This is the scene no parent wants to enter:
Your child is on the ground after a tough soccer game loss. Furrowed eyebrows, more people gather.
You faintly hear Greg say calmly into a cell phone: “Brian, I know you’re at the basketball game, but this is an emergent situation.” Out of the corner of your eye you see Tim Sterling hoisting the amazing Sarah (his ER physician wife) over the fence to help out.
“Oh shoot,” you think walk-running onto the field, “this isn’t a case of a sprained ankle.”
It’s too raw and too fresh for me to write well in a detached, poetic, observant way about how my eldest daughter presented to me on the field last night. Suffice it to say she was there but not there. She sometimes responded appropriately in a slurred-slowed-down sort of way to the onslaught of questions coming her way (why do we do this to people when they are down and out? why do we assess by way of questioning?) but her eyes, pin-prick pupils, they didn’t register understanding.
“Her pulse is really thready and barely there,” Dr. Sterling said calmly, “someone call an ambulance right away.”
My body entered the kind of stay-calm-externally-while-you-are-losing-it-internally mode that I think parents know better than anyone. But I found myself afloat, just like Lucy. I kept being startled awake back to reality, like when Kevin Lewis asked if he could help get my kids home. Kids? I have other kids? I have never so forgotten I had two other kids in my life.
“Sure, let me grab my ummmm credit card,” I said to my boss, uncertain that credit card was the right word but also not really caring either way. (What I meant was garage door opener so they could get into the house but this was beside the point. Words were beside the point.)
In the informal-formal arrangement that is co-parenting I do not do the medical things. Justin stays calm. I lose my mind. I, who am calm in regular life interpersonal frustrations that make Justin flip his lid, CANNOT EVEN when there is blood or broken bone or whatever the heck this was last night. But alas, Justin is training for a new job out of town for three months. I’m up.
After an eternity, first responders arrived, barraging Lucy with many of the same questions Dr. Sterling had been (perhaps more expertly and less aggressively) assessing:
What happened?
How do you feel now? Better/worse/same?
What symptoms are you having?
What is your name? How old are you? What is your birthday?
How much did you drink today?
When is the last time you ate?
What are you allergic to?
Has this happened before?
When was your last period? (Seriously, dude? I never know that unless I check my app.)
Then we arrived at the hospital, and I got barraged with impossible questions, such as Lucy’s birthday, my husband’s birthday, his (newly acquired) employer, do I want to pay now or should they bill me later?
I now feel like questions are a passive-aggressive stance toward someone going through a thing. Like I know they have a purpose, but like seriously do you have to do me like that RIGHT NOW? Is that how my students feel when I catch them on a bad day and am practicing cold calling?
Let me skip to the end of the story quickly, which is to say, when my eyes met Lucy’s as she exited the ambulance I felt a rush of relief. She was back. Her eyes caught mine in an “I recognize you and I’m with it” sort of way. All the labs and all the tests later, we left the hospital a little baffled. She was normal in every result, not even all that dehydrated. Our only explanation came from the ambulance driver:
Everyone is built differently, and the body pulls crazy stuff sometimes to tell us it needs rest. It doesn’t always mean there’s an underlying health issue.
Lucy had just played striker for a full game plus double overtimes, no breaks. It was a huge game for the girls to get to state. She is the type of stubborn human who pushes herself beyond her limits. She ignored her body’s early warning signals (I’m feeling exhausted, I’m feeling dizzy, my legs are cramping up) by sheer force of will. She refrained from asking for help. I may not get this kind of athletic dedication, but I certainly get the plot-line here. I’ve lived it too many times in different arenas.
I say all of this to say . . . sometimes understanding eludes us because our adrenal system is on overdrive, like with me last night. Sometimes understanding eludes us because our lack of physical rest, our obsessive urge to push through the pain and do it all on our own, literally drives our body to diverting blood flow where it needs to be. Sometimes we look like we understand, are conscious, and we are actually there no more than someone passed out on the ground.
There were a lot of helpers that popped up last night despite myself. These helpers helped me pause, breathe, and process probably the scariest night of my life. Kevin reminded me I have two other children and kindly took them on the drive to Rankin County so they could go to bed at a decent time. Blake reminded me I hadn’t eaten dinner and picked up a grilled chicken sandwich for me to deliver when he dropped my car off at Batson’s. Sarah Sterling was at my side the entire night, providing expert commentary to help me decipher what would happen, what was happening, and making the path unbelievably smooth for us. Coach Lis was the one who delivered my key and dinner, made patient conversation, and lovingly told me to “shut up” when I recurringly told her to go and rest and get dinner for herself. There were so many other could-be helpers that waited 45 minutes on the field for us to get Lucy in the ambulance just so they could ask if they could help with younger kids, texted me with offers of food and drink, asked me not just how Lucy was but how I was doing.
The blog blast was supposedly finished before all of this went down. I had written my fill on checking for understanding. But then the worst thing incomprehensible thing happened, and I realized not one blog really addressed the most important two prerequisites to the world making sense again: (1) physical rest and (2) letting the helpers help. Everything was falling apart and then, once we starting doing those two things, everything started coming back together again.
With love to the SA Village,
The Rusts