Cerin Amroth

There are at least a couple of sweet things that happened or I learned about after Nate and Dom’s scary ER trip that have really touched me. While we were still at the hospital and after he was feeling better, Dom stopped playing with me, looked around, and said, “Ella.” I’m sure he liked the attention of having two parents around him, but it wasn’t complete without Ella.

After we left the hospital, we stopped at the drug store to get his prescription filled. Dom and I were waiting in the van, which was parked across the street from the YMCA, with the doors open to catch the breeze. I was reading a book to him. He was fully engaged in the story and pointing at the pictures, but then, he took a quick breath, pointed his finger, and said, “Ella.” I looked up and realized he had spotted her, across the street walking with our friend to the YMCA. He eagerly waived at her. Later – in the YMCA – he ran up to her as she was walking down the hall to him, and attacked her with a huge hug and long and loud, “Elllllllllaaaaaa.”

Tonight I was at a meeting at Ella’s preschool and heard about the other sweet moment. After Nate got to the hospital, he called Ella’s teacher because he was supposed to pick her and her friend up from school that day. Ella’s teacher told her that her daddy had to take Dominic to the hospital because he was sick, so someone else was going to pick her up. Ella – very matter-of-factly – stated, “He didn’t seem quite right this morning.”

Both of these stories illustrate that they have a closer bond than we will ever understand. When we were initially thinking about whether to have a second child, we were so concerned that we wouldn’t be able to give two children as much attention as we were giving Ella. One of the driving factors for me about having two was hoping that they would have a bond, later in life, if not growing up. Seeing and hearing about moments like these makes me so glad that they have each other.

Dominic woke up in the middle of last night and was unusually reluctant to settle down again.  This morning after Suanna left for work I trudged downstairs to find he and Ella bickering over LEGOs, so I set about distracting them with breakfast.  Uncharacteristically, Dom wasn’t interested in his — he just picked at a few raisins in his raisin bran and drank a little bit of milk.

He was in good spirits dropping Ella off at preschool but looked awfully tired in the car afterward, so I decided to forego the usual trip to the YMCA and went home to give him a nap.  He didn’t fall asleep in the car, though, so we ended up reading a couple of books in his bedroom.  His forehead felt pretty warm, one of those borderline “Do I give Tylenol or don’t I?” cases, but since his eyelids were drooping fast I decided to just put him down rather than trying to wrestle some medicine into him.

I was down in the basement an hour later, with the baby monitor on.  I heard a couple cries, normal stuff for when he’s waking up, usually to be followed by sounds of movement in the crib and then his voice calling “Daddy!” or “Ella!” or “Mommy!” depending on his mood.

This time I heard strange, guttural gurgles.

For about ten seconds I thought that he was talking to himself in his crib, maybe in a funny voice.  But then the unnatural-ness of the sound set in and I realized something was not right.  I sprinted up the stairs and into his room and found him in his usual napping pose — on his tummy, legs tucked under, butt up in the air.  But his skin was pale and his mouth was full of saliva.  He wasn’t choking on it, exactly, but neither was he swallowing it or spitting it out.  I yanked him out of his crib and realized that he wasn’t doing anything.  His body was completely limp.  His head flopped around like a rag doll.

I would not wish on anyone the experience of the next couple of minutes.  Mind racing:  where did I put the phone?  Do I carry him with me as I search for it or do I put him down?  Do I wait for the ambulance or throw him into the car and rush to the hospital?  As I moved through the house he flopped along in my right arm, conscious but eyes unfocused.  I wanted to stop and hold my ear close to his mouth, to reassure myself that he was breathing, however shallowly, but forced myself instead to hurry, find the phone, and race out with it and Dominic to the front steps where the reception would be clear.

