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But other than making that well-orchestrated introduction, I'd done very little with or for my son, and I expected to be chastised for it. Instead I found myself appreciated for doing anything at all. On those rare occasions, I was no longer a father doing his duty but an assembly line worker who has rushed down the conveyor belt to rescue a fellow worker who had fallen behind. A company hero. Worker of the month.
Now, on this afternoon, the assembly line finally ground to a halt, its gears gummed up with paternal guilt. It took 90 minutes to get home, drop my daughters with our endlessly generous neighbors, and speed over to the hospital. There I found Walker with two tubes up his nose, another in his left foot, and wires taped to his chest.
Dried blood stained the blanket by his feet, where nurses had tried to insert an IV drip. He looked bad, but his mother looked worse. She hadn't slept properly in months, and she'd spent the past five hours watching this baby she's been caring for poked and prodded with needles and strapped down on gurneys. Four different people had offered her four different explanations of RSV, but the hardest piece of information she'd come away with was that she should expect Walker to be in the hospital for at least a week.
"Don't worry," she said, reading my mind. "I'll spend the nights with him."
Thirty minutes later, the door closes behind her, and she's gone. It's just him and me, for the first time, really. Except for his sad little wheezing sounds and the beeping of the machine that measures the amount of oxygen in his blood, the room is silent.
RSV, it turns out, stands for respiratory syncytial virus. It's transmitted from person to person like the common cold; most kids get it by the time they're two. But RSV puts some of them in the hospital because it's often the first illness their bodies have to fight, and it can wear them out quickly. Their small airways are easily blocked by even a little mucus buildup. It can also lead to much worse: RSV is the most common cause of pneumonia and bronchiolitis in children under the age of one.
From the point of view of Berkeley's infants, RSV might as well be the bubonic plague. The hospital floor has 28 beds, and 25 of them are occupied by infants with RSV, who have one other trait in common: older siblings in school. So after a day of happily swapping germs with their peers, my older children apparently returned home with what probably felt to them like a mild cold and kissed their baby brother—who promptly lost his ability to breathe.
Besides the IV, there's little that modern medicine can do for Walker, except attach him to a machine that measures the oxygen in his blood, and, if he's about to suffocate, attach him to an artificial respirator.
As I see it now, my job as his attendant is to decide when he's about to suffocate. Over his bed is a black box that blinks bright red digits, like a radar gun. One hundred is a perfect score. Under 90 and the box starts to beep, and I can summon a nurse to suction the mucus from his nose and mouth (the staff are also monitoring his numbers from their station). For an hour or so, his number is a reassuring 94, but then it plummets, and I call a nurse. Twenty minutes later, it happens again, and then again and again.
It's about six at night when, at length, he is finally able to breathe properly and falls asleep.
That's when the phone rings.
I didn't even know there was a phone in the room, but there it is, howling, right beside his ear. He wakes up and begins to cry.
I pick it up. It's a woman calling from the hospital's "financial counseling department." The department has checked our health insurance, she says, and discovered that we have a $100 deductible.
"So?" I say.
Walker's now trying to holler. Only he has no voice, so the cries emerge as tiny gasps.
"How do you want to pay?" she asks.
"Just send it to me," I say.
"We typically collect before you leave the hospital," she says.
"Can't you just stick it in the mail?" I ask.
"I'll send it over by courier," she says.
Forty minutes later, the patient is soothed and sleeping again when in charges a nurse.
"Where's Mama?" she asks loudly.
Walker wakes up and begins to cry. The nurse tsk-tsks around him until he is inconsolable, and then finally she says, "There should be more fathers like you."
"There are!" I want to say, but before I can, she's gone, and I'm working to get him back to sleep.
Thirty minutes later, the courier bangs on the door with the bill, waking him up all over again.
And so it goes for the next 24 hours. Bill collectors, nurses, doctors, interns, floor cleaners, linen changers: As soon as he's recovered from one of their visits and fallen back to sleep, another bursts into the room and disturbs him all over again. Each time he wakes, he cries, and each time he cries, he generates mucus, and each time he generates mucus, he begins to wheeze and his radar gun readings plummet.
The odd thing about this is that the doctors all admit there is nothing they can do for him. He's in the hospital only so he can be near an artificial respirator. But the hospital seems only to increase the likelihood that he'll need an artificial respirator. Such is the state of our health care system: They keep you from dying but somehow leave you feeling like you're getting the raw end of the deal. Asking politely for peace and quiet does no good; the nurses change every four minutes, and the new one never has any idea what the old one did or didn't do.
After the 50th time he's awakened, I decide that it's time for a show of paternal authority. I make a sign: Please do not disturb. I'm sleeping. Thank you. Walker.
I tape it to one side of the door and drag the chair that doubles as a bed against the other so that no one can enter without climbing over it, and me. Then I hunker down, like some Montana survivalist. And I wait for the enemy.
The first assault comes at about ten o'clock that night: a new nurse.
"Can I help you?" I ask her.
"I just want to look at him."
"Why?"
"We're supposed to," she reports, which is to say that even she knows she serves no good purpose other than to collect evidence for any future lawsuit.
"Nope," I reply. And she leaves!
I repel several more assaults until finally, word must have spread that there's a total jerk guarding the little boy in room 5426, because we find ourselves well and truly alone. I change his diapers and feed him. I suction the mucus from his nose. I notice for the first time that he has my hands and feet. I study the little heart-shaped birthmark on the back of his head. I discover that if I hold him to my chest and hum against the back of his neck, he falls right to sleep.
Tabitha comes and offers to take over, but the truth is I don't want to leave: He feels like my jurisdiction. After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.
And he gets better, and better.
On the third day, he's hitting 100 on the radar gun and seems almost himself. At six that morning, an intern—a student there for no reason other than to satisfy his curiosity—catches me off guard in the bathroom. I hear a stir. I bound out to discover this child—doctor bent over my son, preparing to apply cold metal to sleeping flesh.
"What do you think you're doing?" I ask.
"Can I listen to his breathing?" he asks.
He's not even a doctor. He's a tourist.
"No!" I boom.
I haven't slept in two days and I'm in no mood. Still, it comes out sounding more menacing than I intended. The poor kid actually trots out the door.
Then I look down at Walker, and unless I'm mistaken, my son is laughing. He's got tubes coming out of every orifice, and he's having a ball. We're just two guys in a foxhole, defending ourselves against repeated, ceaseless assaults from the hospital staff.
"How you doin', buddy?" I say.
"Coo!" he says, and smiles.
It's a big, sloppy grin.
It's then that the doctor arrives. She has good news. She points to the black box over Walker's head—his number flashes between 94 and 96—and says, "He's the strongest on the floor."
My first thought: There are 24 other kids with the same thing and they're all more likely to die than he is, and … since no one ever heard of 25 kids dying in a children's hospital … he's not going to die. My second thought: He's winning the RSV tournament!
I look down at him, proudly.
He smiles again.
I'm hooked.
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