Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[Part 3]

Naturally, during an emergency, the children’s car seats were in the house when they should have been in the car. It always took at least fifteen minutes to install them, and I wasn’t sure Alice had that long. Alice could lean against me as I drove, and she was holding the Raggedy Andy pillow, which was almost as big as she was. I put Nicky into the floorboard across from me, so he couldn’t fall there, and had to concentrate not to drive like Mario Andretti through the quiet streets of our little town to the hospital.

“No sudden stops at red lights, no jarring, and, above all, no collisions,” I kept saying to myself.

As I walked through the emergency room automatic double doors with both kids and the Raggedy Andy pillow in my arms, a nurse who was a neighbor of ours saw us and guided us into one of the examining rooms. I briefly told her what had happened. Then Alice yelled to go to the bathroom. Another good sign. Her bathroom training was just recently learned but still holding. Still, she couldn’t relax enough to use the bathroom, so I brought her back to the examining table. The nurse was holding Nicky. Up until now he had remained pretty quiet, surely sensing that something was wrong. Now he started to whimper into the nurse’s shoulder.

Suddenly, Alice lifted herself up onto one elbow.

“Get Cat,” she said again.

“Cat’s in the wash, Alice,” I said. “Just hold Raggedy Andy.”

Alice looked at me square in the eye, then looked as if she were giving up. She didn’t know the words to tell me where Cat was. She started throwing up.

“Nausea is common after a head injury,” the nurse reassured me, as she handed Nicky to me and moved to help Alice. Just then the pediatrician on call stepped in, having just fished a needle out of someone’s foot. He looked into Alice’s eyes with a little light, then explained that he was taking her to x-ray.

“We’d better call your husband,” the nurse said. She helped me over to the phone, and I tried to remember the number of the radio station where my husband worked and where I had worked for years before the kids were born. It took two tries to remember the number, and my hands trembled as I pushed the buttons.

“Bring diapers, and juice, and Cat,” I said to my husband after telling him what had happened. He would be on his way as soon as an announcer who was a realtor on weekdays could get to the station to “take the control board.”

The doctor poked his head in the doorway.

“The x-rays didn’t tell us enough,” he said. “Do you want a CAT-scan?”

I nodded agreement.