Chapter 5: Restroom
Saturday, May 22 - 8:04pm
“Dr. Hansen, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Dialysis,” Olivia repeated the word, so foreign to her everyday life. It was a word for hopeless cases, people in strip mall clinics hooked up to machines to try to cling to this world a while longer. It was a word for old people, a geriatric word, not a word for children. “She’ll have to do this for the rest of her life?”
Dr. Hansen rolled his eyes. “No, this is continuous dialysis. Short-term. Like I said. Weren’t you listening?” He shook his head.
Olivia was having a hard time warming up to gruff Dr. Hansen, but when she’d looked him up online, she’d found awards, high praise from colleagues, raving reviews from patients. And You put him on call, Lord, she prayed. Surely, You know what’s best.
“Look, the chemo drugs are putting a lot of strain on Betsy’s system, and the nephrologist doesn’t like the kidney function numbers from her latest labs. It’s not an emergency, but if we don’t act, it could become a big problem. We’d like to get out ahead of it as a precaution.”
“What’s the risk of not doing it?” Nico asked.
Dr. Hansen looked at Betsy’s sleeping form again. “If it gets worse, we could be looking at kidney damage or failure. Which could be fatal.”
Pain shot through Olivia’s gut, like a thousand sucker punches—and she had to dodge her way past every one to get back to the surface. “What are we standing around waiting for, then?” she asked through the pain.
“Hang on,” Nico said, pulling her arm down. “What does this dialysis involve? Is it like chemo where you just run some stuff through an IV?”
“No,” Dr. Hansen said. “We’ll put a central line into Betsy’s neck. It’s like an IV but it goes directly to the heart. We need to get as close to the heart as fast as we can. We connect that central to a dialysis machine, which will slowly pull Betsy’s blood out of her body, clean it, and put it back into her body.”
Nico went pale. “All of her blood?” He stared at Olivia, looking helpless. “They’re going to remove all of the blood from her body?”
“The procedure is slow. The amount of blood leaving her body at any one time is small, I assure you, Mr. Rodriguez. I’ll give you a few minutes to talk it over,” Dr. Hansen said. “I think it’s the best course of action. There’s risk in any procedure, but we’re not new at dialysis. it’s as safe as it can be. And the risks with dialysis are lower, I believe, than the risk of tumor lysis causing more damage down the road.”
Betsy stirred in the bed. Olivia licked her lips. “Doctor, we don’t need to talk it over. We should do the dialysis.”
“Hey,” Nico said, staring at her. His face was a mix of fear and anger. “We haven’t decided anything yet. This is a big deal. We need to talk about this.”
“We really don’t,” Olivia shot back. “This is the most logical next step---”
“I’ll leave you two alone to talk,” Dr. Hansen said and backed out of the room.
Betsy rolled over and looked at them. “What’s going on?”
Olivia opened her mouth to speak, but Nico rushed over to Betsy first. His sobs weren’t loud, but ragged and unhinged. Olivia had never seen him cry like this.
“Betsy, sweetie, we’re going to do everything we can to take care of you,” he mumbled through the tears, caressing her face. “We just love you so much, and I know this is scary. It’s scary for Papa, too, okay? It’s so scary.”
Panic flooded through Olivia. She pulled Nico away from the bedside and stooped down to Betsy’s level, tucking a stray curl behind her daighter’s ear. “How are you doing, sweetheart? Do you need anything? Do you need to use the bathroom? Water? A popsicle?”
Betsy shook her head. “Maybe in a little bit,” she whispered, already drifting back to sleep.
Olivia straightened up and glared at Nico. She yanked him by the arm into the tiny bathroom. She tried to look past the plastic “hat,” a bowl the nurse had placed inside the toilet to measure Betsy’s “output.” With the fluids turned up so high, so was her output—to the point that Nico and Olivia were often the ones measuring, recording, and emptying the hat rather than the technician. She shook her head, trying to forget how un-normal all of it was.
“What is the matter with you?” she hissed at Nico. “Our daughter is fighting for her life, and all you can tell her is how scared you are? She doesn’t need that from us, from you! She needs her Papa to be strong for her, not falling apart.”
Rage coursed through her veins, an electric surge of anger desperate to find some home that wasn’t her body.
“Nico, you have got to pull yourself together. We’re doing the dialysis. It’s the right call, and it’s necessary. The doctor says it’s low risk, and that sounds a lot better than kidney failure or d-death.” Her voice caught.
“See? You’re scared, too!” Nico whisper-shouted at her, and she could nearly see his blood boiling behind his temples.
“Of course I’m scared. But we can’t let Betsy know that! We have to be strong so that she doesn’t have to be any more scared than she already is.”
“Mom?”
Olivia startled at the sound of Betsy’s voice. She pushed Nico out of the bathroom and found Betsy sitting up in bed. She let out a deep breath as she sat on the edge of the bed and reached for Betsy’s hand.
“Sweetheart, Dr. Hansen was here to talk to us while you were sleeping. He’ll be back in a little bit to talk about the garbage trucks in your body and the extra help they need.”
Before she could go on, Dr. Hansen stepped through the doorway. “Ah, better timing,” he said. “How are we doing?”
Better timing? Olivia wondered. Had he been here earlier? Had he heard her outburst at her husband? Shame threatened to color her cheeks where red of another kind had burned only moments ago.
She cleared her throat, burying the thought. “Dr. Hansen, I was hoping you could explain about dialysis again before you bring in your team and equipment. The garbage trucks can’t clean out her blood because there’s too much gargabe piled up, right? I think I understand it, but you’ll be able to explain it better—”
The doctor’s face drooped. He dropped his voice low. “Mrs. Rodriguez, I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear before, but Betsy won’t be having dialysis in this room. We have to take her to the Intensive Care Unit. She must be sedated and intubated, which means placing a tube in her throat to help her breathe, and we can’t do that here.”
Olivia looked at Nico. They had seen intubations on TV shows: pulsing music and beeping, staff shouting and circling around to increase the drama of the moment. Was that what it was really like? Would they have to watch that scene play out with their daughter on the table? How has TV suddenly become our reality?
And, more importantly, how are we going to get through it?
Need to catch up?
Chapter 6: Rockstar Treatment (next chapter)
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