It was a ridiculously beautiful spring morning, sixty-five degrees, clear sky, flowering trees, singing birds.  Even as I dialed 911 and yelled “Help!” at the top of my lungs to no one in particular, part of my mind lingered on how bizarre it was to be going through what we were going through on such a pretty day.  And the other part, the part I tried to keep firmly tamped down, wondered if he was going to die in my arms and reorient the world, the universe, around this one terrible moment, everything else Before or After the now.

And the next moment, things got ever so slightly better:  He moaned.  Not a cry, per se, but a low vocal complaint.  “Hey Dad, I don’t know what’s going on here, but man, this really sucks.  I can’t move ANYTHING.”  At that point I still didn’t know what the hell was going on, and it still seemed entirely possible that something had gone terribly wrong with him that would never get better.  But by the same token it was clear that whatever it was he wasn’t going to die, and that fact alone was no small measure of hope.

This was happening as I was on the phone with the operator, who could hear his moans on her end of the line and assured me that they were a good sign.  An ambulance was on its way but a fire truck happened to be driving by when the alert went out, so I heard the holy sound of sirens before I had even hung up with 911.  One of the firemen who approached had been exercising on the elliptical machine next to mine at the Y two days earlier.

The paramedics arrived not long after.  The one who examined him and heard my (somewhat frantic) account of what had happened assured me that she had seen this sort of thing many, many times before:  seizure after a spike in fever temperature.  (If you’re still freaking out at this point in the story, go google “febrile seizure” and you’ll learn that it all seems way, way scarier than it actually turns out to be.)

So, the two minutes of hell gave way to half an hour of holding my son on my lap in the ambulance and then on a hospital bed, whispering into his ear, trying to believe the people who said that he was going to be OK, and waiting, waiting for him to lift an arm, move his head, cry, or do anything more than adjust his eyes slightly to focus on something else.  And finally, it happened.  It wasn’t even particularly gradual.  One moment he was lethargic and the next he realized there was an oxygen mask on his face and a bracelet on his wrist and a blood pressure cuff on his arm and a band-aid on the bottom of his foot:  “What the hell, Dad?  Get me OUT of here!”  I had been falling down a bottomless pit, and his cry was the bed of pillows at the bottom.

As you might imagine, what followed was several dreary hours of hanging around in a hospital waiting for this or that test or tidbit of information.  All the stuff the paramedics had indicated was probably the case turned out to be the case:  he had a fever, and it had spiked while he slept, causing what’s called a febrile seizure.  Happens to 1 in 25 kids between 6 months and 3 years of age.  The surprise came when the results of the chest x-ray came back:  the fever had come along because he had pneumonia.

In fact, it’s likely that that congestion that we noticed he had as long ago as last Saturday was probably pneumonia.  It didn’t even begin to occur to us because 1) it’s springtime in Washington, pollen capital of the world — who doesn’t have congestion? and 2) until this morning he had not been acting sick in the slightest.   If you’re a parent you understand:  it’s a wild, crazy world of ambiguous symptoms, variable forehead temperatures and nose runniness and skin tone and whatnot, so what you fall back on is the reliable question:  Is he acting like himself?  Or is something Off?  Dominic, blessed Dominic, so good-natured, so tough, gave us no clue until this morning that anything might be the matter.

When the doctor said they wanted him to stick around long enough to see him eat, drink, sleep, and wake, I took the opportunity to get out of the hospital, get the charger for the phone, call a few folks, and grab some food for Suanna and me.  By the time I got back he was up from his nap and was acting … like every other time he’s just up from his nap.  We had to linger longer to let the hospital bureaucracy run its course but by the time we got home the bracelet on his wrist would have seemed odd to anyone watching:  “Why was that kid at the hospital?  He’s the picture of health!”  While I was typing this in the living room I watched Dominic pounce onto Suanna’s back, grab a handful of her hair in each hand, and merrily bellow “C’mon, horse!”

