The Last New Year

On New Year’s Day 2010, three o’clock in the afternoon, I’m running down Tenth Avenue in freezing cold wearing only a t-shirt and jeans, untied sneakers, no socks, my year-old son Nate wrapped in a blanket in my arms, his head thrown back and eyes fixed sightlessly on the sky as he spasms uncontrollably, his spine arching, arms flopping, lips turning blue. The Roosevelt Hospital emergency room is three blocks from our apartment, but it feels like running through waist-high swampwater. I can’t sprint full speed because that risks god knows what neck injuries to the baby. So I run in this crabbed, tormenting, half-restrained forced march-jog. It takes forever, and my muscles cramp from the stress and panic which also squeezes breath out of my lungs. I am slowed even more by glancing down at Nate’s face, trying not to notice his shocked eyes staring up at nothing, checking to make sure he isn’t choking or throwing up. “Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, baby, stay with me,” a toneless litany I can’t stop chanting as I run.

I charge into the ER, crash through the security doors. I shout about a baby with seizures and a clutch of nurses spring up, direct me to the “resuscitation room.” We tumble into a double-sized triage space with a stretcher surrounded by respirators and tanks and pneumatic apparatus. I lay Nate down on the stretcher and stagger back as a wave of medics encircle him. I step back further and double over, gasping, coughing, hyperventilating so loudly that another wave of nurses coming in thinks I am the afflicted—they take hold of my shoulders and pull me toward a gurney. I wave them off, they see Nate, and they go to help.

After about fifteen minutes of oxygen and rubbing and other ministrations, Nate stabilizes and begins to come back to himself. He cries weakly, then with more gusto, struggling a little on the table. His color flushes into pink, he reacts to sight and sound, and to all intents and purposes is just loudly emotionally distressed. Still, when you have this kind of experience, the recommendation is to check for root causes like meningitis and other deadly signals. So I hold my son’s arms while a surgeon inserts a probe into his spine to draw out fluid for testing. Nate jerks, then screams, then ratchets down to miserable, exhausted crying as the probe is withdrawn.

Nate has to stay in the hospital while the spinal test runs. His potential for an infection, however slight, means he is isolated in his own room. Hospital cribs for crawling babies are metal cages raised up to waist level that can be opened or locked from any side, including the top. Very similar to what you see at cat and dog adoption events, really. Nate also has to wear a splint on one arm to keep the IV leads in. He hasn’t started walking yet, and the splint means he can’t crawl very well in his crib-cage. We still have the set of pajamas he wore, with the right arm cut off to allow for the splint.

He’s pretty good for a child stuck in the hospital. Mostly Nate is bored and tired, as are his parents. About nine o’clock on the first night there is a knock at the door: a middle-aged man and a group of a dozen kids. In halting English the man says this is a class who came to the hospital to give presents to sick babies. I say that’s very nice. The man looks at me expectantly while I look back at him and the kids, my brain fogged to neutral. A girl of about eight comes forward with a wrapped green package the size of a lemon. I reach out to take it, but she withdraws it from my grasp, laughing uncertainly. The man says, she would like to give it to the baby, okay? I am so mentally crashed that I just accept this. No idea who these people are, why they are freely making the rounds in a quarantine ward, but sure, why not. The little girl creeps into the room and gives Nate the package through the crib bars. He smiles and holds onto it until they leave, then drops it out of the crib. I open it up and inside is a puffy little toy like you’d get in a gumball machine. Some multicolored bug-eyed fuzzy monster-alien-hamster with a white head and green feet. It’s still sitting on his bookshelf, many years later.

For the two nights Nate spends in the hospital, only one parent is allowed to stay with him. So my wife remains and I go home. That first night, I am so very weary and spent, but I feel a spacey optimism. Everything is going to be fine. The doctors are very reassuring, they are just being thorough. We’d had quite a time, but many people tell me that they themselves or their family members also had febrile seizures as babies. Really common actually. Terrible to see but usually harmless. Not a great way to start the new year, but the worst is over.

As I walk alone down the hall to our apartment, I glance up at a light fixture next to our door. This mundane piece of hardware is nothing special, just a fake brass plate, two little candle-bulbs under a small yellow shade, probably fourteen bucks all in. I don’t know why, but seeing this familiar object breaks me in half. Next thing I know I am leaning against the door, without strength or thought, keys dropping from nerveless fingers. I feel like my heart has been knocked out by a stone shot into my chest with great force, and the stone is expanding, turning me numb. If this is an attack it is the opposite of panic, because I don’t feel afraid. Instead I feel like I am being inexorably crushed from the inside out, and the feeling is so strange and impossible that I can’t understand it as something to fear or as anything that can be escaped.

But abruptly the stone vanishes and I untense, not sliding down the door or anything so dramatic, and it’s like my whole body has clicked one turn toward release, unlocking in the process. I shake my head to clear it and bend to pick up my keys. I go inside and pour myself a whiskey, stare out the window and drink it, wash up and go to bed. Every normal act seems outlandish for its normalcy, though that seeming is already receding, even before I sleep. Nate comes home after two days, and a few days later he starts walking. What hit me at the door in the hallway wasn’t anything as easily concrete as relief or grief or the realization of vulnerability. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to articulate what that moment meant, but I think the message was: Pay attention, now.

Originally published on Tumblr, 1/3/2011.