Chapter Four: The Emergency Room

“Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God’s astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible. Amid the mortal and fragmentary communiques and the breaking news of the day concerning various human conflicts, God lives in an eternal now where the past, present, and future are constantly before Him”
-Neal A. Maxwell

Before we were married I promised Nate that I would go with him to medical school, anywhere he got in, as long as he promised to bring me home after he finished his education. I didn’t think I’d end up moving my two small boys to a northern suburb of Chicago. I always figured the school would be in the West, so did Nate. It turns out that there aren’t many private medical colleges in the West. And, we learned during the first year of applying, that state sponsored colleges were pretty much inaccessible to anyone not from that state. So, when Nate didn’t get into the University of Utah, we knew we were headed East.

We found a duplex in a town called Waukegan. We had three bedrooms, a backyard and a basement with a washer and dryer. Nate quit his jobs, dropped out of mathematics graduate school, which he had been doing since he had finished undergrad the year before, and prepared for a blind move. I tried to contact people from the church in our new area that could give us advice, but had little luck. We truly had no idea what we were headed into.

We knew that the school sold health insurance, which was required for students. We figured out a budget so that I could stay home with my two boys. The financial aid people at the school had sent Nate letters telling him that in addition to the fifty thousand, or so, he would need for tuition and supplies, he could borrow $1600 a month for living on. Our apartment cost $850, so we would have to make the rest of the bills fit into the remainder.

Needless to say, we were a bit discouraged when, during the first week of school, he received paperwork showing that insurance for our family would be over $800 a month. The numbers simply didn’t add up. I talked to some of the other medical students at church and discovered that everyone was on Medicaid. I was in a predicament. I could have applied for a job, but it was extremely unlikely that my bachelor’s degree, with no experience, would earn us enough money to pay for day care, let alone insurance. And I didn’t even want to try. I had two babies who needed a mother.

So all of Nate’s well-founded principles were about to collapse. He believed it was a man’s absolute obligation to provide for his family. But, he had been accepted into medical school and would not be able to have a job. The support we were allowed to borrow was simply not enough. The only thing he could do was lament the bad decisions that had put him in this situation and apply for Medicaid. Of course, the whole thing made him ornery. But Nate wasn’t stupid enough to tell me he wished we hadn’t had our children. He just moped and avoided the subject of healthcare. That made it my responsibility.

I did almost everything myself. I went to the meetings and did the paperwork. Luckily, the wife of a second-year med student offered to watch Ryan, so I could meet with the social worker. I called the referral line and asked about doctors that would accept the insurance. When I was told there weren’t any, I took the boys to the state health clinic for their immunizations. The whole thing was humiliating, but I would do what it took to make sure my children didn’t suffer for my decisions.

By the time January rolled around, we were getting settled into our new home. When Nate had been accepted to medical school, we realized that we would have to sale our nicer car in order to pay off what we owed on both of them. Since our sad little budget didn’t include money for a car payment, I was left at home alone most of the time. As a result, I didn’t know the area very well at all.

All of this presented a problem the middle of our first January in Chicago. Ryan was suffering from croup. It was an illness we’d battled before with our sweet little boy. He would get that horrible barking cough and cold symptoms. As new parents, a year before, we had rushed him to the pediatrician. He had told us it was completely viral and, besides a few simple home remedies that have been around since medieval times, there was little we could do except wait for it to pass.

Alone in my new home, I waited. It got a little worse each night and a little better during the day. I knew it was just a viral respiratory infection, but it sure seemed to be taking a long time for my little boy, just months shy of two years old, to fight it off. One night, I sat in a chair holding Ryan, waiting for his dad to come home from school. My energetic toddler lay there, struggling to breath. I knew he needed a doctor, but I didn’t have a car.

By the time Nate came home, all of the clinics were closed except for the after-hours acute care center and the emergency room. I certainly didn’t even entertain the idea of taking him to the ER for something as silly as croup. So, I looked up the address of the acute care center and loaded Ryan in the car, leaving Nate with Sean. The clinic was in a part of town that I’d been to before. I felt semi-confident that I could find it.

