The Aquarium
On July 15, 2010, my wife, Teri, and I took our younger daughter, Isabel, to the doctor for a regular checkup. She was nine months old and appeared to be in perfect health. Her first teeth had come in, and she was now regularly eating with us at the dinner table, babbling and shoving rice cereal into her mouth. A cheerful, joyous child, she had a fondness for people, which she had not, the joke went, inherited from her grumpy father.
Teri and I always went together to our children’s doctor’s appointments, and this time we also took Ella, Isabel’s big sister, who was almost three. The nurse took Isabel’s temperature and measured her weight, height, and head circumference, and Ella was happy that she didn’t have to undergo the same ordeal. . Everything seemed fine, except for her head circumference. The doctor was concerned. Reluctant to send Isabel for an MRI, he scheduled an ultrasound exam for the following day.
The following morning, Isabel underwent an ultrasound exam of her head, crying in Teri’s arms throughout the procedure.
he ventricles of Isabel’s brain were enlarged, full of fluid. Like an Aquarium.
An MRI was urgently needed.
She received antibiotics and underwent a scan or two. I left the hospital and went home to be with Ella. I talked to Ella about Isabel’s being sick, about her tumor, and told her that she would have to stay with Grandma that night. She didn’t complain or cry; she understood, as well as any three-year-old could, the difficulty of our problem.
She had just over a pint of blood in her body.
Ella came to see her that afternoon and, as always, made her laugh by pretending to grab little chunks of her cheeks and eat them. After Ella left, Isabel was agitated as I held her. I realized that she was twitching and whimpering every thirty seconds or so. Then she went into a full-blown seizure: she stiffened, her eyes rolled back, her mouth foamed as she twitched. Teri and I held her hands and talked to her, but she was not aware of us.
Teri is in the corner weeping ceaselessly and quietly, the terror on her face literally unspeakable; the gray-haired attending doctor is issuing orders as residents take turns compressing Isabel’s chest, because her heart has stopped beating. They bring her back, as I wail, “My baby! My baby! My baby!” There is a good chance that she will not survive the surgery. Her heart stops beating again; the residents are compressing her chest.
My baby! My baby! My baby!”
Copyright © Aleksander Hemon | Year Posted 2021
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