Alive on Opening Day (4 page)

The Curve

“
Watch
out for the curve!” David yelled to his son from behind home plate.
Then he turned to his wife. “Not many high school pitchers
even
have
a curve, but Jackson’s is pretty good.”

Even after ten years of
Little League and school baseball, Clara still didn’t understand
all the nuances of pitch selection, but she smiled at David’s
enthusiasm and played along. “Hope he doesn’t throw the curve,
then!”

David looked at her in
surprise. “Well, if he HANGS it, Dan can take him deep. He just has
to watch for it.”

On the mound, Jim Jackson
went into his windup and strode toward home plate to deliver the
2-1 offering. From his vantage point slightly above the field,
David could see the pitcher’s grip and recognized the pitch as a
curve ball. He flinched as it dipped inside, then watched horrified
as Dan began his swing early and, by the time the ball was even
with the plate, his son was twisted around facing away from the
ball. A sickening crack confirmed what David feared: the pitch
crashed into the right side of Dan’s head, and the boy staggered
around his bat for a couple of seconds before dropping it to the
ground.

A moment later, Dan
sprawled across the plate, motionless.

“
No!” Clara screamed, and
David squeezed her knee for reassurance.

“
Hold on, Clara,” he said.
“I’m sure Dan will bounce right back up.”

But Dan
didn’t
bounce right back
up, and when Coach Croft came out of the dugout several seconds
later, David leaped over the empty bleachers in front of him and
sprinted to the field. The small crowd in the stands were all on
their feet, and David could hear a mix of whispers and gasps. Both
Clara and Gabbie, who had been seated along the third base line,
were calling Dan’s name as they made their way toward home
plate.

By the time David got to
his son, the Eagles’ coach, the home plate umpire, and a couple of
teammates were already gathered around. Together, they turned Dan
on his back and shook his hands gently, trying to get a response
from the boy, but his body was limp. Coach Croft grabbed one of
Dan’s wrists, held it for a few seconds, and leaned in to put his
ear close to Dan’s mouth. He looked to David and said, “He has a
pulse, but it’s weak. And he’s breathing, but it’s shallow and
jagged.”

Then, turning to one of
the players who had gathered around, Croft held up a key chain and
directed, “Take these keys and open up my office, dial 0, and tell
the operator that we need an ambulance. You got it?”

The young man nodded
vigorously and grabbed the keys, then sprinted off toward the
building.

Gabbie and Clara rushed
onto the scene and poked their heads through the small crowd of
boys and men, trying to get a glimpse of Dan’s face. Clara pushed
her way through to her son and crouched down at his side, caressing
his cheek. She looked to David, who nodded, and she moved in close
to Dan’s ear and whispered, “It’s OK , honey. Mommy’s
here.”

Gabbie shrieked when she
saw Dan’s face, prompting David to stand up and put an arm around
her shoulder. He turned her away from the scene on the field and
spoke softly to her.

“
Gabbie,” he said. “You
need to calm down, OK? There is nothing we can do for Dan right now
other than wait for the ambulance to get here, and carrying on like
this will only make it harder for everyone else. I’m sure Dan is
going to be fine, but only if we keep clear heads and do what we
can to get him the proper help. Sound OK?”

Gabbie took a deep breath
and nodded. “Yes, yes, you’re right,” she said. “It’s just that
…”

“
I know, Gabbie,” David
said. “But I need to get back to Clara.” He pulled away from the
girl and pointed to the stands. “Why don’t you go sit down until
the ambulance gets here, and then we can figure out what we’re
going to do, alright?”

She nodded again and
ambled toward the bleachers while David walked back to Dan and
crouched down again to slip an arm around Clara’s waist.

For 15 long minutes, David
and Clara huddled around their son, talking to him and watching for
any tiny movement. Clara stroked his face, and David told him
stories from the current Major League Baseball season, about how
the Cincinnati Reds would be in a dog fight all year with the Los
Angeles Dodgers for the National League West crown. They did all
this to give Dan some comfort assuming he even knew they were
there, but mostly to avoid thinking about how bad he might be hurt
and why it was taking so darn long for help to arrive.

Finally, an ambulance from
the Pickens County Hospital screamed to a stop on the driveway
between the school building and the ball diamond, and the driver
backed the rig up through the grass and parked along the fence, as
close as possible to home plate. Two paramedics hopped out of the
vehicle and hurried to the huddle of people in front of the
backstop. Seeing them, David took his wife by the hand and helped
her stand to the side.

While one of the medics
checked Dan’s vital signs, the other unfolded a stretcher in the
grass beside the boy and began palpating his
extremities.

“
Shallow breaths, and a
slow, unsteady heartbeat,” the first said.

The second nodded and
said, “I don’t find any displaced fractures, and he isn’t showing
any edema. Let’s get him loaded up and get a mask on
him.”

“
What’s going on?” Clara
wanted to know. “Is he going to be OK?”

The first paramedic
answered as they were straightening Dan’s body and moving him onto
the stretcher.

“
We don’t know the extent
of his injuries yet, ma’am,” he told her. “For now, we need to make
sure that he’s getting enough oxygen and transport him to the
hospital so the emergency room doctors can check him out more
thoroughly.”

“
We’ll follow behind you,”
David said and guided his wife away from the field. As the
paramedics lifted Dan up on the stretcher to carry him away, Clara
reached out to touch his arm and blew him a kiss he never
saw.

“
Come on, honey,” David
said, tugging on her arm.

