Advanced Essay Writing, Spring 2013

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

I couldn’t stop coughing.

While it had lingered there for several weeks, on this particular day it was relentless. Cough after cough, my face reached beet red. My peers ignored the board and turned their attention me and my racking cough. The frustrated teacher had enough of my disruptive cough and I was sent to the administrative office. Much to my displeasure, he had done so just a short while before recess!

The secretary rolled her eyes as I, a second grader, declared that I was too sick to attend class. She had heard that excuse too many times before. After placing her hand on my not-so-warm forehead, she emphatically declared it “just a cough” and admonished me for wasting her time. However, she decided to play it safe by dialing my mother, who had custody of me at the time.

My mother too was skeptical to say the least. Between coughs I tried to apologize – she was searingly mad about having to be pulled away from work. On the drive home, I asked her to turn up the heat – I was becoming cold. It certainly didn’t seem anything too ominous, as the winter of 2002-2003 would see record snowfalls and freezing temperatures. As we arrived at the apartment, she instructed me to change into sweatpants and go to my room.

Yet I was becoming more cold.

What came next was the most terrifying 15 minutes of my life. The words cold, freezing, chills and painful don’t accurately describe what the subjective experience was like.  I felt cold, a freezing cold that I didn’t think was even humanly possible to feel. I began shivering, which quickly transitioned into practically convulsive chills. I remember struggling to put on the dark blue sweatpants, but my hands were shaking beyond my control. Whether I was a brave-beyond-my-years 7 year old or (more likely) I was simply gripped by shock, I didn’t shed a tear. I spent almost 10 minutes attempting to put on the second pant leg and finally succeeded. I gathered every blanket within sight and burrowed myself in bed under the sheets, trying to gain some semblance of warmth.

I was overjoyed that the freezing cold petered out after about 45 minutes. I was alive! And I was warm now. Almost too warm, a bit hot. The rest of the afternoon my temperature would climb dramatically to the other extreme as a severe fever set in. I would later have my temperature be recorded at 103 F. The coughing too returned with a vengeance, with sharp and suffocating chest pains.

My father called to check up on me, I would get to have visitation with him the following night. Perhaps having grown up in trying times in post-war Ukraine, he had a keen sense for detecting illness. He was alarmed to hear my cough over the phone and suggested my mother take me to the doctor. In spite of all the coughing over the past few weeks, it was something she frankly neglected to do.

I struggled to make it through the night as I labored through each breath. It felt like I was drowning while having a 50-pound block of concrete on my chest, an observation which I would discover had a great amount of truth in it.

Wednesday, December 4, 2002

Why any of this was happening to me was beyond my grade level. What was abundantly clear was my health was sharply declining. After spending the previous day experiencing shaking chills and gasping for air throughout the night. I insisted on going to the doctor and my mother at last obliged.

I was quite familiar with my pediatrician, who had served as my primary care physician since two weeks after birth. Albeit on this day, his facial expressions were strange to me. After hearing a list of my symptoms, he placed a stethoscope on my chest and instructed me to breath in deeply, something I had done on plenty of occasions. I strained to breathe in and out three times. His eyebrows shot upwards with a mix of concern and inquisitiveness. He asked me to repeat the breathing a few more times. From what I recall, the next thing he did was immediately rush over to the phone on the wall and dial a radiologist with an office nearby in Brooklyn.

The fever and fatigue was taking its toll. A few minutes after being driven over to the radiologist’s office and signing in, I was brought into the x-ray room. I was uninitiated with the machines, and from what I did know about them, they were frightening. The assistant place the cold metal imaging plate against my chest. She instructed me to hold my breath and quickly scurried to another room to shield herself. I dutifully complied and then returned to the waiting room, expecting the worst to be over.

A few minutes later, the chief technician – a tall bearded man with a pained expression, hastily ran into the waiting room and was pointed by the receptionist towards my mother. After exchanging words with him, her face soon shared the same anxious countenance. I was rushed into the car and my mother began speeding away. I asked her what was wrong. Where we going?

She was equally curt to both questions. “It looks like severe pneumonia. The hospital.”

I wasn’t sure what severe meant, probably a word similar to bad. Yet I had heard of pneumonia before! Being the avid reader I was, I recently had devoured a series of historical fiction books covering the immigrant experience. Pneumonia outbreaks apparently occurred with great frequency and were quite lethal. Even a character my age had succumbed to it! What would become of me?

We soon arrived at the hospital. As my temperature climbed, it all seemed a blur. We didn’t wait too long thankfully. An IV was inserted in my arm and a clear bag with an unknown liquid began releasing its contents into my bloodstream.

My father soon arrived, running into the room. We’d have to have our Wednesday visitation in the hospital.

I passed out shortly after.

