Ike's First Two Days of Life
This is the story of Ike’s first few days of life. It’s a small part of a project I’m working on and I thought I would put it up. It can be a hard read, and it's pretty long, just so you know, but the good part is Ike lived.
-Slack
We were on the way to Seattle Children’s Hospital and we weren’t speaking. Somehow it seemed like enough just hearing the thudding of the road in between all that silence. What was there to say anyway? At that point, I had pretty much accepted the thought that Ike wasn’t gonna survive that long trip in the ambulance. I sat there driving next to Sweetie thinking about the last two days and how in all that noise and confusion, under the breathing tube and IV wires, I had found a small bit of face I could touch to say good-bye and let him know I loved him – how I leaned over and said “be brave.” The ambulance team packed him and what equipment they couldn’t carry onto the gurney and left to make the drive up Interstate Five to Seattle. How fucked up was that? Handed down a death sentence at only 36 hours old.
I was numb and tired, and the road seemed to go on forever as it wound its way over the gray hills of Kent and Des Moines, past the Rainier Valley exits and Georgetown. Though I’d made this trip a hundred times over, it had never seemed longer than it did that day. Every exit looked like one I wanted to take, if it could have turned me around and sent me back home.
What made it so strange was how routine the birth was that first day in the hospital. I made sure I cut the cord this time, because in all the chaos I’d forgotten with our first. In the morning the families all came by the hospital to see the new baby. The Older Boy, who was then two-and-a-half, was excited to finally be an older brother, showing him off like a state fair trophy and holding him on his lap for the first time that afternoon. Sweetie had a real hard time getting the baby to eat as he was so sleepy all the time, so we spent a frustrating, restless night at Saint Joe’s, and left first thing the next morning. We just figured that if we could get home and get some rest, things would get themselves worked out -- but we got home and it all kept getting worse. He threw up a few times, not like a newborn spitting up after having something to eat, but real throw-ups that came in between feedings. He also was never really awake, not unless Sweetie made him open his eyes anyway, and it was starting to make us nervous.
We were new to Tacoma, having just finished moving into the park the week before and in all the activity, we’d didn’t get a pediatrician. There was Dr. C_, whom we had met the day before at the hospital when he performed Ike’s circumcision. He had given us his card with the number of his practice on it, and so Sweetie called his office and made an appointment for the next day.
By that afternoon, Ike still wasn’t feeding and was now almost impossible to wake up. Sweetie and I had been without sleep for what must have been twenty-four hours straight, and we both desperately needed some. Sweetie was still having no luck getting him to eat, so at a little after eleven that night, we decided to go to bed and try again in the morning. At that point, we just figured, who knows; maybe the baby really did just need some sleep after all. Sweetie kept the baby with us instead of the bassinet next to the bed and before I even realized I was sleeping, she was leaning over and shaking me awake. Ike was lying between the two of us, cold and dripping sweat, breathing quick, raspy breaths and looking uncomfortably pale. I could see by the clock that an hour had passed since we went to bed, but I was so tired, I was unclear about what to do next. I called my folks, who live close enough to come by and could watch The Older Boy. I stumbled around the house trying to gather what I thought we’d need, and then Sweetie left with the baby. I stayed behind, waiting for my parents to arrive.
I can’t describe how slowly time moves at two-thirty in the morning, waiting to follow your wife and a sick newborn son to the emergency room.
By the time I made it to the hospital they were dealing with his low temperature. Ike had come in at around 94 degrees, so they placed him under a heat lamp, and when that didn’t work well enough, managed to find a heating pad to put under him as well. His heart was racing at 140 beats a minute, and if they moved the heat lamp for any length of time, his temperature would immediately start dropping. They had no idea what was wrong with him so, over the course of the night, did blood cultures, chest x-rays, urine tests and anything else they could think of trying to figure out what was making Ike so sick. By eight o’clock that morning, they weren’t any closer to a diagnosis. His heart rate was up to 170 per minute and he was looking a lot worse.
