Alive on Opening Day (5 page)

David nodded, and Clara
began to cry again. Her mother had died of lung cancer 10 years
before and had spent the last several years of her life in and out
of hospitals, almost always attached to one machine or another. The
thought of her son suffering through the same sort of ordeal
devastated Clara.

“
OK,” Parks said, and his
face turned even more solemn than it had been. “We also need to
monitor his heart closely, because if his pulse rate drops much
lower, he could develop an arrhythmia and go into cardiac
arrest.”

“
He could die?” Clara
burst out.

Parks raised a hand and
waved it back and forth. “No, Clara, I won’t let that happen,” he
told her. “But it IS possible his heart will stop, and if that
happens, then we’ll need to shock him to get it started again.” The
doctor paused and took in a deep breath. “And,” he continued, “I
want you to brace for the possibility we’ll need to use a pacemaker
to make his heart pump fast enough to keep him alive.”

Clara whimpered but
nodded, and David pulled her close to him and kissed the top of her
head.

—

Doctors monitored Dan
throughout the night but decided to hold off on hooking him up to
any machines. By morning, they were feeding him through an IV, and
he still had his oxygen mask on, but Parks reported to the Hodges
that their son seemed to have stabilized. His heart rate had
leveled off at a very slow but steady 20 beats per minute, and his
breathing was hovering between three and four inhalations every 60
seconds. Not surprisingly, his blood pressure had also tanked, but
it, too, was holding on at 60 over 20.

In short, Parks told David
and Clara, Dan was in a coma, and they didn’t have any good answers
as to why. The doctor left the hospital at eight that morning to
check in on his practice and to try and grab a few minutes of sleep
but promised he would return in the afternoon. He suggested they do
the same, but Clara insisted she wasn’t leaving Dan’s side, so
David volunteered to swing by their house and pick up some personal
items so he and his wife could be more comfortable.

While David was out, Clara
camped out in a stiff, straight chair next to Dan’s bed and, when
her husband returned just before Noon, he found her sleeping with
her head lolled off to one side. He didn’t want to wake her but was
afraid she would hurt her neck and was relieved when a nurse burst
into the room five minutes later. Clara jolted awake and jerked in
her chair, then found David in the blazing overhead lights and
smiled at him.

When the nurse had checked
on Dan and gone on her way, David persuaded Clara to go with him to
the hospital cafeteria. Neither one had much of an appetite, he
conceded, but they had to eat so they didn’t get sick. Dan needed
them, after all, even if they didn’t know what was wrong with him.
They were gone for less than half an hour, but when they stepped
through the door to Dan’s room, Dr. Parks was already tending his
patient, flipping through a chart and making little grunting
noises.

The doctor lifted his head
when the Hodges walked in and nodded at them.

“
David, Clara,” he said,
and they returned the greeting.

Parks made a final mark on
the chart and hung it back on the foot of the bed. He turned toward
Dan’s parents with a serious expression on his face.

“
Look,” he continued.
“This is a small hospital with limited resources. I’m confident we
can keep Dan alive, but that’s about as much as I can
promise.”

Clara looked to David,
concerned, and he squeezed her arm.

Parks sighed and finished
his thought. “What I’m saying is, I think it’s time we transfer Dan
to another hospital, one with more equipment and more
specialists.”

“
We’ll do whatever we need
to do to help Dan, doctor,” David said.

“
Yes,” Clara agreed. “We
just want to know what’s going on so we can fix it.”

“
Well,” Parks began,
hesitation in his voice. He was clearly weighing his words, and
finally decided to continue. “I’ve done a bit of research in the
last couple of hours and I do have a theory … but as I said, it’s
going to take more resources than I have available here to know for
sure. And time. It’s going to take time.”

The Hodges just
nodded.

“
I’ve already contacted
Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis,” Parks said, “and we’re set to
take Dan there by ambulance this afternoon. I would suggest you
follow behind in your car, though you’ll probably want to go home
to grab some clothes and toiletries first.”

David pointed to the two
duffel bags in the corner of the room, the ones he had carried in
just before lunch.

“
We’re ready to go,
Doctor.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Baseball Bear

Parks really had made all
the arrangements at Methodist, and there was no check-in procedure
the Hodges had to go through when they arrived two hours later.
Instead, they were whisked straight to the fourth floor, where
Dan’s room in the Intensive Care Unit waited for them. Unlike at
Pickens County, this room provided a couch and two chairs, and the
hospital staff had wheeled in a cot so Dan’s parents could stay
with him as long as they wanted.

Parks had made the trip to
Indy, too, and he stood speaking with the Hodges while the nursing
staff helped two medics situate Dan in his new bed.

“
I want you to understand
that this isn’t a typical setup, you two,” Parks explained to them.
“The ICU is usually off-limits except during very specific times of
the day, but it does not appear Dan’s immune function has been
compromised in any way.” Parks lowered his voice and cast a furtive
look toward the hallway. “And besides, the head of the ICU owes me
a favor.”

David smiled for the first
time in a day, and even Clara cracked a small grin.

“
Now,” Parks said, “let’s
see what we’re dealing with here.”

—

What they were dealing
with there — after a CT scan, multiple EEGs and EKGs, more X-Rays,
nearly hourly blood tests, and a dizzying array of specialists —
surprised even Dr. Parks.

