Children’s Ward by Zary Fekete
It is the fifth day and they finally gave me his infection diagnosis. It took this long because the MRI machine had to be calibrated for a smaller head, and those resizing braces and parts had to be sent for from across the city, from the other children’s hospital.
The first three days of his illness are murky in my mind…because of the lack of sleep…but the highest moments of misery stand up clearly, sort of like necessary stepping stones in some wretched stream. He had ear infections before, but his face on that first evening of pain was very twisted, like a gnarled mask.
He vomited throughout the second day until there was only an angry, yellow drippling film that came up. He didn’t say very much, which made the whole thing much worse. I do remember him occasionally saying, “My forehead…” I don’t remember where he learned that word.
Today, with the diagnosis clear, we made the decision to let the operation proceed. The ENT seemed fired up...excited even. “It’s all under this pressure, you see,” he had said. “Right there, behind the ear.” He started to thump on my son’s skull with a finger, like he was checking a melon. “Anyway, let’s call it an infection, but it’s all right here. We’ll want to open him up to create a little hole and then…” He pistoned his arm up and down… “And then I’m hoping for a HUGE spurt!”
It was comical, in a way, to picture a plume of wet infection, and a part of my tired mind hoped it might really be like that. I essentially just wanted some kind of release for my son.
That evening as I was tucking him for another horrid night my son caught me with a question that I couldn’t quite handle. “Why do all the doctors lie?”
“One evening I was remembering details from when my son was in the hospital with brain swelling when he was 5. It was not difficult to remember details, but it was hard to make sense of it. I tucked it away until now.
Zary Fekete has worked as a teacher in Hungary, Moldova, Romania, China, and Cambodia. They currently live and work as a writer in Minnesota. Some places they have been published are Goats Milk Mag, JMWW Journal, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable, and Zoetic Press. They enjoy reading, podcasts, and long, slow films. Twitter: @ZaryFekete