The Chicken Who Saved Us

by Adams, Kristin Jarvis;

  Many days when Sue visited, I hovered around the corner in the hallway, waiting, listening, thanking God for sending us relief in the form of an intensely patient woman with a bewitching voice, who could lure my son into a trancelike state. But one day, things changed. Andrew’s fever skyrocketed to an all-time high, the lesions in his mouth became gaping holes, and he stopped eating entirely. During our next trip to the ER, they proposed Nasogastric Intubation (NG) for hydration and feeding.

  “You should be able to put some weight back on him without disturbing those ulcers,” we were told.

  Andrew was stabilized, and then sent home with an NG feeding tube threaded through his nose and down to his stomach. Remembering my son that day, frail and weak, I have no idea why we agreed to bring him home. I think we had just begun to accept his illness and ongoing pain as something we had to live with. It had become our insane version of normal.

  In an attempt to cheer him, Hannah pressed Frightful to the downstairs playroom window where Andrew lay on a makeshift bed. Soon after, the chicken took up residence on a broken flowerpot next to the window, and we heard the constant tap-tap-tap of her beak on the pane. When we locked her in the pen, she screeched and squawked, causing Jon to make not-so-veiled threats.

  “Wk-wk-wk-wk-wanh! Wk-wk-wk-wk-WAHN!”

  I want out! I want OUT!

  Frightful poked her beak through holes in the chicken wire in her attempt to escape.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little weird for a chicken to act like that?” Jon cornered me one afternoon.

  I glanced out the window at the chickens scratching in the rose garden. “I’d be mad, too, if I was the only one locked up while my friends were out feasting in the garden,” I said.

  “You know what I mean. Frightful doesn’t care about the garden. She just sits in front of the window all day, staring at Andrew.”

  He was right. She’d been acting unusually odd for the last couple of days. When Hannah went to the coop to collect eggs, she screeched and bolted through the door, running across the yard to her flowerpot. I had tried to nudge her away with a toe and she had lunged at me with a clawed foot.

  “She’s gone batty!” Hannah cried.

  “She’s just scared,” I told her, wondering if that was really true.

  Sue walked into chaos the next afternoon when I was on the verge of collapsing under the sheer horror of each long day. Andrew was screaming and had been vomiting for hours. When I called his doctor, he had tried to convince me to give him more anti-emetics and wait it out. I sometimes wondered if the doctor thought I was exaggerating his symptoms, because on many days when he saw the doctor, Andrew would behave normally, feeling perfectly fine. The next, he would be horrifically ill. It made no sense.

  Sue took control, sending me out of the house to get fresh air and perspective. After she left, however, an eerie, almost haunted silence descended over the room and Andrew. Outside, Frightful suddenly stood frozen on the flowerpot in the rain, her wings spread wide like a shield. We made eye contact, the raptor and I. She pierced the air with a screech before throwing herself at the window, imploring me to take action, to help her best friend. Horrified, I reached for the phone in my pocket and dialed Jon at work.

  “You have to come home. NOW!”

  In a fit of panic, I drug Andrew and the mattress through the door and into the hallway where Frightful couldn’t see him. When Jon arrived, the two of us lifted Andrew into the car and left the bird calling for our son in the rain.

  Chapter 11

  Jon peeled into the circular drive, the tires of his SUV chirping to a halt. For a frozen moment, I sat in the passenger seat, staring through the rain-splattered windshield—a terrifying thought pushing at the back of my mind. While Jon flung open his door and his shoes crisscrossed pavement, I watched water gush from overflowing gutters. The light in the red and white sign flickered like a firefly I had once seen on a hot summer night. Curious, I wondered why they hadn’t fixed it.

  There was no sound. Then there was: a roaring in my ears, a heartbeat thudding through veins…the sound of fear. My arms and legs moved without allowing time for my brain to catch up. I was out of the car, my hands reaching through the door, dragging my sixteen-year-old son from the back seat. He was taller than me by six inches, but somehow, during the time of no sound, I had developed superhuman powers. My arms easily lifted his skeletal frame, cradling him against my chest. Then I turned and walked straight through the double doors of the Emergency Room.

