OPTIONAL ORGANS

MY WINTER BREAK IN THE HOSPITAL

(First of all, sorry I’vve been MIA, so much has happened in the last month that I almost don’t know where to begin. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m gonna try to catch you up. This first story is about my holiday vacation at NYU LANGONE.)

I don’t write about sick kids. Ever. Not incidentally, not in passing, not as part of the scenery. My writing simply does not include them.

This is probably superstition. In my second book, I made a stupid joke about having another child and developing a thyroid disorder. Both of those things happened. I’m not implying that I’m a witch. I’m just saying that I probably am.

Three days before we were supposed to fly to Austria for Christmas, Jason pulled me into the bathroom and told me we needed to cancel our trip. He’d been having excruciating back pain and had decided to have an emergency discectomy. The pain was so severe that he was going to spend the night in the hospital before his operation the next morning. As sad as I was to miss out on all the hot cocoa and kaiserschmarren, I was relieved to know this would not be the Christmas Jason’s snowboarding passion landed him in a full body cast. A discetomy I could deal with.

That night, Sid slept out, and Lazlo had a friend over. Around three in the morning, Laz woke up with a stomachache, the same kind of stomachache every other child in his class had come down with in the weeks prior. His forehead was warm, but not alarmingly so. I tried to give him Tylenol, but he refused.

We walked to the bathroom, where he proceeded to vomit and have diarrhea. We went back to bed, then we did the whole routine over again. And again. And again. By six a.m., I gave up on sleep and just started making coffee.

I cancelled soccer, and I encouraged both Jason and Sid to spend another night out of the house. My sister-in-law, Chiara, stayed to help out. Since she’s a preschool teacher, she’s immune to illness, so we decided she would be fine, and by “we,” I mean me.

Laz spent all Sunday curled up on the living room floor while Elf on the Shelf movies played on the TV. I tried offering him chicken broth, a couple of saltines, even against my deepest principles, Gatorade. Everything came right back up.

On Monday morning, he wasn’t fully awake before he was screaming in pain. The sharp stabbing above his navel was now at an eleven, to the point where he couldn’t sit down. This felt different. I needed to take him in.

Without grabbing a jacket or even my wallet, I scooped him up and headed to urgent care.

When we arrived, the attending physician suggested a suppository.
“No,” I said. “We’re past that. I want a CT scan,” I insisted like I was a season regular on ER.

I don’t know why I thought it was his appendix. He was the opposite of constipated, and the pain wasn’t yet migrating to his lower right side. I just knew my kid, and of my two kids, he wasn’t the emotionally high-strung drama queen. That was Jason.

The doctor started Lazlo on an IV and administered pain meds. I don’t think he blinked. We were then brought to a neighboring office for a CT scan. I hovered above the lab tech as he snapped pictures, hoping to see a glowing, still intact appendix, or at least make out the chalk outline of where one used to be. Unfortunately, I saw nothing.

After the tech gently asked me to unhook my fingers from his back, I stepped into the hall and waited. It took less than ten minutes for the radiologist to read the scan and tell us that it was, in fact, his appendix.

We had two choices. We could go home and treat it with antibiotics, or we could go to the ER and have it removed.
“In Europe, they are more relaxed about this kind of thing,” he confided.

“Well, where I come from in Scottsdale, Arizona, we remove organs first and ask questions later,” I replied, already helping Laz off the exam table.

Jason was still in his hospital bed, eating breakfast and waiting for me to pick him up when I called him on FaceTime with the news.

“Change of plans, I can’t pick you up this morning,” I said, plainly. “I’m on my way to NYU to take Lazlo’s appendix out.”