It may have been my imagination, but Ryan’s breathing seemed to become more labored every time I turned a corner. I drove to the shopping center where I expected to find the acute care center. It was along a very busy stretch of rode, with a huge mall on one side and smaller strip malls along the other. I wasn’t sure which side of the rode it was on or how far into a shopping center it might be, so I squinted into a half-dozen dark roads. I pulled into some of them, but I couldn’t find what I sought.

It was in the parking lot of a car dealership that I finally lost it. Ryan was wheezing and whimpering. I had no idea what to do. While making our budget, we had decided a cell phone was completely out of the question. I said a prayer and then picked a direction at random. Miraculously, I turned into the parking lot of the acute care center. It was tucked behind another building in the mall parking lot; go figure.
Ryan was weak and a little limp when I pulled him out of his car seat. He had to suck hard to get any air into his lungs. But we had made it. There were doctors just a few feet away. I tried to compose myself, but my hands were still shaking a little as I carried my little boy into the clinic.

I stopped dead a moment after I had entered. Right over the reception desk, they had a huge sign posted. It said, “We do not accept any form of public aid.” I didn’t really know what that meant. I realize that sounds stupid, but I wasn’t real familiar with the terminology of welfare. I knew there were a hundred different programs. I wasn’t sure if one of the programs covered public aid and kid-care was something else. Well, the ideas flashed through my head. I was pretty sure what it meant.

I took a step up to the receptionist and tried to talk quietly. I said, “You don’t accept Medicaid?” She shook her head. I choked. I am not the type to ask for help. I like to figure stuff out on my own. But I was at my wit’s end. Ryan seemed to be getting worse moment by moment. I asked, “Where can I go?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “I guess there’s always the emergency room.” I stepped in closer, after glancing around at the other people in the waiting room. They were all watching me curiously, a few with pitying looks. I desperately wanted to turn and run out.

I whispered, trying not to make eye contact with this woman, “Where’s that?”

Again I was met with a look of distain. She said, curtly, “Down Grand,” and looked to her computer to tell me she was done with the conversation. As I turned to go, another of the reception workers stepped over and started to whisper directions to me. I nodded but didn’t speak. I repeated the directions in my head and tried not to let the tears burning my eyes fall. I had no idea where any of the roads she mentioned were.

I remember hurrying out to my car and strapping my sick little boy into his car seat. I don’t remember many details of what happened after that. But I know I was being watched over through my minor crisis. I know that because I drove strait to the hospital. More than a year later, when I became pregnant with Chloe, I saw an obstetrician whose office was at that hospital, some ten miles away from the acute care center. I was never able to drive to those prenatal appointments without wondering how in the world I found that hospital in the dark when I had never been in that city before.

The triage nurse watched me walk into the waiting room. I don’t know how I looked, but Ryan must have concerned her. When I was signing in she turned to another nurse and said, “This baby is going to need a cool mist right now.” There was no nerve racking wait. They took Ryan right back, x-rayed his chest, and gave him steroids.

We sat in the tiny ER room for hours waiting for the x-ray results. When they came back, the doctor said his airway was constricted and he would need to be admitted for a couple of days. It made for a great adventure with Nate taking over with Ryan before school so I could run home and shower. Ward members came to give Ryan a blessing and even fed Nate and Sean while I stayed at the hospital with my boy.

In the middle of the second day, I got pretty hungry, but didn’t want to leave Ryan. I decided he could walk down to the cafeteria with me. As soon as I had him out of his room, though, alarms started ringing, the doors to the unit automatically closed and three nurses ran over ready to tackle me. It turns out Ryan wasn’t allowed to leave the floor. Oh well. I wasn’t hungry enough to leave my poor little boy in the bed surrounded by prison bars all by himself.

The good that came out of my whole experience was a business card from the ER doctor. It turned out that she had a friend who was family practice and would accept Medicaid. I was thrilled at the prospect of never having to go to that horrible state health clinic again. Of course, I would learn a year later, that hope was too good to be true. I didn’t complain. Beggars can’t be choosers.