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My mom shook her head. “Gerry and I want to stay here so that we don’t miss the doctor. There’s no need for you to go to any trouble for us.”
“It’s no trouble at all, Mom. Really, I would be happy to do something for you.” I paused then, listening to myself, taking a moment to understand that what I was truly doing was making an attempt to rescue myself from the proceedings going on right now with my family. It was hard to be in the room, to see my little brother hooked up to these machines and absolutely helpless. This wasn’t the way that things were supposed to be, not for someone his age with so much promise in his life. Josh had a future in front of him, one that was looking bright. How was it possible for him to be facing something of this magnitude, whatever it was?
I felt the tears welling in my eyes and I moved away from the bed to sit in one of the chairs in the room, burying my face in my hands. It was ignorant and silly to be questioning all of this. Of course something like this could be happening to my family—people encountered these things every day and we were no different. It was only that it had been so long since we had seen any kind of tragedy and none of it had ever been in my immediate family. What I was dealing with was ignorance and a sort of privilege—I had never had to witness a health crisis like this and now that one was right in the middle of my family, it was like a bomb had gone off. It was only that now I was close enough to feel the impact of such a thing.
My dad came over and put his arm around my shoulder and comforted me while I cried. This wasn’t about me, but I had to get the emotions out. I wanted the same thing my parents wanted—to find out what was going on with Josh and to make sure we did whatever it took to see him well again.
Chapter 6
It felt like ages waiting for one of the doctors to come back in with some test results to discuss with us. For a moment we started to wonder if it would be during the next morning’s rounds, but all of us knew we weren’t going anywhere until we had some word about Josh’s condition.
One of the doctor’s had come in during the middle of the night to go over the event that happened to Josh on the football field.
“It was, technically speaking, a heart attack,” he said.
I gripped my mom’s arm, steeling myself as much as making sure she wasn’t going to collapse right there beside Josh’s bed.
“What? It can’t be.” My dad was beside himself. “He’s only 17…I’ve heard of that sort of thing, but isn’t that rare?”
The doctor made a kind of pained face. “Well, it all depends on the sort of event that led to the heart attack. So that’s what we’re looking at now. While most of these things can be spotted easily after an event like this, Josh’s was a pretty minor thing—all things considered. It’s the sort of thing some people experience and are often able to go on about their day though in some terrible discomfort. In a way he was lucky that he lost consciousness, but that adds another element to it.”
“So, when will we know something concrete?” My mom asked.
“I’ve handed this over to one of my colleagues who has a little more experience with pediatric cardiac events such as this. Your son, while almost a grown man, is still technically a kid. What he has going on here is likely something that has been going on for a while. What we’re looking at now is the cause of the event and what we can do to prevent another one from happening.”
I listened intently as the doctor spoke, not wanting to miss a word. Both of my parents were so caught up in all of this that I knew it could be valuable for me to be their ears in these situations. Sometimes it was easy to miss out on a word here or there or misinterpret what the doctors were saying.
“For instance,” the doctor went on, “if Josh were a 45-year-old, beer-guzzling, pizza eating contest winning guy who looked like he was carrying around a keg in his gut, I would have a pretty clear guess as to what the cause of his issues were. However, Josh is 17 and that on its own makes this a significantly murkier case to look at. He’s healthy by all accounts, was playing football when this happened, and I’m guessing has been going to two-a-day practices since late summer?”
Josh nodded, finally entering into the discussion about his health.
“Ever had any chest pains during practice, Josh?”
He shook his head. “Nah, I mean…nothing more than usual. Like, not my chest but in my stomach. But that’s just the normal thing. We run so much we puke in the early days of practice. I’m just like every other guy on my team as far as that goes.”
The doctor marked something on a clip board. “Do you ever feel out of breath for no good reason?”
Josh thought about it for a moment. “Well, I had asthma when I was little and sometimes I feel like that is flaring up.”
That statement caught the doctor’s attention. “Okay, that right there is the sort of thing I’m looking for in a person’s medical history. It’s the kind of thing that people tend to forget. You don’t think about him having asthma when he was little and then when similar symptoms crop back up when he’s 17, he just thinks it’s a touch of the asthma coming back. The truth of that is—and this is just me hypothesizing and in no way a diagnosis—the way your bronchial tubes work and where they are placed, when there is stress on them and you’re having an asthma attack or something close to one it can feel like tightening along with the shortness of breath. Does that sound like what you’ve been experiencing?”
Josh nodded and looked back and forth between my parents.
“So the thing with that is—a lot of things can feel like an asthma attack. Now it’s usually the reverse happening, like someone coming in with tightness in their chest and shortness of breath, thinking they have had a heart attack. In those cases it’s usually something else—like a panic attack, asthma, costochondritis, or any number of conditions than can occur in the chest wall. In your situation, however, I believe we have a cardiac event or condition that has been masking itself as your asthma symptoms returning to haunt you.”
It was all a lot to take in and the doctor left us with that information to digest for a few hours before his colleague followed up.
At nearly dawn, the specialist came in and h
e was much more abrupt in tone than the other doctor had been.
“Josh, Mr. and Mrs. Tanza, I’m Dr. Douglas and I’m going to cut right to the chase here.”
None of us had gotten much sleep in the hospital room and bleary-eyed we looked at the doctor awaiting what he had to say about Josh’s prognosis and recovery.
“I was able to look at the images we got of Josh’s heart and I have been monitoring all the information these machines have gathered throughout the night.” He tapped one of the machines that was connected to Josh with several different wires. “It took some real searching, but I was able to locate the source of the problem. Josh has got a very tiny hole in his heart.”
My mother gasped audibly and held onto my father’s hand for dear life.
