Almost an Elegy, Part 1 3 comments

By Bradford Winters

By the time I got to the hospital, he had been sedated and intubated in E.R., his face a pale shade of black and turning purple at the mouth. If the memory of that same cadaverous hue on Pope John Paul II at his televised funeral wasn't enough to tell me what was happening, the only other thing I needed to see was my father's face when they pulled back the curtain.

"Jesus Christ," he gasped, turning to me with a hand at his mouth. Or maybe it was "Holy shit." One part profanity, two parts prayer. My brother was in septic shock from a massive but unknown infection, and his life was on the line.

Earlier that morning his girlfriend had called me from outside the hospital, but between her distress, her accent, and the background New York traffic, it was hard to get a sense of what was happening beyond the fact that he woke up feeling sick and went to the hospital. The emergency factor seemed equivalent to a bad bout of food poisoning.

Then his (and my) internist called me, because he wanted someone in the family to hear it from him first: "I don't know what's going on, but your brother's sick. Really sick. This is the real deal. And I'm concerned." Turns out my brother and his girlfriend had gone there first—her 5'6" carrying his 6'2" in her arms from the taxi—where his doctor called 911 the moment they walked in the door.

By noon, our whole family was en route to the hospital by plane, train, taxi, and car.

As various doctors from E.R., Infectious Diseases, and Hematology peppered us with questions in the effort to narrow the range of possible infections, his body swelled from the influx of intravenous fluids which included a host of antibiotics as well as medicines to help his blood pressure rebound from the fatal depths to which it had plummeted.

One thing was clear, though: the spleen is not as disposable as one might think. My brother had lost his from a fall on a golf course fence when he was ten—impaled trying to climb it and retrieve a golf ball for a teacher that he loved—and whatever he was now fighting with his life, he was clearly at a loss for having had a splenectomy.

Once he was transferred to ICU, we descended on the waiting room and took turns visiting him in groups of two, donning the required mask fitted with an eye shield. When I saw my sister coming back down the hallway from his room, weeping in her husband’s arms, all she could say was, “He’s really struggling.” Then it was my turn.

I’ve been in the presence of a dead body before—my grandparents when each passed, a family friend or two at wakes over the years—but never had I felt so in the presence of death itself. Indeed, there almost seemed to be an entity in that room. Surrounded by nurses, my brother was dying.

So I prayed.

And we prayed, my other brother and I huddled with our father in the hallway; the whole extended family and several friends, believers or not, holding hands in the waiting room.

Then I went to the bathroom and got down on my knees to pray some more. “Please” and “Jesus” were the gist of it, strung together less by words than tears. For all the books on prayer I’ve read over the years, it came down to those two words and those two alone.

Since you know from the title where this is going, I’m not about to tease out a spiritual suspense story of his recovery. But while I’m as likely as anyone to give as much (or more) credence to modern medicine as to answered prayer, when you have a doctor tell you that the recovery was miraculous, you’re more inclined to give prayer its fair due.

Within 48 hours a blood panel manifested Streptococcus pneumoniae, a particularly insidious infection for someone without a spleen since the organ functions to destroy the capsule that encases the bacteria, meaning that the white blood cells can’t even begin to fight the encapsulated enemy.

Shortly after that, with a more focused treatment of antibiotics and his blood pressure stabilized, the tube was taken out to let him breathe on his own. From full systemic shut-down with all his organs on the blink, his vital signs were slowly but surely improving. And from his black, cracked lips beneath eyes swollen half-shut he was able to mouth the words: “I almost died.”

Almost as in “couldn’t have come closer” according to the doctors, having been admitted with a blood pressure reading of 56/0, the blood itself jet-black, and, once he was able to speak again, the memory of a paramedic saying in the back of the ambulance: “We’re losing him.” The nurses in ICU told him he was the first one they had ever seen survive in his condition upon admission, and we had every reason in the world to say, “Amen.”

But there being no rest for the weary, not a moment too soon he and we were on to the next front: survival was one thing, but survival with all his extremities intact was another, as the fingers and toes had suffered an acute lack of perfusion in the twelve to twenty-four hours that his body sacrificed blood flow at the digits in order to save the brain.

Lying in bed with the equivalent of frostbite across his hands and feet, only time would tell what would be restored and what would not. Frostbite indeed, as it felt like all of us, by dint of divine and medical intervention to go with it, had climbed a mountain of unimaginable proportions.

And having climbed one, it was time to climb another.