They put in a call to Dr. C_ to see if he, or someone from his practice, could come down and give their opinion on what to do, as the ER staff had run out of ideas at this point. He happened to be at the hospital that morning, and though he was not the doctor on call that day, the ER nurse called the wrong number paging his personal beeper instead. Dr. C_ is an older man, whom we both liked when we had met him the other day. He has a way of talking that sets you at ease, being both reassuring and authoritative at the same time.
Although we didn’t know this at the time, Dr. C_ had seen another baby with symptoms like Ike’s years earlier when he was stationed overseas in the army. Like the ER staff here, he and his colleagues had been stumped as to what might be wrong and didn’t find any answers until after the baby died. On the off chance it might be a similar illness, he asked for them to take a blood ammonia level -- an uncommon blood test that is often hard to get. Everyone was also getting concerned about Ike’s heart rate, which was continuing it’s slow climb and was now up past 180. Dr. C_ called the Mary Bridge Infant Intensive Care Unit and asked them to accept Ike. Now since he wasn’t born there, this went against hospital policy, but Dr. C_ was friends with the man that ran the unit and told him that Ike wouldn’t have much of a chance if they moved him to the floor or sent him back to the hospital where he was born. His friend agreed, and while we waited for the ICU nurses to bring Ike upstairs, Sweetie and I were left to wonder just how serious this was all going to get. I remember asking Dr. C_ for the worst-case scenario, and he said he thought there was a chance that Ike might have something called a metabolic disorder -- a genetic illness affecting his liver.
“Best-case scenario?” I asked.
“I guess best-case scenario is that he’ll just get better and we’ll never really know what went wrong.”
Somehow that didn’t seem likely. Nobody liked the way Ike was looking and I was getting the uncomfortable feeling that there wasn’t a clear idea of what to do next. By ten o’clock that morning, Ike’s heart rate was over 190.
Waiting for the ICU staff to take us upstairs took a lot longer than I would have liked.. Ike was unhooked from everything and all ready to go but nobody was coming down to get him. We stood next to Ike’s bed with his nurse watching the second hand on the clock go by and wondering what was taking so long. But after they finally arrived and grabbed the paperwork we all took off running. Now I gotta say, in my whole life, in all the hospitals I have ever been in, it is the only time I have ever seen nurses run. It was the scariest moment since we’d arrived, the moment where the thought of Ike not surviving began to feel less like a crazy idea and a little more like a possibility.
The Infant Intensive Care Unit was run by Dr. Mulligan, and yes, even at that frantic stage, the irony of the name didn’t pass unnoticed. Damn it, I wanted do-overs, since everything about this day, including Ike, was getting more fucked up by the minute. The ICU is on the top floor of the Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in one big room full of premature infants and their worried-looking parents. There are large windows that look out over the Cascades and Mt. Rainier, although that afternoon the mountain had stayed hidden behind a low band of clouds. The bed they’d prepared for Ike was in the middle of the room, and within seconds after arriving, six or seven people were around it working on him. His heart rate had climbed up past 200 by now, and though it was making everyone nervous, the first thing they started working on was putting a breathing tube in. They needed to get intravenous access, and with an infant the best way was through his umbilical cord. That required putting him to sleep; it also required a real-time x-ray machine to help them find the vein and to make sure everything was placed properly.
Between all the equipment and other beds, there was no place to sit down or even put a chair, so we stood over by the window where we did our best to keep out of the way but still see what was going on. Nobody said much to us really, and information was hard to come by. The only thought going on in my head was how surreal this all seemed, like I was watching a movie of someone else’s life. I tried to call my brother to let him know what was going on, but had a lot of trouble speaking without crying. It was a miserable conversation where my voice wouldn’t stop shaking, and I had to stop after almost every word to keep from breaking down.
