Dear Sufferer

One, two, three, four, rhythmically two three four, again two three four. The 911 operator counted for me, in turn I counted for my husband. He was feverishly pumping life into our son’s chest. It was April 17, 2022, the Saturday before Easter. My husband RJ and I were leaving the hospital with our twenty-two-year-old son. Noah was extremely nauseated, had a debilitating headache and his legs were drawing up in cramps. Alarmed by these symptoms of bad dialysis, we hesitated with the discharge nurse. “Yeah, that can sometimes happen from dialysis,” came his unaffected reply, “Sign here.” Alone in the hospital room, we faltered a moment. Reluctantly, we wheeled our son to the car. Home was forty-five minutes away. Less than 10 minutes after striking the highway, a ghastly gurgling sputter came from the back seat. RJ was driving. Noah was directly behind me. Unbuckling recklessly, I spun to my knees facing the back seat. My eyes absorbed the horror scene. Noah was blue. His arms stiff and frozen at a ninety-degree angle. His fingers shot into the air like claws. His eyes were rolled back in his head. He wasn’t breathing! Delving over the back of my seat, I began blowing into his mouth. Mankind’s universal enemy, Death, held my son in his menacing grasp. I was desperately breathing into a mammoth cavern. There was no return of life. “Pull over! We are losing him!” I whimpered hysterically. I called 911. Moments later we exited the highway and swerved into the nearest parking lot. Our son remained trapped in the nightmare. We wrestled with the seatbelt. His unyielding stiffened body was tangled. My husband was weeping, “I think I may have broken his arm,” He sobbed. Absurdly, my nurturing maternal instincts persisted. I hastily spread a blanket on the asphalt. After all, what sort of mother wants her child receiving CPR without a blanket? Providentially my husband was recently CPR certified through his work. He began compressions and I counted with the operator. My pulse was a raging jackhammer throughout my body! My mouth was dry like cotton. Adrenaline was bombarding my senses! Yet, somehow, I continued to count for seconds, then a minute then several minutes, a lifetime really. By now, Noah’s body had grown limp. He still wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse. My beloved child was a gruesome sight. No longer was he blue or grey he was dull, lifeless and mottled. “When are they going to be here!” I demanded in desperation. “It’s only been three minutes ma’am,” came the operator’s calm reply. Incredulous, I could only groan, “WHAT!?” A motley crew of peculiar homeless men begin to surround our scene. This was no ordinary emergency. This was my son. Irked at the gathering strangers, I sputtered at them. “If you are going to stand here, I expect you to pray!” After eight eternal minutes, the ambulance arrived. At last, my husband was reprieved of the chest compressions. Skillfully the responders immediately put our son on a ventilator simultaneously gathering his vast medical history. We were reeling. The responders worked another 5-10 minutes on our son while we scrambled to load our limited medical equipment and blanket back into our Mazda. The homeless men meekly abetted. Believing ourselves unfit to drive, we attempted to accept the offer from a police officer to ride in the back of his car. Three seconds later, we bolted out of the backseat, no door handles and the cramped space of the police car only enhanced our anxiety. We prayed and summoned a supernatural capacity to drive ourselves. At the Emergency Room, we were ushered into a family room, (the rooms where the doctors come to you and share their condolences because your loved one didn’t make it). They told us to call in our family. Soon a friend walked in with our other five children and newly adopted son-in-law. Our children, the youngest being 9 were all allowed into the ER to say good-bye to their brother. Our large family seemed tiny in comparison to the enormity of the situation. We circled around Noah’s bed. He remained unconscious on a ventilator. The doctor was pressing us to make decisions. He openly shared his unbiased opinion that we should proceed towards hospice care. When someone dies their body gets extremely acidic. Certain medications needed to be administered immediately if we wanted Noah to have a chance for life. We prayed asking God to reveal His will to us; that we would KNOW! We were all weeping when a nurse came in to tie Noah’s hands down. Brokenly sobbing we communicated, “No, we don’t want our son restrained. We don’t want this for him. Take him off the ventilator.” They readily complied. We had no expectations of life for our child. They gently removed the breathing tube. It was uneventful. Seconds later, our son was modestly smiling and waving with full recognition at his siblings. Wide-eyed glances were exchanged around the room. In my ear my husband softly muttered, “We are going to be taking our child home again, aren’t we?” Stunned by this miracle I could only nod in agreement. The doctor pulled us aside. With a gentle smile he began, “I don’t know what just happened in there, but I can’t believe your son is living. Let’s get him admitted and try to figure this out.” Dialysis Disequilibrium Syndrome: our villain had a name. The day he died, Noah had a grand mal seizure that arrested his heart, his breathing, his everything. Being an extremely rare and severe reaction to dialysis, it took a while for the physicians to realize this was the culprit. Today, Noah can only recount a feeling of extreme fatigue just before the seizure.