Thursday, December 5, 2002

I stirred awake at 1am to discover I might have to be moved from the ER to a different hospital. The children’s ward was full and from what I surmised the hospital official said while they weren’t overtly refusing care, they had no choice but to move me by ambulance. With my life hanging in the balance, the poor bureaucrat soon faced the combined wrath of both of my parents. When I woke up again, I was being wheeled into a bed in the children’s ward.

The sequence of events are a bit fuzzy in my mind, being thoroughly medicated for most of the duration of my hospital stay. I was ushered through multiple x-rays and a CAT scan. To my dismay, I learned there was nothing feline about computed axial tomography. The machine was even more dreadful than the stand-up x-rays. I was placed on a flat surface and told not to make a single movement. As the comparatively gigantic machine whirred to life, I was being mechanically moved towards the scary circular enclosure. I shut my eyes and laid stiff for what seemed an eternity. The process was repeated on a few more occasions during my stay.

The results were back and the pneumonia was confirmed. Despite the reassurance of my parents and the nurses, I was facing steep odds. My lungs, specifically the small sacs called alveoli, were filling with liquid. The liquid was hampering my blood oxygenation. I was hooked up to oxygen tubes. The situation was so precarious that if the liquid did not recede, I’d suffocate – effectively being drown from within. The surgery required to drain the sacs would also be incredibly dangerous. Fortunately, the antibiotics and my immune system made the necessary progress and I came back for the brink.

Lasting Impressions

Hanukkah had begun a week prior, and Friday was the 7th day of the festival. I got up to roam the halls of the children’s ward, walking for the first time in a while. With the doors to each room open, it was heart-rending to see all the suffering that occurred to innocent kids, from shrieking babies to limp adolescents with terminal cancer. With the hospital being located near a Hasidic enclave, fervent prayer in the rooms were a common sight, but the prayers weren’t always answered. It raised questions that I would later ask about faith and God’s role in the coming years of orthodox yeshiva schooling.

Nevertheless, local members of the Jewish community brought homemade chicken soup and toys to all the families on the floor (I received a coloring set). Although their altruism took just a handful of dollars, a few hours of time, and some kind words, I felt the tangible impact of their meaningful volunteer work. That kindness and the firsthand understanding of the power of service to others stays with me to this day.

Going on a tangent for a moment, the whole episode made me examine pneumonia and diseases in a whole new light. The World Health Organization estimates 450 million people are afflicted with pneumonia annually. Of those, 150 million are children and 1.6 million in that group will die. Even within developed countries, the mortality rate for those hospitalized is 12% and can reach 40% in severe cases. When I did the research following my hospitalization, it shocked me that the news of the day revolved around Saddam Hussein and less about this colossal killer of a disease. While I knew that pneumonia had been a terror in the days of yore, the ongoing magnitude of pneumonia was and is astonishing. I turned out to be a fortunate son of the U.S., but most people on our planet don’t have access to the kind of care I received.

My experience led me to recognize the importance in protecting the vulnerable denizens of third world countries. First in eradicating this and other diseases, and second through infrastructure that enables development from within. That infrastructure isn’t limited to civic buildings, but also higher education opportunities and a robust finance sector that can create liquidity and low-interest loans for entrepreneurs. In addition, while I didn’t fully grasp it at the time, the experience of coming so close to dying made me have an appreciation for life’s randomness in ways the other kids. When I finally returned to school, I pledged to myself to make the most of my time. I applied myself to my studies (well, not so much the religious ones) and tried to be more accommodating to friends.

As for the rest of the medical treatment, I wound end up staying 5 days in the hospital. Luckily for those immigrants I had read about and myself, scientist and Scotsman Alexander Fleming caught a fortuitous big break in the treatment of pneumonia. The development of penicillin had radically altered the casualty rate from pneumococcus (the bacterial pathogen that is transmitted between humans and causes the illness), with 80% successfully treated. Unfortunately, the primary delivery method and injection site has not changed since its inception. The oversize needle (pictured below) requires direct injection to the, erm, buttocks. The pain is tremendous, and the prolonged soreness has some comical effects.

I also had surgery that inserted a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter) which is a long-term IV line that leads directly to the heart. I was sequestered at home and had a multitude of antibiotics injected in me via the line. With the exception of a saline solution overdose and profuse bleeding/scarring when the PICC line was torn out (the scars are still on my right arm), the experience was uneventful and lonesome. During my time at home, I was exposed to an excess amount of daytime television; my repeated viewing of the show COPS may have been responsible for some street-wise slang that didn’t mesh in a yeshiva. Ultimately, the full recovery ended up taking months, and I had to leave school again when the pneumonia recurred in February. For good or bad, this experience was an integral part of my early life, playing a small role in shaping who I am today.