Alecto's Ophelia

To the 911 operator who answered the phone and became the lifeline...

To the 911 operator who located my car (and therefore me and my daughter), gave me instructions and kept me from coming completely unhinged - thank you.  Your voice was a lifeline I never really understood until I needed one.  You are wonderful and amazing and if I can work out how to find you, I will.

Lucia didn't feel good very much the same way I didn't feel good except maybe not so bad. I'd been toying with the idea of taking her to see doc but I know what they always say, looks viral, go to bed, drink lots of fluids and try to eat. And she was going to school, she was just really tired. Her therapist spit venom at me on Saturday and said that I must take her.  Well all righty then, off we go, another half day of work missed for a non-diagnosis of something that will take a few weeks to work out of her system.

At 9:08 Lucia called my cell phone and said she really didn't feel good and wanted to come home.  I asked if she wanted to wait for me or if she wanted me to get Nanny to come get her.  She said, in her smallest little girl voice, I want Momma.  OK.  I called the doc and was told I could get her in at 10:30 (fabulous!).  I called my boss and told him I would be back online from home as soon as I got back from Doc's.  He said, OK.  So I drove back to Weston, picked up Lucia (who looked Pitiful with a capital P) and headed into New Canaan to see Doc.  While waiting in line to check in, Lucia sat down. I say sat but fell is probably more accurate except she rather gracefully used the wall.  We were sent upstairs immediately.  Doc didn't like what she saw (same way my Doc didn't like what he saw) and ordered a bunch of blood work, sending us on our way.  We drove through Norwalk until we found the blood place, went in, took a number and sat down. Lucia curled up on my shoulder and we looked at women's magazines because we never see any and we're fascinated.

It smelled really bad in the blood place. It felt bad too.  Lots and lots of sick people.  I went in with Lucia because she was unsteady and hates having blood taken.  This is because the last time she had blood taken she fainted and threw up apricots. She can't stand apricots anymore either.

We got through that and headed toward home.  She told me she felt awful and was sure it was the blood.  I explained that having blood drawn would not make a person woozy but that the mind was a very powerful thing and that she could make herself feel that way very easily.  We didn't get very far down the road, I called NoMans to tell him we were going home, and while I was on the phone she did a very strange thing. Lucia unbuckled her seatbelt and tried to open the door of our moving vehicle.  I swerved and yelled at her and she pulled the door shut.  I thought she was going to be sick and looked for a place to pull over.  I made it another 20 yards and pulled up a side street and into someone's driveway.  She opened the door.

And sat there.  I asked if she was going to be sick and she said no so I said, OK, close the door. She reached out to close the door and as she leaned back in her entire body convulsed, foam poured out her mouth and she made the most terrifying animal sounds, rolling forward toward the dash.  I undid my seat belt and got in front of her as she leaned back, arched and rolled her eyes back into her head.

The world went white.

I still had my headset on and I looked at my phone and thought White White White White call NoMans and then I dialed 911...

... and somebody answered it this time.

I said that my daughter was seizing and we were somewhere off East Avenue in Norwalk and I thought I might have crossed the Post Road but other than that I had no idea. He tracked me by the GPS that is probably in all phones by now but couldn't quite get me triangulated. I could not hear sirens.

I got out of the car and ran around to open her door and roll her over but it was in the wrong direction. I put her seat all the way back like he told me too and she kept frothing and her eyes stayed back.  Periodically she just looked like she was unconscious.  I got back in the car on my side and rolled her toward me and spoke to her.  At some point I had to leave her alone to run down to the bottom of the street to find out where I was.  I ran back up and jumped in the car and wondered why no one could see this and help us. I rolled her over again and rubbed her back like he told me too and he was with me the whole time.

She woke up and started to howl. I held her and kissed her face and told her to breathe.  She told me it hurt so bad and then she did it again. A Police cruiser pulled up and I have never been so happy to see anyone in my life.  He opened her door and spoke to her.  She responded a little, she knew her name.  And then I heard the sirens and the ambulance pulled up the street and many people got out with a stretcher. 

We got her out of the car and onto the stretcher.  They slapped oxygen on her face and she kept seizing.   I had to move the car and the cop helped me get it out of the way and then me into the front seat of the ambulance as they kept asking me questions and I kept trying to call NoMans back and finally succeeded and said he must come now.  I also called her father and was sent right to voicemail and left a nearly incoherent message stating, seizure, Lucia, Norwalk hospital, ambulance, come now. I tried her brother but he won't take my calls.

We spent three hours in the emergency room having a blood workup and a Ct Scan. Lucia settled down and didn't seize again. It has been determined that the Lucia seizures were not seizures but convulsions (this matters, in her life and to her life, a lot).  Looks like a seizure, smells like, tastes like, sounds like but is not. Ct Scan normal, electrolytes normal.  Mono test negative. 

We were allowed to take her home.

