Crave by Laurie Jean Cannady Read Free Book Online

question, “What insurance do you have?” stood between me and the emergency room doctors bustling behind the double doors. My mother had never been proud of being on public assistance and I am willing to admit I have hidden in the corners of stores, clutching a book of food stamps, waiting for the line at the register to shrink, but I can assure you, that day, Momma was unashamed to say, “I have Medicaid.”
    After a too long, too quiet wait, Momma was called to the double doors, which led behind the window. We were guided into a small room. The nurse took my temperature, not with a makeshift thermometer as Momma had, but with a thin rod which she inserted into my rectum. I remained still, all energy reserved for breathing as the nurse’s eyes widened while watching the mercury jump from 96 to 101 to 104 degrees. Before the red dot stopped rising, the nurse swooped me from the table, leaving behind my diaper and Momma, and ran into the emergency room foyer. She yelled “Doctor” as she careened toward a rectangular room with curtains for walls. I was thrust onto the hospital bed as the doctor rushed in and nurses crowded around. Commands bounced from one curtain to another.
    â€œShe needs an IV.”
    â€œNo, we need to cool her first.”
    â€œGet her on oxygen.”
    â€œStart a neb treatment.”
    Momma was swallowed by their voices, eyes trained on me through the sticking, prodding, and pulling. No one talked to her or asked questions. She cried. I cried too, but it was not a baby’s cry, more like a kitten being smothered under the weight of its mother.They decided to cool me after pushing a nebulizer treatment. Buckets of ice were tossed into an oversized sink while a stream of water cut through the ice construction. They drew blood, swabbed my throat, and took my temperature again. Then it was time for the bath not intended to clean.
    Momma had given me what she thought were ice baths before. Cracking ice trays over the bathroom sink in a puddle of water, she’d douse a rag, wring it, and wipe my exposed body. She stopped only when my shivers made it too difficult for her to hold me still. That was not the hospital’s ice bath.
    They took off all of my clothes and dipped my body in those newly formed glaciers. They held me there even as my limbs stiffened, my feet slapped against the sink floor, and my body spasmodically twisted and jerked in their latex-covered hands. Unlike Momma’s two hands struggling to keep a hold of me, there were plenty of hands in the hospital. If I twisted from one pair, there was another to catch me.
    I could not cry. What little breath I had was frozen inside me. Momma stood, wanting to demand them to stop, but her voice was frozen too. The doctors and nurses held me in the sink until their hands became numb.
    After all of the baths, X-rays, and needle sticks were done, the doctor admitted me to the hospital’s PICU. Despite it being a place for the sickly, noise flooded the room. The sucking and swooshing of machines drowned any tears we children cried. Nurses bounced from child to child. Some carried IVs, others needles, and a few walked around the room, monitoring machines spouting melodies of beating hearts. Cribs, no bigger than the drawer I normally slept in, lined the PICU walls. Momma’s eyes ached and any wall within a foot of her became a crutch. She had not realized so many sick babies lived in the world. This made her sad, but relieved she wasn’t the only mother who couldn’t heal her child.
    Hours after admission, my fever broke and my lungs opened. Momma stood vigil in the PICU waiting room with other mothers of sickly children. Head leaning against the wall, body pressed intothe overstuffed chair, she observed the room. One mother with deep grooves under her eyes sat with coffee in her hands. Another sat with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. There was a bouquet of mothers in that room that night. Some