was that small. And those thin fingers, curled under her chin, none of them wore a wedding band, which would have bestowed honor upon her situation.
Even though he was a known fuck up, at least that’s what his daddy always said, he believed he couldn’t hurt her. Like Momma, he’d also been hungry since before he was born, but he’d learned to fill himself with a shot of liquor when famine hit. He believed he might be able to help her and she him. Casting off fears of the Boone boys and blinding himself to the protruding belly, he offered his hand.
When I was ten months old, Momma rushed me to the hospital because I couldn’t breathe. My chest, filled with crackles, rumbles, and bubbles, sounded as if Pop Rocks were sizzling inside of it. Of course, I can’t remember any of this, due to the age/memory handicap, but there are things the body knows, even if the mind has not the capacity. I’d contracted pneumonia. Mucus, which lined the walls of my lungs, expanded like insulation foam. I’d suffered an unbreakable fever for more than a week and had a whining cough reminiscent of a car with a faulty starter.
Momma waited as long as she could to take me to the hospital, not because she wasn’t concerned, but because she had my older brother, Champ, at home and my younger brother, Dathan, in her belly. Plus, sick babies didn’t normally require hospital care. A pot of boiled onions, a sponge bath, and a round of steam-filled bathroom visits could usually do the trick.
I had never been a loud baby, having been taught by Momma’s squinty eyes and two-finger swats that silence was preferable to noise. But that night, I was quieter than usual, so quiet even my eyes lay silent in their sockets. I lay in Momma’s bed instead of my makeshift crib, the dresser drawer. On my side, with my leg and arm sprawled across my body, I resembled a swollen letter “K.” Petrified, the only movement came from my chest and back: waves, up and down, quickening, becoming shallower with each breath I took. I was not hot. I was a heater, scorching the fabric of Momma’s sheets with my skin. I would not eat. What little milk I drank curdled and spewed as soon as it hit my stomach. My face was bright red and my cheeks shined as if they’d been glazed with Vaseline. Momma took my temperature with her makeshift thermometer, the back of her hand. When she found no sweat, just burning, she knew then something was seriously wrong.
She packed bottles of water mixed with Pet Evaporated Milk and the cloth diapers she’d washed earlier in the kitchen sink. She prepared a meager meal for Champ of flour bread and a slice of the block of cheese she’d picked up from the welfare office. She did not know who would watch him while she was at the hospital with me, but she had to get moving. Movement often led to solutions and she required solutions for so many things in that moment.
Believing it would be too easy to say “no” to a voice, she did not make calls. Instead, she caught a cab to her sister’s, rehearsing the dialogue that would convince her to watch my brother. Knowing Momma, there was no pleading, no crying, maybe some adamant reassurances it would only be a couple of hours. Whatever the exchange, Momma continued to the hospital with me alone.
The cab pulled into the emergency room driveway. Momma handed the driver the last of her money, which would have been spent on food and milk for us children. She pushed through the emergency room doors, rushed to the glass window at the registration desk, holding my limp body. I was wrapped in a cloth blanket, folded longways. With my arms and legs pinned so tightly to my body, I might have been mistaken for a caterpillar in a cocoon. Momma leaned on the desk, not out of disrespect, but exhaustion.
“What’s wrong?” the nurse asked curtly.
“She’s not breathing right,” Momma replied.
“How long has she been sick?”
“Two days,” Momma lied. She couldn’t say it had been two weeks and she hadn’t taken me to the hospital because she didn’t have cab and food money, she didn’t have anybody to take care of my brother, her body was in constant aches because she was pregnant again, and she was only eighteen. She couldn’t explain she’d tried to heal me herself, feeding me the juice of boiled onions from a spoon, placing me on my stomach and patting my back, trying to loosen the crud building within. She couldn’t describe how she’d sat with me on the toilet, hot water spouting from all faucets, towels rolled at the bottom of the door, turning the bathroom into a foggy sauna. Momma knew by the woman’s look she would not understand things like that, so she repeated, “Just two days.”
The nurse raised her eyes and continued to write. Her other questions, “What medication is she on? Is she allergic to anything? Does she have any recurring illnesses?” held Momma steady as the small of her back and leg muscles began to tighten like twined meat.
The last question, “What insurance do you have?” stood between me and the emergency room doctors bustling behind the double doors. My mother had never been proud of being on public assistance and I am willing to admit I have hidden in the corners of stores, clutching a book of food stamps, waiting for the line at the register to shrink, but I can assure you, that day, Momma was unashamed to say, “I have Medicaid.”
After a too long, too quiet wait, Momma was called to the double doors, which led behind the window. We were guided into a small room. The nurse took my temperature, not with a makeshift thermometer as Momma had, but with a thin rod which she inserted into my rectum. I remained still, all energy reserved for breathing as the nurse’s eyes widened while watching the mercury jump from 96 to 101 to 104 degrees. Before the red dot stopped rising, the nurse swooped me from the table, leaving behind my diaper and Momma, and ran into the emergency room foyer. She yelled “Doctor” as she careened toward a rectangular room with curtains for walls. I was thrust onto the hospital bed as the doctor rushed in and nurses crowded around. Commands bounced from one curtain to another.
“She needs an IV.”
“No, we need to cool her first.”
“Get her on oxygen.”
“Start a neb treatment.”
Momma was swallowed by their voices, eyes trained on me through the sticking, prodding, and pulling. No one talked to her or asked questions. She cried. I cried too, but it was not a baby’s cry, more like a kitten being smothered under the weight of its mother. They decided to cool me after pushing a nebulizer treatment. Buckets of ice were tossed into an oversized sink while a stream of water cut through the ice construction. They drew blood, swabbed my throat, and took my temperature again. Then it was time for the bath not intended to clean.
Momma had given me what she thought were ice baths before. Cracking ice trays over the bathroom sink in a puddle of water, she’d douse a rag, wring it, and wipe my exposed body. She stopped only when my shivers made it too difficult for her to hold me still. That was not the hospital’s ice bath.
They took off all of my clothes and dipped my body in those newly formed glaciers. They held me there even as my limbs stiffened, my feet slapped against the sink floor, and my body spasmodically twisted and jerked in their latex-covered hands. Unlike Momma’s two hands struggling to keep a hold of me, there were plenty of hands in the hospital. If I twisted from one pair, there was another to catch me.
I could not cry. What little breath I had was frozen inside me. Momma stood, wanting to demand them to stop, but her voice was frozen too. The doctors and nurses held me in the sink until their hands became numb.
After all of the baths, X-rays, and needle sticks were done, the doctor admitted me to the hospital’s PICU. Despite it being a place for the sickly, noise flooded the room. The sucking and swooshing of machines drowned any tears we children cried. Nurses bounced from child to child. Some carried IVs, others needles, and a few walked around the room, monitoring machines spouting melodies of beating hearts. Cribs, no bigger than the drawer I normally slept in, lined the PICU walls.
