When the hospital becomes home
- John DeSantis
- Jan 3, 2020
- 6 min read
I’ve been offline for a couple of weeks, and this was mostly due to this dad on the bus with headphones being away from the bus and his headphones. It all started with a medical emergency. When your small child goes through something adverse that is completely out of your control, it feels like your world collapsing into itself in the middle of an apocalyptic Michael Bay movie. Few things are more terrifying and demoralizing for a parent than this.
Trips to the hospital are never easy, and other than for the birth of a child, they’re often met with the uneasy feeling of distress only relieved if and when you’re out of the proverbial woods. When you’re there with a small child and left with nothing to do but hope and pray, there’s no more desperate place to be as a parent. This happened a few weeks ago when our 6 month old son developed a cough. At first this seemed like the usual cold that had been passed around the house by his two older brothers who harbor germs like gold prospectors during the 1800’s in Northern California.
This time of year, if you have kids that are in school or daycare, some sort of ailment will make its way into your home and fester there to such a familiar extent you may as well call it Uncle Fester. We were fortunate to avoid having our first two sons out of daycare until they were both over a year old, and our youngest son is following suit.
The first 6-12 months in daycare for any kid involves them getting accustom to the various germs and illnesses they’ll be bringing home with their sponge art and drawings of blue ducks. This is inevitable, but the longer you can keep an infant out of these hot zones the better in my experience.
While our 6 month old isn’t in daycare right now, he’s subject to whatever his older brothers bring home from school. This is unavoidable unless we keep him in a plastic bubble for a few years like John Travolta in a 1970’s TV movie but I don’t have the time, money, or neurosis for that. So he gets a cold, you use a nebulizer and humidifier, keep him resting on an incline, all the usual limited treatments you have for an infant.
This developed into something worse when one afternoon my wife noticed he was struggling to breathe. A valuable lesson, always trust your parental instincts, no matter how new you are to it. After taking him to the doctor, she was told to bring him to our area pediatric hospital and to have someone ride in the backseat with the baby. This was to make sure he was still breathing while driving there, words that would understandably make any parent lose their shit. So after my wife lost hers with enough composure and resolve left to find a kind neighbor to take the ride to the hospital with her, she called me while waiting for my bus home. Then I did what most dads do with their toxic thoughts of uncertainty, impending doom, and gut wrenching fears: swallowed it into a ball of misery, buried in the pit of my stomach as I tried to calmly talk to my wife while she game planned her trip to the E.R.
I use the term “scare the ever-loving shit out of” scarcely, but few occasions are so fitting for it as your kid’s doctor telling you to have someone watch them while you drive them to the hospital to make sure they don’t stop breathing.
I met my wife in the E.R. after I got home and didn’t leave the hospital (save for a few trips home to shower) for 6 days. I’d never spent more time in a hospital in my life. Not for the births of any of our 3 sons, not when my dad died, not when other family members were sick or passed away. If you’re fortunate enough, even in dealing with death, hospital stays will spare you the longevity.
The first 2 days in the hospital were scary, his fever approached 104 degrees, which for babies helps their bodies fight off illness. Or that’s just what they tell you for it to be one less thing terrifying you. What is a somewhat common ailment this time of year, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, usually strikes most of us adults, toddlers, and kids as a bad cold. Fever, cough, runny nose. Unpredictable, and as with many viral ailments, there’s not much to effectively treat it with aside from the time it decides to leave your system. If fevers get too high there’s Tylenol, but antibiotics won’t do you any good and there’s no other medicine or vaccine for it.
When an infant under 1 year old gets RSV though, it can be especially dangerous as the congestion builds in their lungs and often paired with bronchiolitis can tighten their already narrow airways. Some cases of RSV can quickly turn as it did with our son in going from a cough to short, labored breathing, which then lead to concerns over his oxygen levels and overworking his heart. In the hospital they’re able to supplement the lower oxygen levels by hooking them up to breathing apparatus and if they’re not able eat as in this case, a feeding tube or IV for fluids is administered. Baby veins can be hard to locate, so a feeding tube it was. Nothing prepares you for the sight of a small baby with tubes coming out of them, and they even get to experience the shame of the ass-less hospital gown. At least they get the dignity of wearing their diaper.
After 2 days things didn’t get better and the RSV, as it can do, turned into pneumonia on day 3. Then his feeding tube was removed when they were able to get an IV into his hand. Our smiling happy baby was miserable, and we worried if this would break his spirit, or adversely change him when we weren’t worrying about whether his life was in danger.
By day 4 he wasn’t improving significantly. I didn’t bother changing out of my basketball shorts, figured out the least gross items to order from the hospital’s meal menu, and where they kept the endless supply of ice cream cups. That night I brought his 2 brothers to see him, he smiled again, and his heart rate jumped at the sight of these familiar little faces. It was the happiest we’d been in days.
On day 5, he started improving significantly, to the point where they could remove the extra oxygen and IV, they started him on an antibiotic for the pneumonia, and he started to eat again. On day 6, the doctors said there was nothing we couldn’t do at home that they were doing so he was discharged and we felt a wave of relief. He would still be sick and it would take time to get completely well, but the worst of the virus was behind us.
As I felt grateful we were going home 3 days before Christmas and the 5 of us would be together, I thought of the families in the hospital that wouldn’t be home for Christmas. Then I thought of those that were in the hospital for more than 6 days, for things far worse than the scary shitstorm my family just navigated blindly through. There are kids who never make it home from a hospital stay. Others are there with their parents for weeks, months, or longer, going through soul crushing circumstances while trying to stay positive for the rest of their family and for whatever good it might do for their sanity or their ill child.
Another thing happens when a child draws the cards of being in the hospital around the holidays. Almost every day there would be a visit from some kind folks giving the kids gifts. There were NJ Devils players, Batman and Captain America, young kids, and in one case a family giving out gifts in honor of their “angel baby.” Fewer things gave me more faith in humanity than that moment. The next time one of my kids gets a fever, throws up on the exponentially aging living room carpet, falls and cries in agony, I’ll be happy that it’s the worst thing they’re dealing with in that moment, because those moments are truly gifts when seen from the perspective of the world around us.
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