I saw Sweetie’s Ob/Gyn, who delivered Ike not even two days before, walking down the hallway just outside the unit so I invited her in. She hadn’t heard that Ike was sick and was shocked to see us standing there. At this point, we were still just watching the team of ICU doctors work on Ike. From what we could see of him, he wasn’t looking too good, though with the breathing tube in, it was hard to see that much of his face. In fact he had so many wires and tubes covering his tiny body that it was hard to see much of him at all. The monitor above his bed said his heart rate was now at 225.
Sweeties doctor stood with us in silence for a while and then asked if we’d been told how serious this was.
After a few hours had passed, we were shepherded into a small room off to the side where we met the social worker…a short plump woman who seemed, like us, to be in a bit over her head. The room had a few chairs but the two windows that looked into the ICU were covered with blinds and made me uncomfortable that I couldn’t see what was going on. She said not to worry and that Dr. Mulligan wanted to speak with us and would be coming in to explain what was going on. The longer we waited, the smaller and more claustrophobic the room became, but she kept asking us to wait, saying that when the doctor got a break he’d be in.
When he finally came in to talk to us I should have taken that moment to kick her out, but I didn’t, and so she just sat there not asking if she could stay.
Dr. Mulligan explained that once they got lines placed in Ike’s umbilical cord, they were going to transport him up to Seattle Children’s Hospital. At this point they were pretty sure Ike had some sort of disorder that would best be treated by the metabolic specialists they have up there. He also thought that Ike needed Hemo-dialysis and Children’s Hospital is the only place around that has the capability to do this procedure with newborns.
After answering a few of our questions, Dr. Mulligan excused himself and left. The ambulance team had arrived while we’d been talking, and when we returned to the main room everyone was crowded in, waiting for the doctors to finish up. It didn’t take long for them to start moving Ike onto the ambulance gurney. Sweeties doctor, who had stayed through all of this, even taking the time to write a sedative prescription her for at one point, went over and spoke with Dr. Mulligan. In a minute, he came over to us and said that maybe we should take a moment to say our goodbyes. He said he believed Ike would “expire” before they got there or, that even on the off chance he survived the trip, would likely be too far gone for Children’s to save him once he arrived.
I hadn’t been able to get very close to him for the last few hours while they were working on him, and when I got the chance, I could clearly see how far he’d fallen. His heart rate was over 240 and his skin was a sickly mottled gray. In truth he looked dead already. What do you say when you see such a tiny baby so close to death, one that you’ve held and kissed; one that’s yours. You want to tell him that you love him and that everything is gonna be ok, but you know that there’s no way you’ll ever get those words out. You wind up thinking about how you’ll have to tell The Older Boy that his new baby brother just died, or how you’re gonna have to move the bassinet out of the bedroom when you get home and the crib out from next to The Older Boy’s bed -- that you’ll need to deal with all the stuff you’ve done to prepare for the new baby, the clothes and diapers and bottles.
There was very little skin exposed to kiss, but I found a spot near the top of his head and squeezed his tiny hand one time before they left.
Nobody in the ICU wanted us to drive ourselves up to Seattle, but there was no way I was going to sit in the back seat of some car and have someone else drive. We swung by the trailer to see my folks and pack up a few things for the trip. The Older Boy was thankfully taking a nap, so we caught the two of them up on what had been going on, and headed to Seattle. That whole trip we didn’t speak once and I had the feeling that was the real reason I didn’t want to be driven. The idea of having to speak made me sick.
It took a about an hour to make the trip from our house. I’m sure we could have gotten there faster, but we weren’t in much of a hurry. We had a pretty good idea that we were going up there to pick up his body, deal with funeral arrangements and then try to think of a way to tell his brother and everyone else. I realized that without even knowing it, I’d been planning a life -- that in my head I’d seen him born, at five, at twenty and on up through his whole life. I’d already played catch, watched him learn to ride a bike and graduate from college. In fact I’d not only planned his life, but all of our lives in some way or another and in the course of one day, everything I’d planned was gone.
