[i]Sorry to put up a long personal story, but this time of year is a very special one because of how close I came to losing my life 12 years ago at the age of 14. I felt like finally sharing my experience with others after a long silence.
I’m not sure if it should have gone into health or temporary so I put it here to get sorted where others see it fit. It’s a little graphic, I guess, but bear with me.[/i]
This will be the first entry in a series of three parts of what happened to me 12 years ago.
Part I: March 9, 1994
I had become very tired in school, panting up the stairs and sleeping in every class despite going to bed almost soon after dinner every night. I had been an athlete in the prior months, both doing track and volleyball, so I didn’t know what was going on. My mom thought it was just a growth spurt wearing me out. Except it had been going on for two months and I was getting more tired.The night after the spring concert I was sick and soon it turned into feeling ill in the mornings, but feeling okay in the afternoons.
My mother’s ex-husband-to-be (which he wouldn’t be, unfortunately, for another three more years) told my mother that I was faking it for attention, trying to get out of going to school, or that I was pregnant. The only way he would let her take me to a doctor was if I ate dinner. I remember it was kielbasa and tater tots which would have ordinarily loved, but when I got into my mom’s old banana yellow Toyota wagon, it didn’t stay inside me. My mom absolutely cannot handle sick, but she took me back inside and put me in the tub. Even though I was 14 years old, I let my mom wash me, too exhausted, embarrassed, and sorry to be anything but appreciative to her. I soon was in bed, which was just some old dusty, scratchy couch cushions on the floor with a blanket because we couldn’t afford beds for my sister and I.
After that time I grew weaker and weaker because I couldn’t eat or even drink something like water. I got to the point where I would crawl to the bathroom to throw up, then scoop some water from the sink to drink and sit by the toilet till that came up too before crawling back to my bed. That second week I became so tired I had to stop halfway through my crawl across the bedroom to rest for a few minutes before continuing on to the bathroom which was right outside my bedroom door. Because my mother’s ex-husband-to-be was insistent that I was simply craving attention, I was to stay back in the bedroom by myself until I was ready to be civilized and tell my mom why I was faking it. Since I wasn’t, and we lived in fear of that man, I remained in my bedroom, taking my occasional crawls to get rid of bile, since my stomach was empty and had been for over a week, and the little bit of water I scooped from the sink.
On March 9, 1994, however, things were a little different. My little sister, God bless her, had frozen some grape drink for me and wanted me to try some when she got home from school. We sat in the living room, me on a blanket in the middle of the floor while she fed me juice cubes. Around 3:30, my mother burst through the door and told me to get dressed because I was going to go see a pediatrician. I crawled back to the bedroom my sister and I shared and put on some clothes I had gotten for Christmas. I don’t remember the top I wore, but I do remember I was wearing the purple jeans I had asked for so I could fit in with the other kids at my new school. I crawled back out and my mother helped me into my Duke jacket (also a Christmas present) and got me to stand up. We walked out of the apartment together.
It had snowed pretty heavily and then rained a few days later so the ground was covered with deep, ice-coated snow. I took a few steps from the outer door of our building, holding my pants up because they would fall to my ankles if I let go (pants that fit me kind of snugly three weeks earlier). I got a a few feet in the snow and fell down because I had no sustenance after two weeks of starvation. My mom circled back to stand me up and helped me to the car. She quietly apologized for not taking me to the doctor sooner and then started the car.
The nurses saw my mom trying to help me out and met us with a wheelchair. It was the first time I had been in one. I told my mom I was going to be sick so she fished a soft drink cup out of the garbage near the reception desk for me to get sick in. I had to do a urine test and a blood test. Then my mom and I were left in a wood-paneled room where I was lying on a examination table napping from sheer exhaustion.
The pediatrician came in and talked to my mom. He said he ruled out diabetes, but that my hemoglobin was very low. He said the word “anemia” and burst into tears. Reflecting back on it, I’m not quite so sure it was in fear of the disease associating it with sickle cell anemia or in relief that there really was something wrong with me and I wasn’t just making it up, but fear did play a big part in it. He and my mom tried to calm me down, assuring me that it was nothing big and it was easily treatable. He then went on to tell us that there was something else in my blood, but he didn’t have the equipment to anylyze it properly so he had called the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati and they were waiting for us in the ER to run some more tests.
I was still crying all the way down to Cincinnati while my mom tried in vain to calm me. They also met us with a wheelchair. The first thing they wanted to do was weigh me, but I couldn’t stand up for long. I did manage to stand up long enough to get weighed. One hundred twenty pounds. I normally weighed a very steady 150 lbs. In two weeks I had lost 30 lbs.
They put me on a guerney in a private stall and I was introduced to ice chips although I complained that they tasted funny, almost like a sweet powdery taste. I learned what a phlembotomist was when one came to take my blood in a tube. Up to then, I had only gotten finger pricks. It was strange to see my blood being sucked out of me. They had a hell of a time finding a vein to get it from considering that my veins are normally very small and that they were even more shrunken from my dehydration and starvation. But they did get it. I was put on IV fluids immediately after.
I was so happy to be able to sleep in a bed for the first time in over six months. We more or less fled our old house and left our old beds because of the bridges my mother’s ex-husband-to-be had burned with my grandmother who owned our last house. Partly that and the fact that we had no electricity there for the month before we moved out at the beginning of a bitter winter.
When the doctor came around, I woke up. He told us that they were still running tests, but they were going to give me several pints of blood because I had severe anemia. I was also going to be moved upstairs to the ACU (acute care unit, one level below intensive) and stay overnight. Again I panicked. As much as I liked having a nice warm bed, I wanted to be home.
I was moved upstairs by an orderly named LaShawn. He said he preferred to be called “L.A.” since he thought Lashawn sounded like a girl’s name. I was surprised when we arrived on the ACU floor. I had been to a few hospitals before like when my brother broke his leg running into a tree on his bike. I had been expecting a gray dreary room with a wooden door and high windows to be shared with other people. What I saw was the hallway decorated with a colorful cartoony jungle animal pattern. My room had a sliding glass door front with a curtain for privacy. There was a chair and a loveseat in the room. I had my own sink and bathroom en suite and a window that looked out at the elephant house in the Cincinnati Zoo a few blocks away. My mom happens to love elephants. My room had a slightly different set of animals as its wallpaper border and the walls, the furniture, and the curtains all matched each other. It was a really nice room.
My nurse who would be my primary nurse was called Jenny. She was young with curly light brown hair and a big smile. She brought in my first pints of blood and before starting it, put a warm washcloth over my IV entry site to help warm up the blood as it went in. It still stung bad and I could trace the initial drops as they chilled my veins from my hand all the way to my chest before they finally warmed me up. They brought around some food for me. Chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese. I ate voraciously and it all stayed down. I gave a little bit to my mom as well and for the first time that day, she seemed a little less worried and looked less guilty. Perhaps since I was eating, she thought I was getting better.
She stayed with me all night, curling up on the loveseat after she called home to tell her ex-husband-to-be that he would have to take care of my sister because I was in the hospital. I do have to admit I felt a little selfish because I finally had her to myself although I wished my sister could have been here too instead of at home with him. Little did I know how much I’d pay for that attention. But that’s another story.
I soon fell asleep ending what was to be my first day of several at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati.
