A Day at the Hospital

I started to write a post in my head as I drove to the emergency room. It went like this:

“Why I Believe in Modern Medicine”

The week after M was born, UNICEF published a study saying that in Africa between 40,000 and 60,000 women a year die of obstructed labor. That, I remember thinking, would have been me. After four days of pre-labor, ten hours of Pitocin, and three hours of Pitocin plus epidural, the-baby-who-would-turn-out-to-be-M showed no signs of emerging. Rather than keep trying and risk an emergency c-section, we opted for a non-emergency c-section during the course of which we discovered that Baby M, for by that point she was identifiably M, had been stuck. She wasn’t coming out, no how, no way, and if I lived in a small village in Africa, we both would have died.

It’s quite possible that if I had been laboring under the care of Ina Mae Gaskin in a yurt at The Farm, things might have turned out differently. I’m not being facetious at all: M’s position wasn’t inevitable, especially given that E slid out relatively easily four and a half years later, and certainly the process of labor has a lot to do with its outcome: maybe if I’d been drinking herb tea and getting massages during those four days of pre-labor, I would not have been so exhausted that I wanted to be induced, and if I hadn’t been induced, maybe I would have labored in a different position and she wouldn’t have gotten stuck, and so forth and so on. But the fact is, I did the best I could in the circumstances, and it turned out the way it did, and modern medicine saved our lives.

Then, when M was five, she had a stomach ache. A bad stomach ache. Our pediatrician was away so we went to his partner which was a mistake, as always, though it was the last time we made that mistake. She said it was constipation and recommended an enema, but, just in case, she sent us to the local hospital for an x-ray which didn’t show anything (and that was the last time we went to the local hospital for an x-ray). At midnight, M was screaming in pain so we went back to the local hospital. She threw up in the car as we arrived at the emergency room and the pain subsided. They sent us home but told us to go to Children’s if she didn’t improve. The next day she felt better, but the day after that, she was miserable again. I took her to Children’s where we spent a long time waiting to see if she had a bladder infection, which she didn’t. Finally a renegade resident ordered a CAT scan, and lo and behold she had appendicitis and went straight to an emergency appendectomy.

I remember people kept telling me what a terrible thing it was, how sad, how awful, how horrible. But it wasn’t. My kid was sick, they found out what was wrong with her, and they fixed it. At Children’s there were kids with cancer, kids who’d been in the hospital for months, kids who weren’t going home any time soon, kids who didn’t go home. M had surgery and IV antibiotics and lots of flowers and teddy bears and went home after a week. But if she had had that stomach ache 150 years earlier, she would have died.

That’s how far I got in the car this morning. Then we got to the hospital.

M was sick yesterday, with a headache, and I was annoyed because we had such nice Rosh Hashanah plans. But with Motrin she perked up and we did make it to the picnic with all the people in our new neighborhood who go to our new synagogue. By night, though, we were alternating Motrin and Tylenol every three or four hours for the headache. Then at four in the morning, she started throwing up. By 8:00 she had thrown up four or five times, her head was killing her, she was a pathetic heap of sick-childness, and we headed for the pediatrician's office.

M threw up in the parking lot. The pediatrician did a strep test which came out negative and gently suggested the emergency room at Children’s. I pushed her on her gentle suggestion and she said if it were her kid she would go, so I went. M threw up on the walkway leaving the office. She threw up in the car on the way to Children’s. She threw up in the waiting room outside triage.

This is where the story doesn’t go exactly as I expected. I thought there would be another effective diagnosis and (perhaps dramatic) treatment. Then I would use my punch line again.

Instead, they hooked her up to an IV and gave her an anti-nausea drug and some Tylenol. She clearly worried the doctors, because we were on our way up for the CAT scan within half an hour. It was normal, which made everyone happy. Then they gave her some ibuprofen and put us in a comfortable room and…well, nothing much happened. Mainly she slept. I had, in a moment of practical inspiration, stopped at home on the way to the emergency room to get a sweater, my book, my cell phone power cord, and M’s teddy bear, all of which were essential. While M slept, I read my book. Every once in a while, a doctor came in and we woke her up to see how she was. Mainly she was tired, but she also seemed to be improving. We discussed whether to do a spinal tap. We discussed meningitis and encephalitis and migraine and virus. Finally, we were sent home with lots of instructions, including to come back to the hospital if she got as sick again as she’d been in the morning.

She slept all the way home, and ate toast and chicken soup, and went six hours before she needed Tylenol. Now she’s asleep. I think she’s going to be ok. It’s probably a virus or maybe a first migraine (apparently you can't diagnose migraine until there's a pattern, so I'm hoping if it's a first migraine we never know).

How’s my faith in modern medicine? I think it’s still pretty good. She threw up nine times this morning, and if she hadn’t had that IV and anti-nausea medicine, well, I don’t think she would have died, but she would have been much sicker and even more unhappy. And, yeah, the CAT scan didn’t find anything, but I’m sure glad that I’m no longer thinking brain tumor, as I was at about 9:30 this morning. And though it would have been rhetorically powerful, I’m glad not to end this paragraph with “she would have died.” I'll take real life ambiguity over a punch line any day, especially a day at the hospital.