A Football Time-Out
‘Jake; why are you looking up at the ceiling’, asked the nurse?
‘I don’t know’, replied Jake.
‘Then, stop it’, said the nurse.
‘I can’t’! said Jake.
The nurse came into Jake’s hospital room and she asked him again, ‘Jake; why do you keep looking up in that corner of the ceiling’?
I don’t know. I can’t stop looking up there’, said Jake from his hospital bed.
The nurse grasped Jake’s head with both of her hands and gently moved his head down. As soon as she let go, Jake went right back to looking up at the ceiling.
She tried it again. As soon as she let go, he went right back to looking at the ceiling.
The nurse ran from his room and came back with her supervisor.
The nurse supervisor asked, ‘Jake; what is so fascinating about the ceiling’?
‘I don’t know. I just want to look at it’, said Jake.
Jake was laying on his back with his right leg in traction and had been watching soap operas, so that he could keep his nurses caught up on “As The World Turns” and “and “One Life To Live”, but today, he found himself watching the corner of the ceiling above his hospital bed.
The nurse supervisor took his head in both hands and gently pulled his head down until his chin touched his chest. As soon as she let go, Jake’s head tilted back to where he was again looking up and behind him at the corner of his ceiling.
Both nurses left his room and in a few minutes, they returned with Jake’s doctor.
Dr. Smitlander looked at Jake, asked the nurse to re-position Jake’s head and when it returned to its previous position, he informed the nurses that Jake was having a seizure. He ordered a blood draw and an electroencephalogram (EEG).
The blood test showed some kind of infection and the EEG showed abnormal patterns, so the doctor ordered a radioactive brain scan.
Meanwhile, the seizure was strengthening, causing Jake’s body position to become more rigid and his head was arching back to an almost grotesque position.
It was late afternoon and the doctor was finding no answers, so he ordered a spinal tap in the hopes of finding out the severity of the situation.
The spinal tap revealed that there was a bacterial infection raging through Jake’s entire central nervous system.
Several shots were administered, but the seizures were worsening. An instrument was inserted into Jake’s mouth to keep his tongue down and his airway open. Jake’s parents were standing in the hallway and were clearly upset.
Jake could hear some of the conversation between Dr. Smitlander and his mom and dad. When Jake heard the doctor mention ‘taking the leg’, Jake got violent, but couldn’t speak loud enough for them to hear, but his dad saw him and came into the room to him.
Jake’s dad could understand what Jake was saying and he told the doctor that Jake would rather die than to lose his leg. The doctor said that it was a real possibility and he told Jake’s parents that they should call in the rest of the family, because the situation was now very grave.
Though Jake was aware of what was going on, he couldn’t control it or understand it. He was also very scared. He was 17 years old and it appeared that was where his life would end.
It was late evening by now and Jake could see his sisters in the hallway with his parents. Jake had one sister, Jane, whom he was very close to. He motioned for her to come to him.
Jane came into Jake’s room and she was upset and crying. She laid her head on Jake’s chest and Jake told her softly, ‘I don’t want to die. Don’t let me die. Stay with me’.
Jane said, ‘I don’t want you to die either, Jake. I won’t let you. I’ll stay right here. I won’t leave you’.
Both Jane and Jake were crying and Jane was holding Jake very tightly.
‘Don’t let me go’, said Jake.
‘I won’t’, said Jane.
By now, Jake was seizing so violently that his entire body was arched up and almost completely up and off of the bed.
Dr. Smitlander told everyone that there was nothing more that they could do for Jake at that hospital, but he knew someone 50 miles away that might be able to isolate and treat the infection. He told them that if Jake survived the night, he would be transferred by ambulance.
Upon hearing this, Jake would not sleep all night.
The next morning, Jake was loaded into an ambulance for his trip down the road to his eventual recovery. Jake would take the ride under the safety of his sheets. Ironically, as a little boy, when Jake would get scared, he would hide in his bed under the blankets.
When the ambulance arrived at City Hospital, Jake was met by a team of doctors and nurses.
A blood draw was ordered, skull x-rays were to be taken, another EEG and radioactive brain scan was ordered and finally, an angiogram of the brain. The angiogram hurt so much that Jake thought that he was going to die. When they shot the dye into his brain, it felt like his entire head was on fire. All he could do was to lay there and cry.
Jake’s mom and dad were kept busy signing releases from liability. Jake’s condition had reached a point where he was less tolerant of the testing being done.
The angiogram was almost more than Jake could bear. Inserting the tube that would carry the dye was bad enough. Even though the insertion site was numbed, Jake felt the warmth of the blood escaping from the artery in his forearm and could feel the doctor feeding the tube into his forearm, up to his bicep, across his shoulder and to the base of his skull.
Dr. Feinstein told Jake, ‘You can’t move. You have to lie completely still. You will feel a burning sensation when we release the dye, but you cannot move. If you do, it could kill you’.