On the way to the parking
lot, David stopped to tell Gabbie their plan. She wanted to ride to
the hospital with the Hodges, but David reminded her that her
mother would soon return to the school to pick her up. Meg Jordan
would be panicked if she showed up to find Gabbie gone. Gabbie
finally agreed to wait for her mom, but vowed to come to the
hospital later.

CHAPTER SIX

Slow Motion

The Hodges made the
10-mile ride to the hospital in silence, except for the screeching
siren of the ambulance in front of them and Clara’s gentle sobs
from the passenger seat.

When they arrived, David
angled their sedan into the visitors parking lot, and then the
couple hurried toward the ER entry way where the paramedics were
already unloading Dan and speaking with doctors. Clara started to
call out to them, but David pulled her back and said softly, “Let’s
let them do their jobs for a minute. We can follow them when they
take him in, OK?”

Tears were still falling
from her eyes, but Clara managed to nod. Once the medics had handed
off Dan to the physicians and moved the ambulance out of the
unloading zone, David led Clara across the driveway and caught up
with the doctors. As they approached, one of the physicians nodded
toward them and went back into the hospital. The other turned to
face them.

“
Dr. Parks!” Clara
exclaimed. She had not recognized him from the back and through her
emotion, but she was relieved to find their family physician on the
scene to take care of her son.

“
Hello, Clara,” Parks
said, then, nodding toward David, “David.”

Parks grabbed hold of the
sides of Dan’s gurney and wheeled it toward the hospital , where
the other doctor and a nurse were holding open the front doors.
“Come, walk with me,” Parks told the Hodges.

David walked along on
Parks’ left side, while Clara scrambled around to the right side of
the gurney and grabbed Dan’s hand. She looked across her
unconscious son and pleaded with her eyes. “Is he going to be OK,
Dr. Parks?”

“
Clara,
it’s just too early to know that with any certainty,” Parks told
her. “What I
can
say is, he is breathing on his own, and his pulse
is fairly steady, even though it’s slow.”

“
Why is it slow? And why
does he have that mask on if he’s breathing on his own?” she
demanded.

“
I don’t know why his
heart is beating slowly, Clara,” Parks said. “That’s what we have
to find out. And that mask just helps to make sure he’s getting
enough oxygen. Even though he’s breathing on his own, his
respiration is slow, too, which could lead to hypoxia — low oxygen
levels.”

David could see Clara was
on the verge of coming undone, so he interjected. “So what do we do
now, Doc? What’s the next step?”

“
Well, first we need to
get an x-ray of his head,” Parks said, and he leaned toward Dan as
they walked to get a better look at the right side of the boy’s
face. “Looks like he got whacked pretty hard out there this
evening, and we need to see what kind of damage he sustained. He
could have brain swelling, and we have to find that
out.”

“
Oh no!” Clara exclaimed.
“What happens if he does have brain swelling?”

Parks looked first to
David and back to Clara. “Let’s not worry about that unless we have
to, OK, Clara? For now, the important thing to keep in mind is, he
appears to be stable.”

Clara nodded, and the
Hodges walked along with Parks into the first available exam room,
where he gave Dan a more thorough inspection before accompanying
him to radiology.

The next several hours
were a blur of tests and discovery, partial answers and new
questions. By midnight, Parks had moved Dan to intensive care and
was sitting in the waiting room down the hall, telling the Hodges
what the hospital staff had found.

Mostly, the news was good,
Parks said. Despite the fact Dan had been knocked unconscious by a
pitch to the face, he hadn’t sustained any broken bones.The x-rays
did show deep bone bruising in both his cheek and his temple, and
he would be sore for many days, maybe weeks. Depending on his pain
level when he woke up, they may have to consider wiring his jaw
shut for a time, which would mean a liquid diet administered
through a straw.

The force had twisted
Dan’s neck around at the end of a swing, which surely strained it —
he probably had whiplash — but there did not appear to be any real
structural damage to his neck, either.

The final piece of news,
Parks told David and Clara, and really it was great news, was there
was no swelling in Dan’s brain. There did not appear to be any
bleeding inside his head, either, but Hodges warned them that
sometimes these symptoms were latent — they only developed hours or
even days after an accident, so Dan was not necessarily out of the
woods yet.

And then there was the bad
news, which was why Dan was in the ICU and not curled up on the
couch at home with an ice pack on his head, maybe sucking on a bowl
of ice cream. The fact was, despite a lack of any sign of real,
permanent damage, Dan was still unconscious. For now, Parks said,
he was calling it a concussion because he could see a quarter-sized
dark spot, a bruise, on Dan’s brain near the front right side,
where the ball had crashed into his skull. It a was fairly common
occurrence, and Parks suspected many athletes’ concussions which
were never diagnosed at all.

What was particularly
worrisome in Dan’s case was, not only had the young man been out
cold for hours, but his breathing rate and pulse remained
depressed. In fact, they had actually slowed down since Dan arrived
at the ER earlier in the night. Some of that may have been because
the heart of the crisis was past, and Dan’s body was calming down,
but it hadn’t
needed
to calm down. Not with a starting heart rate of 40 and not
when he had been breathing only five times per minute. As he lay in
his room down the hall, Parks told the Hodges, Dan was down to
about four breaths per minute, and his heart rate stood at 35 beats
per minute.

Parks was concerned they
may need to give him some help before the night was
through.

“
What do you mean by
‘help,’ doctor?” David asked, worry creasing his face.

“
We’re going to bring a
ventilator into his room, and I have a pulmonary specialist on
standby,” Parks responded. “If he drops to three breaths per minute
and stays there for more than half an hour, we’ll have to intubate
him. Do you know what that means?”