  “My son is dying,” I said in a voice I barely recognized.

  The woman behind the desk had a paper butterfly pinned to her shirt. I stared at her. She stared back, a polite smile curving at the edges of her mouth. “We’ll get him all fixed up. Why don’t you take a seat?”

  Puzzled, I stared at her lips, thin, painted pink to match the butterfly fluttering about her neck. She spoke again, this time her words a slap across my face. “Take a seat, ma’am. We’ll be with you shortly.”

  Take a seat? Was she kidding?!! At five foot ten, Andrew weighed barely 100 pounds and hadn’t been able to eat in nearly two weeks. No matter how much Tylenol and Advil we administered, his 105-degree fever rarely decreased. That night he began vomiting blood. She was crazy if she thought I was going to take a seat.

  Consumed with rage, I spun around, scanning the waiting room filled with anxious parents and miserable kids. Ten sets of tired and weary eyes gazed back at me, challenging me to sit down. I was not going to sit. I would stand there and stare them all down with laser-vision if I had to, starting with the woman behind the desk, who was now speaking into the phone.

  I adjusted Andrew in my arms, preparing to wait her out. He lay limp, his head turtled into the neck of his sweatshirt. I rocked from side to side, singing, “You are my goofball, my only goofball…”

  The woman’s anxious gaze kept flitting between me and something on her desk as she continued her conversation on the phone. A moment later, the double doors yawned open, spitting out a round woman in dinosaur scrubs pushing a wheelchair. She reached out to take Andrew from my arms and the room began to roar—a deep, guttural roar that made the rage twist in my belly.

  “You make me happy when skies are grey…” I sobbed while squeezing Andrew hard against my chest just to hear something, anything that would make me believe he would be okay.

  “You’re a terrible singer,” he croaked.

  I continued to sing while Dinosaur Lady peeled Andrew from my grip and set him in the chair. A name-tag was clipped to her shirt—a blue logo of a whale within a whale—with her name below: Martha Reed. Martha grasped me by the arm and looked me directly in the eye. “We’ll take good care of him. I promise.”

  They took off through the double doors, the mouth of the giant whale consuming my heart. My arms were empty, my superpowers vanished, my body turned to stone. “Please don’t take my sunshine away,” I sang to no one in particular.

  I stood frozen in the doorway, allowing my mind to replay the day: Andrew’s rising fever, the untreatable pain. Nausea, vomiting, not even an ice cube to the lips for comfort. While Sue sat with Andrew, I poured over my files of notes and diaries I had kept since Andrew entered grade school. I sorted and rearranged each piece of information in an attempt to get a glimpse of the whole picture. It was a puzzle with no borders. Defeated, I’d swiped at my dinner plate, sending it off the edge of the counter in a shower of half eaten spaghetti and soggy bits of salad. I’d returned to glowering at the stack of paperwork again, willing some pattern to reveal itself.

  Still churning the day’s events over in my mind, I finally walked down the hall of Seattle Children’s Hospital, my feet guided by the familiar orange and red salmon etched into the linoleum floor, urging me deeper and deeper into the belly of the whale. Harried voices led me to a large exam room, lights blazed in one corner where an orderly was setting up a tray. I took note of the bed in the center, my son’s frail body occupying barely half the space. Someone washed t
heir hands with disinfectant soap, the odor analogous with the countless doctors we had seen over the years who tried their best, but ultimately had no idea how to help. Even Dr. Torgerson felt like a faraway dream, unreachable. We hadn’t seen him since we joined the rheumatology team three years before.

  From the doorway, I watched as a young doctor hovered over the bed, barking orders at a lone nurse. An IV was inserted, a saline bag hung.

  In contrast to Andrew’s desiccated body and swollen red cheeks, this man was fresh-faced with a country club haircut and a stylish three-day scruff. Sperry boat shoes poked out beneath cuffed khaki’s. No socks. He looked more like a deck hand at the Shilshole Bay Marina than an emergency room doctor at one of the finest research institutions in the country. I hated him instantly.