When we got there, the woman at the front desk told us that Ike had a room in the ICU and explained how to get there. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but both Sweetie and I understood immediately. Hospitals don’t give out rooms to dead children.
-Slack
We were on the way to Seattle Children’s Hospital and we weren’t speaking. Somehow it seemed like enough just hearing the thudding of the road in between all that silence. What was there to say anyway? At that point, I had pretty much accepted the thought that Ike wasn’t gonna survive that long trip in the ambulance. I sat there driving next to Sweetie thinking about the last two days and how in all that noise and confusion, under the breathing tube and IV wires, I had found a small bit of face I could touch to say good-bye and let him know I loved him – how I leaned over and said “be brave.” The ambulance team packed him and what equipment they couldn’t carry onto the gurney and left to make the drive up Interstate Five to Seattle. How fucked up was that? Handed down a death sentence at only 36 hours old.
I was numb and tired, and the road seemed to go on forever as it wound its way over the gray hills of Kent and Des Moines, past the Rainier Valley exits and Georgetown. Though I’d made this trip a hundred times over, it had never seemed longer than it did that day. Every exit looked like one I wanted to take, if it could have turned me around and sent me back home.
What made it so strange was how routine the birth was that first day in the hospital. I made sure I cut the cord this time, because in all the chaos I’d forgotten with our first. In the morning the families all came by the hospital to see the new baby. The Older Boy, who was then two-and-a-half, was excited to finally be an older brother, showing him off like a state fair trophy and holding him on his lap for the first time that afternoon. Sweetie had a real hard time getting the baby to eat as he was so sleepy all the time, so we spent a frustrating, restless night at Saint Joe’s, and left first thing the next morning. We just figured that if we could get home and get some rest, things would get themselves worked out -- but we got home and it all kept getting worse. He threw up a few times, not like a newborn spitting up after having something to eat, but real throw-ups that came in between feedings. He also was never really awake, not unless Sweetie made him open his eyes anyway, and it was starting to make us nervous.
We were new to Tacoma, having just finished moving into the park the week before and in all the activity, we’d didn’t get a pediatrician. There was Dr. C_, whom we had met the day before at the hospital when he performed Ike’s circumcision. He had given us his card with the number of his practice on it, and so Sweetie called his office and made an appointment for the next day.
By that afternoon, Ike still wasn’t feeding and was now almost impossible to wake up. Sweetie and I had been without sleep for what must have been twenty-four hours straight, and we both desperately needed some. Sweetie was still having no luck getting him to eat, so at a little after eleven that night, we decided to go to bed and try again in the morning. At that point, we just figured, who knows; maybe the baby really did just need some sleep after all. Sweetie kept the baby with us instead of the bassinet next to the bed and before I even realized I was sleeping, she was leaning over and shaking me awake. Ike was lying between the two of us, cold and dripping sweat, breathing quick, raspy breaths and looking uncomfortably pale. I could see by the clock that an hour had passed since we went to bed, but I was so tired, I was unclear about what to do next. I called my folks, who live close enough to come by and could watch The Older Boy. I stumbled around the house trying to gather what I thought we’d need, and then Sweetie left with the baby. I stayed behind, waiting for my parents to arrive.
I can’t describe how slowly time moves at two-thirty in the morning, waiting to follow your wife and a sick newborn son to the emergency room.
By the time I made it to the hospital they were dealing with his low temperature. Ike had come in at around 94 degrees, so they placed him under a heat lamp, and when that didn’t work well enough, managed to find a heating pad to put under him as well. His heart was racing at 140 beats a minute, and if they moved the heat lamp for any length of time, his temperature would immediately start dropping. They had no idea what was wrong with him so, over the course of the night, did blood cultures, chest x-rays, urine tests and anything else they could think of trying to figure out what was making Ike so sick. By eight o’clock that morning, they weren’t any closer to a diagnosis. His heart rate was up to 170 per minute and he was looking a lot worse.
