The room had a narrow bench with a foam pad that we used as a couch during the day. At night it was a bed barely big enough for me. Kari slept with Emily, snuggling her close. These moments were precious, as she didn’t know if she’d be able to do this tomorrow. Also, Kari wanted to feel Emily next to her to make sure that she was breathing.
As I struggled to sleep on the narrow bench, I thought about that little boy in the elevator. First, I thought, he was showing me that children are not weak in the way we adults assume they are. There’s a lot they cannot do as children, but, when faced with something big like this, their spirits can be strong, and they can fight as hard as any adult. That was one lesson from the little boy.
The other thing that stuck with me was a question: Where were his parents? He’d seemed calm and self-possessed. I guess he’d been sick for a while and had developed this attitude to help him handle whatever came, but still I thought his parents should have been with him every minute of the time he had left. You take from these whispers what you feel strongly, and I felt strongly that boy was a sign that we should never leave Emily alone.
Late that night, a nurse’s aide’s panicked voice startled Kari awake.
“Emily! Sweetie!” the aide said, shaking Emily gently on the shoulder. “Can you open your eyes for me?”
Emily didn’t move.
“She’s not breathing!” Kari said.
The aide pressed the code blue button and ran out of the room yelling, “I need help in here!”
I jumped up. Emily was limp, her eyes rolled back into their sockets. Her skin looked blue. As I bent over her to start CPR, the door flew open and a team of doctors and nurses rushed in.
“We’re going to have to bag her,” a male nurse yelled.
He positioned a resuscitator over Emily’s face to start pumping air into her.
A young doctor placed a stethoscope on Emily’s chest.
“Start a second IV!” she ordered.
A nurse stuck an IV needle in Emily’s foot, and she took in an audible gasp of air. Thank God!
We soon learned that Emily had too much morphine in her system, which had suppressed her breathing. The attending physician ordered Narcan, a medication for drug overdoses. After the Narcan, Emily’s breathing regained its rhythm. Everyone in the room relaxed as we watched her oxygen level steadily increasing on the monitor. One by one the staff filed out, satisfied the situation was under control.
Kari and I sat on the bench, holding hands and unable to speak. We were shocked and terrified that we had almost lost Emily when we had been right there.
Chapter 2
OUR NEW REALITY
The light of dawn coming into Emily’s hospital room surprised Kari and me. We hadn’t slept at all and had lost all sense of time. The doctor on call came in to apologize and explain that the morphine pump had malfunctioned. They switched Emily to morphine injections every two hours, and they agreed to my request to transfer us to a bigger room.
In the new room, which had a window facing the woods, Emily lay in the bed with her arms extended, pricked by IV lines. She was monitored by a multitude of sensors that made soft blipping noises. Kari was tucked into a curl in an armchair near Emily’s bed, poring over a thick book about leukemia that the hospital social worker had given us. Childhood Leukemia: A Guide for Families, Friends, & Caregivers by Nancy Keene was written for parents whose children had just been diagnosed, and I could hear Kari flipping through the pages, absorbing every word. This was the way Kari handled her fears, by trying to learn more and to understand better. Me, I was looking out the window and praying.
I stood at the window looking at the woods on the other side of the parking lot. Everything was moving so fast, but we were in a kind of parental limbo. We understood how dire the situation was but could do nothing to make it better. I wanted to take charge, to make decisions to save my little girl’s life, and I knew that Kari felt that way, too. But until Emily got more tests, and we knew exactly what type of leukemia she had, there wasn’t anything to do.
I remembered the binoculars sitting at the top of my duffel bag and grabbed them. I scanned the woods looking for deer, or a flock of turkeys, so I could take refuge in the natural order of things. In the natural order of things, Emily would survive, and she would outlive Kari and me. We would be back at our family camp soon using these binoculars to chart the flight of a bald eagle, or the scampers of a squirrel. This was why these binoculars had whispered to me when I was shoving things in the car back at the house.
I heard Kari close the book and I went over to be next to her and to ask her what she’d learned beyond what the doctors had told us. I always think of cancer as a tumor in tissues, like breast cancer or lung cancer, but I learned that leukemia is a blood cancer.
With leukemia, the bone marrow overproduces immature white blood cells, called blasts, which never mature enough to fight infection. These ineffective blasts multiply rapidly and crowd out red blood cells and platelets. Red blood cells carry oxygen throughout the body. Emily’s red blood cell count was low and she was anemic, which was why she was tired and looked so pale. Platelets are the cells that form blood clots to stop bleeding. Emily’s platelets
