Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss Read online

  “No,” David said. “Everything’s changed now.”

  “Changed? Because he feels weak? But we told you that would happen.”

  David’s heart kept pounding. “Yes, but something else is going to happen. All the early symptoms are there, but you don’t know it yet … because you’re not expecting it, so you’re not”—his lungs heaved—“you’re not interpreting the symptoms—”

  “I beg your pardon?” The second physician narrowed his eyes. “I’m not interpreting … ?”

  “The symptoms the way you would if you knew what was going to happen.”

  “Going to happen?” The first physician frowned at his colleague.

  The parents of other patients had begun to gather and listen.

  “Can we go somewhere else to have this talk?” the second physician said.

  “As long as we get this settled.”

  “There’s a conference room down the hall.”

  5

  They shut the door to the narrow room that had a black-board upon which doctors customarily drew diagrams for parents confused about the treatment their child would receive. Both physicians studied David as if they wished they weren’t alone with him.

  “Now we realize you’re under stress,” the first physician said. “You’re worried about your son. All perfectly natural. But what exactly do you think is—?”

  “Going to happen?” David’s legs felt weak. He gripped a chair. “Septic shock.”

  The second physician narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you hear that term? Something you read? You’ve been doing, let’s call it, well-intended but uninformed research, and it makes you nervous?”

  “Never mind how I know. I’m absolutely certain—”

  “Now listen carefully,” the first physician said. “Whatever books you’ve been reading, whatever outdated texts have made you afraid, yes, it’s true there’s always a danger of septic shock. We’ve already warned you. When a patient’s blood counts are low, there’s a risk of infection. That’s why we take extreme precautions to prevent—”

  “No, you listen carefully.” Though the room stayed perfectly still, David’s mind revolved. “Your precautions are fine. There’s nothing wrong with the treatment you’re giving him. But Matthew will get septic shock. I can’t explain why, but tomorrow afternoon, he’ll become infected. His blood pressure will drop and …”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me! Just give him antibiotics now!”

  The first physician edged toward the phone.

  The second physician raised his hands in a placating gesture. “‘Antibiotics’ is a general description of a wide variety of treatment.”

  “I understand that. Different antibiotics have applications to different infections.”

  The first physician picked up the phone.

  David’s chest felt squeezed. “Stop. Give me a chance.”

  The first physician touched numbers on the phone.

  “Please!”

  The first physician hesitated.

  “You need to know the specific infection so you can choose the specific antibiotic to use to attack it. So now I’m telling you.”

  As David spoke the words that to anyone but a doctor would have been gibberish … as he recalled the words he’d memorized from the microbiology report in his dream … words that in his present timestream would have been impossible for him to know, let alone pronounce … he realized that he wasn’t crazy. His dying vision was fact. He had indeed come back.

  For what he told the physicians, the words like gravel in his mouth, was …

  “What’ll give Matthew septic shock? Streptococcus mitis. Staphylococcus epidermidis.”

  David couldn’t believe he’d spewed those chunks out.

  The physicians couldn’t believe it either.

  “Where the hell did you … ?” The first physician almost dropped the phone.

  The second physician drew his head back. “But naturally adapted strep and staph are almost never …”

  “Fatal?” David shuddered. “This time they will be.”

  His legs buckled. The room spun along with his brain. He lost his grip on the chair.

  “My God, he’s …”

  Falling.

  “Having a …”

  Drifting.

  Toppling.

  “Heart attack.”

  6

  When David struck the floor, he couldn’t move; he felt disoriented, helpless. His fall, which seemed to have lasted forever, contrasted sickeningly with the sense he had of floating above his aged dying body. He seemed to drop and rise simultaneously—conflicting sensations that produced such vertigo he could barely muster the strength to blink.

  Making these reactions more intense was the added element of fear, as if to move, to try to stand, would kill him.

  Through a haze, he saw the first physician lunge from the room. The second physician knelt beside David, checking his pulse. After an interval—ten seconds? a minute?—the first physician rushed back, accompanied by Donna and a nurse.

  “His pulse is strong.” The first physician’s voice was an echo. “No fibrillation. Ninety.”

  “Acceptable,” the second physician said.

  “No … normal for me is …” David’s chest heaved.

  “Don’t try to talk.”

  The nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around David’s arm. Donna knelt beside him, touching his cheek, as the nurse inflated the cuff. David saw the fear in Donna’s eyes.

  The nurse deflated the cuff, watching a dial as she listened to a stethoscope pressed to David’s arm. “A hundred and forty over ninety.”

  “Tolerable. A little high, but not unusual. Not critical,” the second physician said.

  “No. Listen. Normal for me is …”

  “Don’t try to talk. Relax.”

  Sure, easy for you to say, David thought, the room and his mind aswirl.

  “What I told you a minute ago might not be true. Try not to worry. Our initial examination isn’t conclusive, but you might not be having a heart attack.”

  “Then what … ?”

  “We don’t know. We’ve alerted Emergency. We’re sending you down there. If it is a heart attack, we’re not equipped to deal with—”

  “Stop the spinning. Stop the damned room from spinning.”

