The entire clinic came alive the moment he walked through the doors. I’d been in the environment long enough to understand the distinction between patients and family, but this was one different.
It was impossible not to be curious about him, as the little soul with bright eyes and wide smile sauntered through the consultation room high-fiving nurses and staff with a toothy grin. His infectious beam was bound to draw your attention to him, and if that didn’t do it, his words would.
If I hadn’t heard him speak I would still have imagined that he was the kind of boy who ushered life wherever he stepped.
He was smart for his age. It was clear after less than ten minutes of meeting him why he conjured so much emotion in everyone.
The discussion wasn’t outrightly about his struggles. In fact, that was last on the list of affairs when he arrived. He was a welcome change to the seldom sterilized nature of the clinic setting.
The medical director, Victoria, a matured epitome of experience, was taken by children, but this young man commanded her attention like no one I’d seen since my arrival at the clinic. She attended to him personally, like the seven-year-old was her own VIP.
His mother, in tow, was a secondary character to her son’s appearance as she smiled naturally and answered the questions with what I would refer to now as a precarious hope. They were in for his bi-weekly check up. He had a bit of pain over the week, but nothing that wasn’t bearable. They were observing all protocols and regimen. His breathing was fine.
Nevertheless, Victoria had the lab run his PCV to check his blood level. It came back at 29%, a top margin for someone as unique as ‘Lore.
Fist-bumps and unsolicited commentary made him remarkable on our first encounter. I remember thinking how much of a fighter he was even though I had never witnessed him in battle.
The pain crisis had started a little over three days. It wasn’t unusual, but the familiarity did not spare either the child or his mother the agony.
In the third ward room on the left wing of the hospital’s ground floor, the entire morning round comes to a halt as everyone’s attention is locked on the doctor’s titration of the oxygen being passed into the lungs of the boy through a nasal cannula.
He’s pale and frail. His eyeballs are a flushed shade of yellow. His fingernails are cyanosed, clubbed, and so are his lips. They are signs that his body lack oxygen and his blood is depriving him of it.
Despite several transfusions, his latest PCV is bottoming-out at 15%. The little bright hero’s belly is slightly taut, and his breathing is anything but regular. His shallow breaths are laborious and punctuated with wheezes. He’d been coughing before, he can barely do so now.
The air in the room grew thicker as I walked in. As ultimately nonessential personnel depart, the doctor keeps watch with a couple of other nurses. His mother is in the corner and there is meaning to her wordlessness as she breathes like she would do it for her boy if she could; push the air in and out of her own lungs for him; take his pain and run it into her own body.
I cannot bring myself to imagine let alone ask what is going on in her mind; what she’s thinking as her only child lays on the bed, fighting what many perhaps fear is a lost battle but would never dare say out loud.
There is an air in the entire hospital with the rest of the rounds noticeably less zesty, and the gloom does not depart despite efforts of everyone to be professional. And it would, in fact, worsen to the unimaginable.
My observership is brought to the mother of all tests, and I’m left with fragments of that memory. No matter how much of it escapes, I cannot get the image of standing alone in the room that has now gone quiet and lifeless.
The only company I have is little ‘Lore who is laid on the bed, the cloth fully covering the length of his figure from head to toe. I am motionless in this, while everyone outside sing praises of his valiant battle against his sickled cells, a fight he ultimately lost at the stage of an acute chest syndrome.