Jake fought the urge to move with what was left of his strength. The reason for the angiogram was to make sure that there were no “abscesses” that the infection could infiltrate. The test results were negative.
In the meantime, the lab had been able to positively identify the infection as a pseudomonas bacterial infection. Jake would spend the next 6 weeks in Isolation and would receive massive doses of antibiotics through I V and would have several shots as well.
Jake was alive because of a good doctor, but almost died because of a bad one!
Dr. Feinstein told Jake’s parents that Jake’s exceptional, good physical condition probably increased his survival chances, because usually, that type of infection that was that far along was fatal 80-90 percent of the time. Jake had defied the odds!
Jake left the hospital 6 weeks after being admitted. With less than 2 months left in the school year, Jake had lots of make up work; plus, he was taking strong narcotic drugs to ward off any more seizures and they were decimating his memory and retention abilities.
He knew that he would graduate from high school, but wasn’t sure if he could still pursue his dream of being a firefighter. Only time would tell.
“Jake; are you in there” asked Vinnie?
“Yeah; I’m just daydreaming about my old football days”, said Jake.
“How so” asked Vinnie?
“Well, it was my senior year. I was coming into the football season in the best shape of my life. I worked hard over the summer. I was doing very physical work in a scrap yard. I did all of the heavy lifting. I would get off work and go to the city park, where I would meet up with some of my teammates and we would do calisthenics and run. Man; would we run! We would do wind sprints of about 50 yards and then, we would throw the football around for awhile and would finish up by running around the outside of the park”, said Jake.
“Yeah; it sounds like you were in great shape”, said Vinnie.
“Tell me about it. I weighed 165 pounds, but I played much ‘bigger’. I was an offensive guard and when formal practices started, no one could get past me; no one could beat me. I mean; I was knocking down guys that were 50-60 pounds heavier than me.
We were state-ranked and were playing our 5th game of our schedule; going into the game undefeated. I was also the ‘fly guy’ on our kick off team and we had just kicked off after scoring a touchdown. I was just about to tackle their return guy and BOOM! One of their guys came out of nowhere as I turned and he took out my legs. That was it. I was taken off the field, placed on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to the emergency room. I had torn just about every ligament in the left leg and the ACL in the right leg.
I had surgery the next Monday on the left leg and after it had healed without any problems, I had surgery on the right leg. On the day that I was to go home from the hospital, my leg was hurting a lot. The doctor threatened to keep me in the hospital, so reluctantly, I went home.
The pain started to increase and I was noticing a bad odor coming from my cast. I told my mom that something was wrong and she called the doctor. He told her that he had done a lot of repairs to the knee, which would explain the pain. He thought that the smell was from the bandages under the cast that covered the incision.
The pain got so bad that I couldn’t lie down, which meant that I couldn’t sleep. I slept sitting up in a wheelchair with my right leg elevated. I refused to use the wheelchair at school, so I used my crutches when there. I would get around my classmates and someone would comment about an ‘awful smell’.
I begged my parents to take me back to the surgeon, but Dr. Smitlander wanted me to go the full 6 weeks in my leg cast.
The day that I was scheduled to have the cast removed was the worst day of my life. When the doctor sawed the cast off and removed the bandage, almost all of the stitches had broken and the incision was wide open, exposing an ugly green gaping wound. I was told that the incision “exploded” because of the infection.
Well, my mom screamed and fainted and the doctor stood there looking very pale and with his mouth wide open, but speechless. When Dr. Smitlander could finally speak, he said, “I don’t understand it”.
I was furious.
I said, ‘See, you son of a bitch. I tried to tell you that there was something wrong, but you wouldn’t listen to me’.
I was immediately admitted to the hospital. The only bed that was available was in the Geriatrics ward. There was a lot of weirdness in that part of the hospital, let me tell you. There was this one, old guy in a bathrobe who thought he was guarding my door like I was a prisoner or something.
They took me into surgery the next morning and when I woke up, I had on a ‘wet’ cast. Tubes were going into and out of my cast and the tubes were going to a pump that was pumping antibiotics and saline through the new incision.
But, apparently, the infection was already too far along. And I am convinced that I would have died in that hospital if they hadn’t transferred me to a doctor who knew something. Dr. Feinstein literally saved my life”, said Jake.
“But now, you’re OK”, said Vinnie.
“Yeah; except I hate that Dr. Smitlander to this day and he has been dead for like 15 years”, said Jake.
“If you had it to do all over again, would you play football”, asked Vinnie?
“In a New York minute”, said Jake.
TCSS.
Art
The article as submitted is published under The Adventures of Jake and Vinnie© umbrella and is the intellectual property of Art Goodrich a.k.a. ChiefReason. It is protected by federal copyright laws and cannot be re-printed in any form without expressed permission from the author. You may read other works by the author at www.chiefreasonart.com.
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