  “David, I’m here. I’ll be with you,” Donna said. “I’ll stay right beside you.”

  “No, stay with Matthew.” The effort to emphasize his words was excruciating.

  David felt his body being lifted. He suddenly found himself in a wheelchair. He closed his eyes. But the tingling—and worse, the swirling—persisted.

  Feeling the wheelchair being pushed, he groaned from increasing dizziness. Pressure accumulated behind his ears. He dared to open his eyes and discovered …

  He was in an elevator. The doors hissed shut. The elevator dropped.

  “No!”

  At last he moved of his own accord, shoving his hands to his ears to stifle the pressure.

  “No!”

  The elevator jerked to a stop. The top of his head seemed about to explode. If someone hadn’t been holding him, he’d have toppled from the wheelchair.

  Blinding lights. A swirling corridor.

  But not the soothing gleam of the corridor in his nightmare. This was the hospital’s first floor. Rear section. The part that patients and visitors almost never saw and prayed they would never have to see. Through a spinning maze of twists and turns, he was rushed in his wheelchair toward the Emergency Ward. Outside, a wailing ambulance arrived. David concentrated to focus on glass doors that led to a curve in a driveway where attendants unloaded a patient onto a gurney. Through a blur, he saw a nurses’ station directly across from where the glass doors now slid open, the attendants hurrying the patient through.

  David’s wheelchair stopped abruptly in front of the nurses’ station. His head tilted forward, making him groan.

  A woma
n peered over a computer screen toward him. “Name?” She poised her fingers above a keyboard.

  David managed to tell her.

  “Two ‘r’s, two ‘I’s?”

  David gasped for breath and nodded.

  The woman tapped the keyboard. “Address?”

  “It’s all”—David sweated, even though his skin felt cold—“on file. I hurt my shoulder … in March.” He breathed faster. “I came here then for treatment. I’m in … the computer file.”

  “Just a minute.” The woman tapped the keyboard again. She read an address from the screen. “That’s where you live?”

  David nodded.

  The woman read the name of an insurance company.

  “Yes,” David breathed.

  “Okay, you can take him in.”

  The wheelchair hurried forward. David’s dizziness increased. He closed his eyes once more, felt the wheelchair turn sharply left, and the next time he looked, he was speeding toward an examination room—a bed, a sink, a metal cabinet, its shelves stacked with medical supplies.

  The nurse who had wheeled him down from the Bone Marrow Ward stopped and tapped his shoulder. “They’ll take care of you now, Mr. Morrell. Good luck. I’ve got to get back on duty upstairs.”

  At once, another nurse replaced her. “Can you stand?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Try. I have to get you onto the table.”

  She gripped his arms and helped him to his feet. Wobbling, he leaned his hips against the table and settled backward. She raised a metal bar on each side of the table to keep him from rolling off.

  A male resident came in, closing a curtain.

  “Pulse is ninety,” the nurse said.

  “Not critical.”

  “No, listen to me.” David felt as if a ten-pound rock had been set on his chest. “I tried to explain upstairs.” He squirmed from the humming pain behind his ears. “I’m a runner. My heart rate’s low. It’s normally sixty.”

  “Blood pressure—one hundred and forty over ninety.”

  The resident shrugged as if to say “not critical” again.

  “You don’t understand.” David shivered. “It should be a hundred and fifteen over seventy-five. It’s never… God, that curtain.”

  The resident frowned and turned toward the privacy curtain. “What’s wrong with—?”

  The curtain was decorated with blue wavy lines. David’s mind not only spun now but wavered in imitation of those lines. Sickened, he closed his eyes again but still saw the wavy lines. His breath was so rapid he felt he’d just run several miles. The top of his head seemed to bulge.

  “I’m going to …”

  Faint?

  Die?

  Toppling toward his kitchen floor.

  Floating toward the radiant doorway.

  Fireflies gleaming.

  (Behind his eyes?)

  Power chords throbbing.

  (In his head?)

  Then?

  Now?

  Later?

  “What’s happening to me?”

  “That’s what we want to find out.”

  The nurse unbuttoned David’s shirt. The resident pressed pads against David’s chest. Squinting, David saw that the pads were attached to wires that led to an EKG machine on a cart.

  The resident flipped a switch on the EKG. Needles wavered, making inky marks on paper.

  The paper rolled from the machine. The resident tore off a sheet and studied it.

  “Yes, I found the problem. Here. And another one. Here. And here. Extra blips. Your heart. There’s something wrong with—”

  “Let me see it,” David gasped.

  “What?”

  “Let me see it.”

  David reached for the printout. The effort to focus his eyes was agonizing. “No, that’s … not what’s wrong with me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Those blips … normal for me.”

  “Normal?”

  “My EKG …”

  “Relax.”

  “Always looks like this.”

  The resident frowned. “Have you had medical training?”

  “No.”

  “In that case …”

  “But I’ve always had a”—David grabbed the sides of the table as it started swirling—“right …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Right … bundle.” David struggled to complete his statement. “Right bundle branch block.”