I made two batches of chocolate pudding because that's what she wanted.  I prepared two racks of lamb with acorn squash and pasta and then came in here to let go. Lucia has come in and passed out on my bed.

We will stay home together tomorrow and see what we see. We will go back to see Doc the next day or day after and see what we see.  We will wait for the rest of the blood and see what we see. 

Lucia is not going to die today.  Today, it seems, was not a day for dying.

I have never been so scared in my entire life, and I have been scared for my life twice. I thought she was going to die in my arms. I really did. Someday I will breath again.

Sibling, mine only...

Today Sudie wrote about her sister and then in my wanderings I found Thumper's site and saw what she thought about Sudie and I think this is a far better thing to write about tonight than the fact that my entire family of procreation (which currently includes Nanny) is driving me out of my ever loving mind tonight. I have stalked away from the dinner table after the last straw of a full glass of milk sprayed across the room which was then exacerbated by NoMans shaking it out of the chair to make sure we covered every square possible inch. I was done anyway and that was an unforgivable sentence.  Maybe I'll fix it later.

I have one brother.  His name is Jack.  I tell you that because if you're digging about you're going to work that out anyway, including our last name (which is no longer my last name 'cause I finally got around to changing my last name which might be indicative of me actually accepting the idea of marriage (I seem to be against it in general)) (I can nest my parenthesis, I'm a programmer, it's allowed).  His link is right over there.  Have a go at it.  He's pretty cool.

My brother Jack was born 26 months and two weeks and 18 hours after me on June 27, 1966 at 10:36 AM. We called him Fat Jack because he ate everything in sight and probably hit twenty pounds by six months and had beady little eyes poking out of the rolls of eye fat. He was cute as hell and he was mine.

My parents lived in Married Housing in Lansing Michigan and taught at Western State. My mother taught English Lit and my dad taught History, loads of it. We had noooooo money.  And it was pretty cool too. Later on we moved to Kalamazoo, the North end, if you're familiar, where there was a blood stain on the wall of the stairwell where somebody got gut shot and bled out.  You can't paint over that kind of thing, it just bleeds right through.

I believe that Jack and I lived a charmed life until my parents started to earn actual money.  Then we lived a normal upwardly mobile middle class pre yuppie kind of life where we helped invent the latch key generation. We started to fight. Maybe we fought earlier but I only remember doing it when we were a bit older and life was maybe more stressful. We fought like two junkyard dogs, no punches pulled but no broken bones either; probably only attributable to the high calcium diet my mother fed us.  Powdered milk was cheap.

I can remember sitting on top of my baby brother (I was bigger for awhile there) and pummeling him furiously.  We would both gasp for breath and he would snarl "Let me up!"  I would ask him, are you going to leave me alone or hit me back and his reply was always direct and dead honest...

I'm going to hit you back!!!!

So I didn't let him up easy.  Dumb ass kid.  Or maybe honorable, who knows.

We broke doors, walls, picture frames and possibly a hamster cage, but never each other. If we were two boys no one would have said boo, but we were a girl and a boy and this was just unheard of. My father told me for years, 'one day he's going to be bigger than you and then watch out.'

I'm still meaner, doesn't matter. Jack will tell you that he has to sleep sometime but he's not sure I do.

(it might be true)

When we were young adults and climbing out of our respective holes we were very, very close. We told each other everything, no judgment, no recriminations. We spent as much time together as we could which was tough because he lived in either Florida or Arizona, I lived in Connecticut and traveled all over the place.  We met up at various drop zones across the US.  At some point, probably between one divorce or another, this all changed.  I think the breaking point was when he was mad about my pending divorce and didn't want to meet my boyfriend.  I was crushed beyond belief. We went a couple years without much of a civil conversation.

And then he got married again.  He got married in Sydney which required a transatlantic flight of me or pure denial. Well, I sucked it up, bought a ball gown for this fabulous black tie event and took off first class with my mother's United miles (she refused the trip). I don't think he believed I'd do it.  And that's when it hit me.  He honestly thought I'd let him down or he thought he didn't deserve it or God knows what he thought but he was blown away by my presence and blown away by the damn Sapphire ball gown, of all things.

This is what I know and I hope he does too, by now (and maybe he always did, I hope so). If there was ever one person in this whole wide world it would be him.  If there was just that one person and the world was ending and I needed somebody to catch my rope, I wouldn't even have to close my eyes.  I would just know and he would just be.  It goes both ways. 

I have one brother and he has me.  I would not trade him for anything, not even a pony.

(p.s., really go look at his site.  He's so beautiful.  He looks just like a boy version of me or maybe I'm a girl version of him.  He broke a world record once in 2002 and he's climbed a lot of ice and his philosophy on life is kinda cool.  I love him)

(p.p.s.  he doesn't read my site, I think it makes him gag.  So you can pretty much say anything you want about him and if he actually does see it then he deserves whatever he gets for not coming to visit more often)