  He began pebbling my son with questions: How do you feel? Where does it hurt? How long have you been sick? You look a little thin. When did you last eat?

  Andrew just lay silent.

  “Fever, pain, vomiting, ulcers in his mouth throat and gut,” I snarled, like a mantra I had come to know month after month of this recurring hell. Don’t these people keep records?

  I walked over to the bed, grabbed one of Andrew’s bony hands and squeezed. In his own version of sign language of which I had become the translator, Andrew lifted his other hand, stabbing a forefinger into the area below his belly button in the same way he’d shown Frightful those many years ago.

  “His belly pain is unbearable,” I said.

  “Where exactly?”

  “In the middle. It’s always the same.”

  Andrew sliced two fingers across his belly.

  “It feels like knives are cutting him open.”

  The much-too-young doctor on call sat down next to the bed and pulled out a clipboard and pen.

  “I know it can feel scary to be in an emergency room, but I’m sure he just has a bad case of the flu. There are lots of viruses going around this spring.”

  Oh good God! You have no idea! How could he say such a thing? My vision narrowed and, for an instant, I felt I could have murdered the doctor. He had no idea where we had been, how weighty our story had become, what Andrew had endured for the past ten years. Rage bubbled up through my own belly, leaving me with an urge to slice him open with the phantom knives that cut across my son’s belly. Frightful understood more about Andrew and his condition than this marina-coiffed doctor ever would.

  A nurse sauntered into the room, handing the doctor a thick file of notes with Andrew’s name printed on the glossy yellow tab. While he carefully flipped through each page, I glared at his throat, the crease of skin, a recent sunburn, the Adam’s apple protruding out a little too far. As we all stood there silently, I watched him passive-aggressively read my son’s medical tome while my boy lay suffering between us. Angry tears welled up, spilling down my face and splatting onto the floor, causing the colorful linoleum fish to swim in front of my eyes.

  Doctor No Socks started the clinical questions. I held up my hand, palm facing out, as a signal for mercy. “We were in here a few days ago, so why don’t you just check the chart.”

  Despite regaining an outer sense of control, I started to shake from somewhere deep inside—an uncontrollable shivering that took over my entire body, forcing me to clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. Groping for the wall, I guided myself to the floor, squeezing my eyes shut and clamping my hands over my ears to block out the noise—just like Andrew does. It helped. As I sat on the floor in the emergency room for what felt like the hundredth time, my world cracked open.

  “Something is happening. It’s different this time.”

  My mind flashed on Frightful throwing herself against the window while letting out an unbearable screech. She’d known it was different this time, too. I felt the young doctor’s eyes boring a hole in the side of my head. I heard, or rather felt, the groan of his chair, the catch of his breath, as if he was going to say something but then thought better of it. I cradled my head in my hands, wishing my world was anything but fevers, pain, emergency rooms, and an autistic son who communicated with a chicken named Frightful more eloquently than he ever had with any human. Tonight, I was terrified. I needed Doctor No Socks to understand what I knew in my gut: Something we couldn’t see was killing my son.

  A scuffling in the hallway told me Jon was back from the parking garage. He was on the phone, his words drifting in through the open door. “Yes. We’ll be here a while. No. I don’t know. Please pick up Hannah and take her home with you.”

  With my eyes still closed, I let out a long, slow exhale, realizing I had forgotten to breathe. I pictured Jon’s mother Connie, rushing to rescue Hannah from the monsters that lurked in the shadows of our empty home. Thank you, I breathed—my silent offering of gratitude to the only person who could comfort our daughter on nights like these.

  Jon entered the room, nodded to the doctor, then crouched low to meet my eyes. He took my face in his hands and spoke the same words I’d heard so many times before: We will get through this. I nodded in a crazy way that meant I didn’t really believe it but hoped to God it was true. Then I fled the room and bolted down the hallway, back through the gaping maw of the whale, and out into the rain.