  The nurse and the resident stared at each other.

  “Right bundle branch block?” The resident seemed astonished, as if he’d never expected a patient to speak to him in technical medical phrases.

  In contrast with David’s certainty about the septic shock that would soon kill his son—have to save him!—there was nothing mysterious about his present medical knowledge. The phenomenon in his heart had been explained to him years before. The heart is a pump, and like any other pump, it needs an energy source, “electricity” produced by the body. Nerves, like wires, control the flow of energy, and under normal circumstances, this energy flows smoothly from chamber to chamber, stimulating the heart to take in and push out blood.

  But in David’s case, a cluster of nerves, a “bundle branch,” on the right side of his heart had deteriorated. Energy impulses, which usually flowed in an orderly fashion, had been interrupted and forced to redirect themselves along another branch of nerves, taking longer to reach the right side of his heart. On a printout from an EKG machine, this redirection of energy produced an extra blip within an otherwise normal heart wave pattern.

  The blip was not alarming, as long as you knew what it meant, and David’s condition wasn’t considered lethal. For twenty years, he’d run an average of four miles every day, and even though he was foolishly a smoker, he could finish that run and never be out of breath. So whatever was wrong with him, he was sure that the bundle branch block hadn’t caused it.

  But something was wrong. Without a doubt. Pausing often to gasp for air, he described his symptoms.

  Tingling.

  Shivering.

  Sweating.

  Rapid heartbeat.

  Rapid breathing.

  Pressure on his chest.

  Humming behind his ears.

  Swelling in his head.

  And swirling.

  Terrible swirling.

  David thought, If you had these symptoms, what would you guess was going wrong? A heart attack? You bet that’s what you’d guess. No, never mind guess. We’re talking fear.

  “Okay, the extra blips match what you’re telling me,” the resident said. “A right bundle branch block.”

  “Then what”—David’s chest heaved, both his lungs and heart—“is wrong with … ?”

  “We’ll do more tests. Hang on. We’re trying, Mr. Morrell. We’ll do everything we can to find out.”

  The nurse inspected David’s right arm. “His central vein’s good and thick.” She stuck an intravenous needle into the vein and extracted blood.

  David felt too disoriented to feel the prick of the needle.

  “Get lab tests as soon as possible,” the resident said.

  The nurse rushed away.

  7

  And just then Sarie walked in.

  Beautiful wonderful Sarie.

  As when David had seen—too weak a word—witnessed Donna in the Bone Marrow Ward (after three hours of having been away or else half a lifetime), David’s soul swelled with love. Again, as when he’d seen Donna upstairs, he had the eerie sense of a triple image: of Sarie as a smooth-faced infant, of the glowing twenty-one-year-old she now was, of the haggard woman who wept beside his deathbed.

  I’m going crazy, David thought. That’s what’s wrong. I’m not sick. I’m nuts.

  And yet …

  And yet …

  Why am I so sure of when and how Matt’ll die?

  Sarie’s blue-eyed, blond glow of young adulthood was dimmed with shock. “I just got out of class. I went up to v
isit Matt. Mom told me …”

  “Yeah.” Despite his rushing heart, David did his best to grin. “Mom told you … I’ve got a few problems.”

  Sarie clutched his hand. “She said you wanted her to stay with Matt, so I came down to see …”

  “I’m glad you did.” The pressure in his head swelled, making him grimace. “It’s good to have you with me.”

  Someone brushed past the curtain, entering the room. A woman. Not a nurse. She didn’t wear a gown but slacks and a blazer. “… neurologist,” she finished explaining. “I understand you collapsed an hour ago.”

  An hour ago? David would have sworn he’d been in the Emergency Ward for less than ten minutes.

  “What are your symptoms?” the neurologist asked.

  For a second time, David described them. Tingling … rapid … pressure … swelling … dizzy … humming …

  The resident enumerated David’s vital statistics.

  The neurologist frowned. “They’re not consistent with a heart attack.

  David turned to Sarie. “Matt?”

  “He can hardly move. His girlfriend called. He didn’t have the strength to talk to her.”

  It’s starting, David thought. The infection’s building. I’m seven floors below him. I can barely move, but I’m the only one who can save him.

  “Grip my hands,” the neurologist said.

  “What?”

  “Grip my hands.”

  David obeyed.

  “Squeeze them as hard as you can.”

  David squeezed until her fingertips turned white.

  “Good.” The neurologist took off his shoes and socks, then pressed the blunt end of a pen down the balls of his feet.

  His toes curled inward.

  “Good.” She tapped a rubber hammer against his elbows, knees, and ankles. His reflexes jerked.

  “Good.”

  “Stop the damned room from spinning.”

  The resident checked David’s pulse. “What the—? It’s up to a hundred and ten.”

  The neurologist straightened. “Blood pressure.”

  “Up. A hundred and fifty over ninety-five.”

  “Sarie, go back upstairs,” David blurted. “Go back to Donna. Tell her, whatever happens to me, tell her—”

  “Mr. Morrell, has anything happened to you in the last few days? To change your medical—”