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
IN THE SAN DIEGO CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL lobby, I waited for one of the ER staff to tell me what was wrong with my seven-year-old daughter. I paced for half an hour for someone to tell me why Molly had been throwing up for four days, unable to eat, unable to do anything but lay in bed. Truth is I waited for an ER nurse to say, “Ms. Zive, Molly’s dehydrated and she needs some antibiotics. Once we give her these intravenously you’ll be able to take her home, and things will return to normal.”
“Your daughter needs an appendectomy,” the ER doctor said.
This man, this boy, had appeared at my elbow moments before. I’d been watching Kelly, my four-year-old, dance around the waiting room oblivious to the fact Molly had been whisked back to the ER thirty minutes before. The “doctor” had escorted me to a corner of the lobby, probably afraid I’d disturb the rest the families with the scream threatening to dislodge from my throat.
I studied his name tag ready to demand a real doctor not some resident, but his badge read Dr. Smythe.
“With a ruptured appendix there’s bacteria—”
“Wait. Slow down,” I said.
Kelly now pulled on my arm to show me the Santa Clause who ho, ho, hoed across the lobby.
“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 blood stream. We need to ensure she doesn’t go into septic shock.”
Septic shock? This wasn’t making any sense. Molly just had the stomach flu. 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, they’d given her the potent pain reliever. Her peacefulness signaled 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 with a new one 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 that blare 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.
There was no indication of alarm in the school nurse’s voice when she called me at work
four days before.
“Hello, is this Molly’s mom?” the nurse asked. “Molly came back to Fuerte from the Old Town field trip because she was throwing up.”
When I got to the elementary school to pick Molly up, my stomach hiccupped when I saw her lying on the cot in the nurse’s office. 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 at Fuerte, 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 the 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 her to Children’s Hospital.”
The panic, bells and whistles, quieted because of Dr. Anderson’s calmness, and I drove Molly, and Kelly, to Children’s Hospital.
Maybe stay-at-home mothers are more aware of 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’ve had more life experiences, who are more secure in themselves are able to make decisions. 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 the way things were, stop trying to control things, and stare wide eyed at the way things are, 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 now 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 his way home. He didn’t even know Molly 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 the surgeon met with us. We sat in a small room, only big enough for four folding chairs. My aunt and I sat in 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?
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 of my mouth. Back then a wail or a cry always seemed about to escape from deep, deep in 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.”
TC grabbed my hand.
He peered at me with his intense brown eyes, looking more intense and larger 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, 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, seeped out. 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.