From Eight East

Room 835 has a nice view. There's the beautiful old cemetary, lined with the oldest surviving trees in the city, and just past that, the causeway with it's double arches heaving themselves skyward like swan's wings against the placid water beneath. From up here, you can see the barrier island and the posh resorts and the million dollar houses, and just beyond those, and because it's a clear day, you can see out across the Atlantic. It gives one a feeling of peace and, dare I say, hopefulness?

Were this a hotel, it would draw a nice price and people would book their reservations months in advance. But this is not a hotel, and for that reason it draws an even higher price. Welcome to the pediatrics wing of Holmes Regional.

Jonas is bundled in my arms, he's pale, listless and withdrawn. They poked him in eight different places and couldn't find a vein. They had to take him to a special procedures room in order to finally get the IV started. Of course, this equates to "a place where Mom isn't allowed to watch as we put his writhing body into restraints and dig around in all of his limbs for the last good vein. He was in there for 45 minutes. He returned to me barely conscious and wrists boasting the telltale marks. All I can do is hold him, kiss his face, try not to think about how sick he really is, or how much he's already been through.

The nurses were the sweetly incompetent type. Good at dishing out kind words and smiles, but grossly incapable of doing anything properly. By day two, his IV was infiltrated,(a fact discovered not by his nurse, but by his Aunt Heidi) and he was off to special procedures for another round of restraints and needles.

Restraints and needles... sounds like some sort of junkie version of an old children's game doesn't it?

Can you tell I haven't slept?

The verdict is Influenza type A. The treatment is time. Time and fluids for the dehydration that is has become so severe that the poor kid can't even pee or cry.

We cuddle together in the hospital bed because the hospital crib looks more like a metal cage to me. I have the flu too. If I feel this miserable, how bad must he feel?

Every two hours Nurse Incompetent arrives to wake him and administer his breathing treatment, and just when he's done with that, and dozing back to sleep, in comes her counterpart to further poke and prod. It seems unfair that so much bad should be experienced by such a tiny baby.

And so I hold him, wrapped in the standard issue hospital blankets, wires and tubes dangling from beneath, and we stare out the window at the spectacular view, and for just a moment, we can pretend that we're not here at all.