on a hospital bed was my lovely daughter, asleep. For the first time in days she had a glow to her cheeks. I reached for Molly’s hand which felt warm. She opened her eyes, gave me a sleepy smile, and said, “I think I’m going to like it here.”
“Here” meant the morphine coursing through her veins. After running the diagnostic tests for her ruptured appendix, she’d been given the potent pain reliever. Her peacefulness signaled just how much pain she’d been in over the last four days.
I listened to her deep breaths as she slipped back into sleep.
“I’ve been an idiot,” I said to Dr. Smythe and the nurse who replaced the empty saline bag for Molly. “I should have…”
Dr. Smythe squeezed my elbow. “How could you have known?”
“She’s my baby. I’m her mother. I should have known something—”
Dr. Smythe smiled. “Listen to me, we had to run blood tests and take x-rays, before we were able to determine she’d had a ruptured—”
“I should have known.”
BUT DO YOU ALWAYS KNOW when you’re in the middle of something that will change your life forever? Are there bells and whistles announcing the importance of the event? Is there a booming voice that sounds in your head, “Pay attention. This is going to matter.”
If there were signs, then I missed them.
Four days before taking Molly to the ER, there was no indication of alarm in the school
nurse’s voice when she called me at work.
“Hello, is this Molly’s mom?” the nurse asked. “Molly came back to school from the field trip because she was throwing up. Can you come and pick her up?”
When I got to Molly’s school and saw her lying on the cot in the nurse’s office, my stomach hiccupped. Her skin normally rosy was pale, even the freckles that scattered across her nose had disappeared. Her eyes, a brown-hazel like mine, lacked their sparkle. And her thick, wavy, dark hair appeared limp, darker.
“Hi, Mommy.”
I smiled. “Hey, Mo, how you feeling?”
Before Molly could answer, the school nurse said, “It must be the flu. It’s going around. And it’s that time of year with the holidays and all.” She laughed, shaking her head. “The influenza virus has pesky timing.”
I looked back at Molly. I felt a nudge of panic. In Molly’s seven years she’d never had the stomach flu. She rarely had a cold. In her two and half years in elementary school, she’d never missed a day of school, perfect attendance.
“What’s going on with you, baby?” I asked. “I heard you threw up a few times.”
“I’m better.” Molly had a bucket near the bed where she’d been throwing up. Clear vomit, since she didn’t have anything left in her tummy, pooled at the bottom of the pail.
Nudge. Panic.
“I just want to go home,” Molly said.
Ignore intuition.
Panic gone.
I took Molly home.
For two days, Molly threw up off and on. I cleaned up vomit, put cold compresses on her head, and fed her Slurpees, the only thing she’d eat. On day three, she stood straight for the first time in days which I mistook for her feeling better. This was when her appendix burst.
On day four, call it intuition or call it looking at a child so ill she couldn’t open her eyes—bells and whistles—I called her doctor. I drove her to Dr. Anderson’s, who’d been her family doctor since she was a baby.
He took one look at her, and calmly told me, “Michelle, I want you to get her back in the car and take Molly to Children’s Hospital.”
The panic, bells and whistles, quieted because of Dr. Anderson’s calmness, and I drove Molly to Children’s Hospital.
Maybe stay-at-home mothers are more sensitive to signs their children are really sick compared to us working moms.
Maybe women with husbands who work nine to five and come home for dinner every night, who say, “I think you need to take our girl to the doctor. Something isn’t right,” are better off than women like me whose husband traveled a lot and even when he was home, he wasn’t.
Maybe women older than my thirty-two years, women who’d had more life experiences, who were more secure in themselves, are able to make decisions about their children’s health. Maybe they don’t question themselves the way I did back then.
Maybe these women know when their life is about to change. Maybe they stop holding on to things, stop trying to control everything, and stare wide eyed at the way life is, letting go.
“WE’LL HAVE TO WAIT for a few hours before we do the surgery on Molly,” Dr. Smythe said. “We need to ensure all her food is digested.”
I’d just returned to Molly’s room after meeting my mom in the lobby so she could take Kelly home with her.
“What?” I asked, holding Molly’s hand while she still slept. “She hasn’t eaten in four days.” Tears, there they were. They hadn’t showed up until now. Where was Bill? Shit. That’s right in Philadelphia for a business meeting. The same one he’d been at all week. He was on a plane back to San Diego. He didn’t even know his daughter was in the hospital. Hold it together, I told myself. I’d heard the whispers of the ER staff. Such a sick little girl. Probably sepsis. Life-threatening. I swiped the tears away. “Molly needs to have the surgery now. She needs to get well. She needs to be okay.”
My Aunt TC sat with me at midnight while they operated on Molly. The waiting room was empty, except for the two of us, eerie in its desolation. I longed for Kelly’s jumping around, tugging on my arm to go buy cookies from the vending machine. I longed for activity, noise, something other than the silence, something other than the ticking of the clock above the door, and the dread and the worry.
TC sensed this and told me crazy stories, one after the other, of the kindergartners she taught and the parents she dealt with. Finally after two hours of surgery, the surgeon met with us. We sat in a small room, only big enough for four folding chairs. My aunt and I sat in the two chairs across from the doctor, my knees almost rubbing his. There was a small window in the closed door. I half expected a prison guard to come by and peer through the window to ensure us prisoners were behaving.
The room was stuffy and dark with a single, dull light bulb sputtering above us. This brought to mind an old black and white film of the murderer being interrogated by the police.
Where were you on the day Molly was in Old Town?
I was at work.
Work? Ha! Let me get this straight. You were at work, carrying on with your important job while your daughter’s appendix was about to burst. Can you imagine the pain? Oh, no, I suppose you couldn’t. You were too busy—
I had no idea that…
And for the last four days you’ve been taking care (I’ll put those in air quotes) of Molly. Well, with a mother like you what do you expect but this mess?
I wanted to ask the surgeon if I could open the door for some air and light, but I couldn’t speak. If I opened my mouth, I was afraid I’d lose control of what came out. Back then a scream always seemed about to escape from my gut. I clamped my mouth shut.
The surgeon took off his glasses, wiped them with his green scrub shirt, over and over again. After what seemed like ten minutes, he put them back on and said, “Well, it was bad. It was very bad in there.”
“Bad?”
My aunt grabbed my hand.
He peered at me with his intense brown eyes, larger more intense with his glasses back on. “Yes, bad. I had a lot to clean up in there. That’s what took so long.”
The smell of antiseptic, and the way he kept rubbing his hands together as if he was washing away Molly’s badness he’d just had to deal with, made my stomach twist. I wanted to take Molly away from here, away from him.
“It was bad,” he said again.
“You’re not mincing words are you, doc?” I said, trying like hell to keep my butt in the chair so I wouldn’t leap across and pummel him with my fists. Tell me Molly is okay. Tell me she is going to be fine. But he didn’t. Instead he shook his head, weary.
“No. I’m not,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Where was this man’s compassion? Hadn’t he been taught this in medical school? At least say the right things, “It’s going to be all right. You did the best you could under the circumstances. Molly is going to be okay. Good as new.”
I had to settle with, “But I was able to clean her out.”
I stared at him. The anger and fear, which had been holding my body rigid, escaped. I slumped in the chair, crying.
He continued, “She’ll have to be in the hospital for seven days getting intravenous antibiotics, because it—”
“Was bad,” I finished for him.