Oh, he’d had a theory, but
it seemed silly when he said it out loud to the team of doctors he
had called in to help at Methodist. It seemed silly to them, too,
but all of them wanted to help Dan and, as men and women of
science, they were always up for a good mystery.

Still, no one really
expected Parks’ theory to be correct, but in the end, it was the
only one that made sense. The only one that matched the available
evidence.

Clara and David looked at
Parks expectantly as he paced across the ICU room floor at the foot
of Dan’s bed. He was making them nervous, and they wished he would
just spit out the news that was agitating him so much, but he was
building for the big reveal and would not be denied.

“
So,” Parks said, still
walking back and forth, head bent toward the floor, “what we found
is Dan’s levels of melatonin are off the charts, while his thyroid
levels have plummeted. That’s the general trend we find in sleeping
people — elevated melatonin, depressed thyroid. The difference is
usually quite slight in terms of sheer numbers, but it’s still
enough to induce sleep. In Dan’s case, though, the gap between
melatonin and thyroid is about five times what we’d normally see in
a young man in the midst of deep sleep.”

Finally, Parks stopped in
the middle of the room and faced the Hodges, spreading his arms out
in an expression of revelation. “In fact,” he continued, “the only
place we would
normally
see such a discrepancy in hormone levels is in …
a hibernating animal!”

David looked confused, and
Clara’s jaw slacked open. “Wait a minute, Doc,” David said. “Are
you trying to tell us that Dan is
hibernating
?”

Parks put both hands in
front of him showing his palms to Dan, and shook his head. “I know,
I know,” he said. “It sounds completely crazy, but there is no way
to deny his endocrine patterns match those of a hibernating
bear
almost exactly
.”

“
But
that doesn’t make any sense!” David protested. “He was going to
school and playing baseball just a few days ago, and now we’re
supposed to believe he’s hibernating? It’s
s
pring
,
for Pete’s sake! Even animals don’t hibernate in the
spring
! They come
out
of hibernation when
it gets warm!”

Parks nodded. “That’s
true, David, at least in most cases, but the stimuli for
hibernating and waking are different for different animals and in
different locations. Their hormones all follow the same basic
pattern, though, and right now Dan’s looks for all the world like
that of a hibernating bear.”

Clara had recovered from
her initial shock, and she looked to Parks with hopeful eyes.
“Doctor,” she said. “Hibernating animals always wake up, don’t
they? I mean, you said there is some stimulus for them to come out
of hibernation?”

“
Yes, that’s right,
Clara,” Parks said with hesitation. He seemed to anticipate where
Clara was heading with her question.

“
So what’s Dan’s stimulus
to wake up, doctor?” she asked. “What can we do to bring him out of
hibernation?”

“
Um,” Parks looked
nervously from David to Clara,”I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to
that question, Clara. At least not yet. Animals all have natural
stimuli to move them along from state to state — a change in
temperature or environment, maybe some sort of internal clock. We
can’t know at this point what Dan’s trigger might be.”

“
Wait a
minute,” David cut in, not quite done with his previous line of
questioning. “Dan is not an animal, so I don’t see how any of this
has anything to do with him. If you expect me to believe he’s
‘hibernating,’ then can you at least tell me how that might have
happened? What was the ‘stimulus’ for
that
?”

David was starting to get
agitated, and his voice rose as he talked. Parks stayed calm and
spoke in soothing tones.

“
I understand you’re
frustrated, David, and I have been frustrated, too, with not being
able to give you better answers. But I’m confident we have found
out what is going on with Dan, and I also think we know what caused
it.”

David opened his eyes wide
and thrust his neck forward as if to say, “I’m waiting!”

Parks paused, trying to
decide how much to divulge, but after a few seconds he went on.
“Even though Dan’s initial scans didn’t show any swelling in terms
of the brain pushing against the skull, subsequent, deeper
scans
did
show
something anomalous.”

David and Clara both
looked alarmed, and Parks tried to calm them. “Now, it’s nothing
too ominous, but I did notice the pocket surrounding Dan’s
pituitary gland was swollen this morning, potentially creating
pressure on the gland itself. In case you don’t remember from high
school biology or health class, the pituitary gland is the
master
gland that
controls pretty much all the others. It also regulates how much
growth hormone is in your body and so contributes to growth and
aging, or the slowing of aging.

“
But beyond that, the
pituitary also plays a vital role in controlling the rest of the
endocrine system, including melatonin and serotonin. And when we
look at the endocrine profiles of hibernating animals, we find
significant differences in these hormones from where they are
during ‘waking’ states. The bottom line here,” Parks concluded, “is
the blow to Dan’s head seems to have caused swelling around his
pituitary gland, and that added pressure has caused his endocrine
system to malfunction, mimicking a hibernation state.”

“
So how do we reduce the
swelling,” David asked.

Parks frowned and looked
straight into David’s eyes. “The swelling has already subsided, but
Dan’s hormone levels have not changed.”

Clara looked sick. “When
will he wake up?” she asked, dazed by the events of the past few
days and the unbelievable story Parks was telling them.

“
I’m afraid I don’t have
that answer, either, Clara,” Parks said. “It’s still early in Dan’s
recovery, and the swelling has only been gone since this time
yesterday, so it may be that his pituitary just needs time to
‘decompress’ and get back to normal function. In the meantime,
we’ll just have to monitor him and make sure nothing else is wrong,
or goes wrong.”