They put in a call to Dr. C_ to see if he, or someone from his practice, could come down and give their opinion on what to do, as the ER staff had run out of ideas at this point. He happened to be at the hospital that morning, and though he was not the doctor on call that day, the ER nurse called the wrong number paging his personal beeper instead. Dr. C_ is an older man, whom we both liked when we had met him the other day. He has a way of talking that sets you at ease, being both reassuring and authoritative at the same time.
Although we didn’t know this at the time, Dr. C_ had seen another baby with symptoms like Ike’s years earlier when he was stationed overseas in the army. Like the ER staff here, he and his colleagues had been stumped as to what might be wrong and didn’t find any answers until after the baby died. On the off chance it might be a similar illness, he asked for them to take a blood ammonia level -- an uncommon blood test that is often hard to get. Everyone was also getting concerned about Ike’s heart rate, which was continuing it’s slow climb and was now up past 180. Dr. C_ called the Mary Bridge Infant Intensive Care Unit and asked them to accept Ike. Now since he wasn’t born there, this went against hospital policy, but Dr. C_ was friends with the man that ran the unit and told him that Ike wouldn’t have much of a chance if they moved him to the floor or sent him back to the hospital where he was born. His friend agreed, and while we waited for the ICU nurses to bring Ike upstairs, Sweetie and I were left to wonder just how serious this was all going to get. I remember asking Dr. C_ for the worst-case scenario, and he said he thought there was a chance that Ike might have something called a metabolic disorder -- a genetic illness affecting his liver.
“Best-case scenario?” I asked.
“I guess best-case scenario is that he’ll just get better and we’ll never really know what went wrong.”
Somehow that didn’t seem likely. Nobody liked the way Ike was looking and I was getting the uncomfortable feeling that there wasn’t a clear idea of what to do next. By ten o’clock that morning, Ike’s heart rate was over 190.
Waiting for the ICU staff to take us upstairs took a lot longer than I would have liked.. Ike was unhooked from everything and all ready to go but nobody was coming down to get him. We stood next to Ike’s bed with his nurse watching the second hand on the clock go by and wondering what was taking so long. But after they finally arrived and grabbed the paperwork we all took off running. Now I gotta say, in my whole life, in all the hospitals I have ever been in, it is the only time I have ever seen nurses run. It was the scariest moment since we’d arrived, the moment where the thought of Ike not surviving began to feel less like a crazy idea and a little more like a possibility.
The Infant Intensive Care Unit was run by Dr. Mulligan, and yes, even at that frantic stage, the irony of the name didn’t pass unnoticed. Damn it, I wanted do-overs, since everything about this day, including Ike, was getting more fucked up by the minute. The ICU is on the top floor of the Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in one big room full of premature infants and their worried-looking parents. There are large windows that look out over the Cascades and Mt. Rainier, although that afternoon the mountain had stayed hidden behind a low band of clouds. The bed they’d prepared for Ike was in the middle of the room, and within seconds after arriving, six or seven people were around it working on him. His heart rate had climbed up past 200 by now, and though it was making everyone nervous, the first thing they started working on was putting a breathing tube in. They needed to get intravenous access, and with an infant the best way was through his umbilical cord. That required putting him to sleep; it also required a real-time x-ray machine to help them find the vein and to make sure everything was placed properly.
Between all the equipment and other beds, there was no place to sit down or even put a chair, so we stood over by the window where we did our best to keep out of the way but still see what was going on. Nobody said much to us really, and information was hard to come by. The only thought going on in my head was how surreal this all seemed, like I was watching a movie of someone else’s life. I tried to call my brother to let him know what was going on, but had a lot of trouble speaking without crying. It was a miserable conversation where my voice wouldn’t stop shaking, and I had to stop after almost every word to keep from breaking down.
I saw Sweetie’s Ob/Gyn, who delivered Ike not even two days before, walking down the hallway just outside the unit so I invited her in. She hadn’t heard that Ike was sick and was shocked to see us standing there. At this point, we were still just watching the team of ICU doctors work on Ike. From what we could see of him, he wasn’t looking too good, though with the breathing tube in, it was hard to see that much of his face. In fact he had so many wires and tubes covering his tiny body that it was hard to see much of him at all. The monitor above his bed said his heart rate was now at 225.