So now the strangest thing about the scariest two minutes of my life is how incredibly distant they feel.  Other than a course of antibiotics, there is every indication that life will go on as if literally nothing out of the ordinary happened today.  And yet:  I have already had plenty of opportunities to run through the What-Ifs.  What if I hadn’t turned the baby monitor on?  What if I had decided to take a nap too instead of making a cup of coffee?  What if he’s one of the 3% or so for whom febrile seizures are a precursor of more seizures to come?  Life goes on, but those two minutes, and the What-Ifs that go along with them, will be waking me up at night for a good while to come.

It was Sunday night, and we were eating dinner. Ella was very pleased that she finished everything on her plate, so I told her she could have a piece of Easter candy for dessert. She triumphantly carried her plate to the counter and opened the cupboard to take out the candy.

As soon as Dom saw it, he put his foot to the edge of the table and pushed his chair back. (This lovely dismissal tactic is his standard move.) Nate pushed his chair back in and said that he had to eat one more bite if he wanted candy. The foot went right back up, he pushed himself back, and said “cand.” (No, there isn’t a “y” on the end of Dom’s word – there’s barely a “d”.) Nate pushed him back in, and I said, “Dom, one more bite” this time. He repeated his maneuver, and then quickly turned himself around to dismount from his seat before Nate could push him back.

He ran into the kitchen, where Ella was unwrapping her sucker. I looked at Nate and asked whether he thought that Dominic could grasp the cause-and-effect nature of what we were saying. Nate repeated the requirements for candy, and Dom shrieked, threw his head back, and stomped on the floor … it was clear he understood.

I kept holding out the one more bite, and Nate kept directing him back to me, but he was having none of it. Finally, I picked him up and took him upstairs for his bath. All during the bath, he kept crying and stomping his feet. When I got his hair wet, he started vigorously rubbing his hair, and saying “no wet.” He continued to do that as I put in the soap, and then rinsed it out. When I asked if he wanted to get out, he seemed inclined, but then he fought my attempts to wrap him in a towel. He also fought my diapering and jammying efforts.

Finally, I carried him downstairs to let him sit on Nate’s lap while I finished up Ella’s bath. By that point, he had completely worn himself out and started to fall to sleep as he sat there.

The length of this tantrum and the fact that we couldn’t distract him by putting him in the bath are the noteworthy elements. Of course, most of it was probably due to the fact that he had less than a 30-minute nap that day. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that he is employing acute observation and mimcry skills related to Ella’s drama-filled episodes. He’s been a very easy two year-old. Hopefully, this incident doesn’t signal a new chapter in that book!

Ella found The Key lying on the ground near Eastern Market a couple weekends ago.  It wasn’t a key exactly — I think it was an old style device to insert into a socket to turn something that might open a window.  But it has decorative loops at the back, so whatever it was exactly it certainly looked most like a key.

Over time it became Ella’s Favorite Thing.  She liked speculating what it might open.  She liked pretending that it was a magic key.  She carried it everywhere she went, and enjoyed showing it to people.

And then, at some point this morning, it fell out of her pocket while she was a the park with kids from church.  She didn’t realize it until we were driving home.  She can be prone to bouts of exaggerative drama, but this time her grief was 100% genuine.  “I’ve lost my key forever!” she wailed.  “It was very important to me and I lost it!”  “I’m never going to see the key again.  I’m so sad that I lost my key!”

I was there in the driver’s seat feeling simultaneously sympathetic, and a little worried that she was going to wake up Dominic, who had fallen asleep, but also feeling admiration for the way she was able to articulate her feelings in complete sentences, which is more than can be said for many folks, not all of them kids.

When we got home I sat with her and told her the story of when I was a kid and had lost the Swiss army knife that was very dear to me.  It was in my pocket when I jumped in a lake and at some point it fell out and was impossible to locate in the murky bottom.  Then, reaching for a way to round out the anecdote, I said “I was sad about it for a while.  But then I found a new favorite thing and I wasn’t sad any more.”

Ella sat still for a moment.  Then she got up off my lap, purposefully, walked over to the kitchen counter, picked up her new squirt gun, and went outside to squirt the newly blooming flowers.