  Chapter 12

  A few stray streetlights cast amber pools of light on the far side of the street from where I stood. Dense cloud layers hung over the city, seeming to squeeze the life out of it. I huddled next to the sliding glass doors, teetering on the rough edge of a cement planter box until reality slammed the breath out of me. Life wasn’t supposed to be this way. At least not like this. I wasn’t supposed to live in a constant state of grief, trauma, and panic, wondering when the next proverbial shoe was going to drop. But this had become my reality. I told myself that with all this newly built character, I was stronger; now that I'd acquired a whopper-load of life experiences under my belt, I’d be tougher. It was all just a big fat lie. I didn’t feel wise. I felt scared, vulnerable, and alone. I secretly wondered if I stood in the wrong line when they were handing out lives.

  Pulling out my phone, I scanned through my contact list, wondering who I could call in the dead of night. I thought of Becki, but truthfully, I was too embarrassed to call her. We had spoken the day before and I had convinced her that we were doing okay, thanking her again for sending Sue to us. I scanned further. My parents were surely sleeping, and Jon’s mom was on the way to our house to get Hannah. I considered my Breakfast Club ladies, but over the years, as our children grew and attended different high schools, we had become involved in our own lives and found new tribes. My thumb stopped on Julie. Yes. Julie was one of my oldest friends, my 3:00 a.m. person. Someone I could call at any time, even when we hadn’t spoken for weeks, or even months.

  Julie answered the phone on the third ring. A rustling of sheets and a single click told me she had sat up in bed and turned on the light.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” I croaked into the phone while on the edge of hysterics. I collapsed into the planter box, crushing the newly planted geraniums. Rainwater pooled at my feet, reflecting a mass of red and white jumbled letters. “We’re at the emergency room. Again!”

  “Tell me everything. From the beginning,” she said.

  And so we talked, me standing in a Seattle downpour, her in the heat of an Arizona night. I told her about my horrible day, how I had felt something sinister come over the room as I lay next to Andrew, and how Frightful had tossed herself against the window in a fit of anxious foreboding. I told her about Sue, what a godsend she was, yet even when Andrew was in her capable hands, I couldn’t relax. I told her about the picture Andrew had drawn weeks before, of a boy with wings and a cape and a chicken on a cloud labeled ‘Heaven’, and how I couldn’t get it out of my head. I also admitted to her for the first time that I was terrified my son was going to die.

  “I told the lady at the front desk tonight that my son was dying,” I said. “What do you think? Am I overreacting?”

  She paused fo
r a long time on the other end of the line. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. It breaks my heart.” She took a breath before adding, “Please remember that you’re not alone.”

  I wanted to believe her, but right then, I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

  “Imagine me sitting next to you right now,” Julie said, “and we’re chatting in the corner of the living room where we met. Remember?”

  I did. We first met as young parents in a bible study at a local church Jon and I were attending. We were a bunch of uptight parents who wanted to believe that God had His hand on the pulse of our lives, but in truth we were all skeptics, hoping to latch onto someone else who was stronger and wiser and more faithful than we were. Julie and I sat in the corner that first day, sharing our stories, oblivious to the rest of the group. We had laughed at the silly antics of our Kindergarten sons and shared in the sudden weight of responsibility we felt for them the moment we became mothers. And somehow, during the course of that night, we found we spoke the same language.

  The sweetness of that memory dissolved as Julie’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Have you prayed?”

  “Yes! Well, I think so. I don’t know. What does it matter anyway?”

  I splashed my foot in the puddle, causing the reflected letters to shiver into streaks of color. I desperately wished Julie was there with me. She had moved to Arizona years before and, strangely, I still felt the sting of her absence.

  “It’s worse than ever,” I said. “Way worse. I don’t know how long this can go on.”

  Grim thoughts filled my mind, but I refused to speak them aloud, so I just sat there among the crushed flowers, listening to my friend breathe.

  “I have your back,” she said.

  “I know,” I replied through a mass of tears.

  In the span of twelve months, Jon and I had made fourteen trips to the emergency room with Andrew. We now had our own direct phone line and social worker assigned to us. I guess I should have felt privileged, but I could only feel a gnawing sense of despair at our impossible situation.