Sweeties doctor stood with us in silence for a while and then asked if we’d been told how serious this was.
After a few hours had passed, we were shepherded into a small room off to the side where we met the social worker…a short plump woman who seemed, like us, to be in a bit over her head. The room had a few chairs but the two windows that looked into the ICU were covered with blinds and made me uncomfortable that I couldn’t see what was going on. She said not to worry and that Dr. Mulligan wanted to speak with us and would be coming in to explain what was going on. The longer we waited, the smaller and more claustrophobic the room became, but she kept asking us to wait, saying that when the doctor got a break he’d be in.
When he finally came in to talk to us I should have taken that moment to kick her out, but I didn’t, and so she just sat there not asking if she could stay.
Dr. Mulligan explained that once they got lines placed in Ike’s umbilical cord, they were going to transport him up to Seattle Children’s Hospital. At this point they were pretty sure Ike had some sort of disorder that would best be treated by the metabolic specialists they have up there. He also thought that Ike needed Hemo-dialysis and Children’s Hospital is the only place around that has the capability to do this procedure with newborns.
After answering a few of our questions, Dr. Mulligan excused himself and left. The ambulance team had arrived while we’d been talking, and when we returned to the main room everyone was crowded in, waiting for the doctors to finish up. It didn’t take long for them to start moving Ike onto the ambulance gurney. Sweeties doctor, who had stayed through all of this, even taking the time to write a sedative prescription her for at one point, went over and spoke with Dr. Mulligan. In a minute, he came over to us and said that maybe we should take a moment to say our goodbyes. He said he believed Ike would “expire” before they got there or, that even on the off chance he survived the trip, would likely be too far gone for Children’s to save him once he arrived.
I hadn’t been able to get very close to him for the last few hours while they were working on him, and when I got the chance, I could clearly see how far he’d fallen. His heart rate was over 240 and his skin was a sickly mottled gray. In truth he looked dead already. What do you say when you see such a tiny baby so close to death, one that you’ve held and kissed; one that’s yours. You want to tell him that you love him and that everything is gonna be ok, but you know that there’s no way you’ll ever get those words out. You wind up thinking about how you’ll have to tell The Older Boy that his new baby brother just died, or how you’re gonna have to move the bassinet out of the bedroom when you get home and the crib out from next to The Older Boy’s bed -- that you’ll need to deal with all the stuff you’ve done to prepare for the new baby, the clothes and diapers and bottles.
There was very little skin exposed to kiss, but I found a spot near the top of his head and squeezed his tiny hand one time before they left.
Nobody in the ICU wanted us to drive ourselves up to Seattle, but there was no way I was going to sit in the back seat of some car and have someone else drive. We swung by the trailer to see my folks and pack up a few things for the trip. The Older Boy was thankfully taking a nap, so we caught the two of them up on what had been going on, and headed to Seattle. That whole trip we didn’t speak once and I had the feeling that was the real reason I didn’t want to be driven. The idea of having to speak made me sick.
It took a about an hour to make the trip from our house. I’m sure we could have gotten there faster, but we weren’t in much of a hurry. We had a pretty good idea that we were going up there to pick up his body, deal with funeral arrangements and then try to think of a way to tell his brother and everyone else. I realized that without even knowing it, I’d been planning a life -- that in my head I’d seen him born, at five, at twenty and on up through his whole life. I’d already played catch, watched him learn to ride a bike and graduate from college. In fact I’d not only planned his life, but all of our lives in some way or another and in the course of one day, everything I’d planned was gone.
When we got there, the woman at the front desk told us that Ike had a room in the ICU and explained how to get there. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but both Sweetie and I understood immediately. Hospitals don’t give out rooms to dead children.
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