Things I’d Never Even Heard Of

By Beck

So yesterday we took the kids to get their flu shots. There wasn’t a lot of debate about it – two of our three kids are in a high-risk group for flu complications AND they get everything. After school, I calmly packed the three of them into my mom’s car and we headed across town to get the needles.

The Baby got hers first, clutching her toy stuffed chipmunk who goes EVERYWHERE with her. She winced and it hurt but nothing worse than that. She looked unhappy, so a pretty young nurse pointed out a table full of paper firetrucks and firehats and she happily enough trotted over to grab them. I was crouched next to The Boy, who was about to get his needle, and so she ran over to see me – and fell RIGHT onto her face, splitting her lip open. I comforted her and handed her over to my mom, who sat on the other side of the room.

The Boy had his shot – and it hurt, poor fella – and then it was the Girl’s turn and she’s scared of needles and she was DRAMATICALLY oppossed to getting it, so I was dealing with THAT, when suddenly my mom called: “Becky! She says she feels sick to her stomach!”

I looked across the room and my baby was turning grey and losing conciousness.

I dashed over and grabbed her and RAN to the nurse’s station. A large, calm, elderly nurse took her out of my hands and screamed at the other health workers to CLEAR THAT TABLE OFF NOW. My child was limp and blue and not breathing in her arms. “Her heart is slowing down!” she yelled at the other nurses. “Get that emergency box open NOW! She is IN SHOCK. WHERE IS THE AMBULANCE?”

My child – my little 28 pound girl, my noisy little firecracker – lay completely motionless and grey and cold on a table. Her toy chipmunk lay beside her limp, motionless hand. I thought she was dead. I thought I was looking at my child’s dead body.

My mother was in the room again – I had screamed at her to take the other kids OUT, to not let them see this – and she told me later that she thought she was seeing her for the last time, that this was the last time on earth she would see our darling. A nurse who I know came running in and screamed “NO! NOT HER!”

They got the box open. The nurse readied the Epi-Pen, and then looked carefully at my child. She bent down, her ear next to my child’s ear.

WHAT WAS SHE DOING, I screamed.

“I’m listening to her,” she said calmly. “She’s telling me something.”

I looked over, and my child’s grey lips were moving, her eyes screwed shut.

The ambulance attendants loaded her onto the stretcher. Her eyes were open again, and she pressed her toy chipmunk to her chest, her face grey and her eyes huge and frightened.

She was signifigantly recovered enough by the time she had been in the ambulance for a few minutes to complain about the quality of the ambulance driver’s driving. “This is bumpy!” she muttered. “Don’t you people know I’m not feeling good?” And then, a few minutes later while I held her icy hands, she whispered to me “Mama, I’m scared. I’m scared of what is happening in my body.” And my heart broke and I died.

Her dad came running to meet us, his face white. The Baby was herself enough to want to walk in, and she was instantly surrounded by fussing nurses who took her blood pressure (“again!” she crabbed) and checked her heart and her vital signs and the young doctor came in and told us that she’d had a severe vasovagal synocopal episode – which means basically that the combination of stress + pain had made her pass out and the blood stop going to her heart. So it wasn’t, let me be clear, a reaction to the INGREDIENTS in her flu shot. It was the pain of it combined with falling on her face and watching her sister’s Dramatic Freak Out that did it. It WILL happen again. Oh grand, says I.

She’s okay today. Kind of pasty, but she’s curled up in my bed with her brother and sister – who were SO horribly worried about her – and they are reading her stories. Will I ever get over this? Probably not. But she’s okay, and maybe someday that horrifying image, the worst thing I ever saw, will fade. Maybe.