A Day in Emergency

Missy lay back in the emergency room bed, exhausted. After the day she’d had, neither Heather nor I could blame her.

Too much crying. Too much pain. Missy had been done with this long before her medical team had, and that meant she turned into 97 pounds of pint-sized stubborn. The vomiting hadn’t helped, nor had the “I gotta go potty-o” trips that repeatedly produced nothing.

We’d had to come, though. Abdominal pain can’t be ignored. Especially the sort that transforms a face into a living mask of hurt, a tragedy mask wrapped in wordless agony.

So here we were, and here we stayed for the longest five hours on Earth. Heather and I had been this route before – in fact, with my wife’s many chronic illnesses, Heather was something of an emergency room veteran.

But not with Missy. Never for Missy.

In more than six years of caring for our developmentally disabled ward, we had never once had to bring her to the ER. Colds, yes. Bugs, sure. But never anything that needed more than bed rest, patience, and a quiet reminder of “Don’t pull your hair, Missy.”

We could feel the difference now.

At the best of times, Missy is a quiet person. She isn’t non-verbal – in fact, she’s “chattier” than she used to be – but even so, her use of words tends to be pretty sparing. In those moments, translation tends to rely on facial expression, body language, and a glossary of common phrases, filtered through the context of the moment. (For example, “book” can mean an actual book or it can mean her ever-present, filled-past-the-brim purse.)

The three of us communicate well. But when the moment of pain hit, Missy didn’t have the words to explain it. And that’s scary, on both sides of the conversation.

No one likes being helpless. And few things are more helpless than to see someone you love in pain, without being able to do anything about it.

We all know that one, don’t we? Whether it’s a night in the hospital with a relative in pain, or a headline that screams of disaster visiting friends and family across the country, it opens the same doors. That desperate need to help that can’t find resolution, however hard we try.

And when the person involved can do so little to help themselves – the very old, the very young, the disabled – it only gets magnified.

Yes, this is part of how we know we’re human. This is the heart showing that it can feel need, empathize with pain, and spur us beyond ourselves. It’s how we know the depth of our bonds, as a family and a species.

But when all that potential has nowhere to go, it hurts. You find ways to help, but they never seem enough. Maybe they are. Maybe even our smallest gestures mean something on the other side of the divide. I hope so.

It finally seemed to for Missy.

Blood tests. An X-ray. A CT scan.  And in the end, some good news – no appendicitis, no bowel obstruction, none of the worst possibilities that Heather and I had been fearing. The meds were helping her through, the pain was receding. Everyone could go home.

We didn’t have final answers today. For now, those could wait. For now, it was enough to be together, to have been together. To have “normal” back, however fragile it might be.

No, you can never do enough.

But sometimes you can do enough for now.

Fuel for the Fire

The battle lines have again been drawn in flame.

We know the drill by now. High wind. High heat. Lots of vegetation, some of it beetle-killed. One spark and Colorado becomes a tinder box, with too many fires and not nearly enough people to fight them.

Homes consumed. Prisoners evacuated. Summer evenings obscured by smoke.

Oh, yes. We know this well. It’s part of our memories, our fears, our DNA.

Even if we did think – hope? Pray? – we might actually dodge the bullet this time.

I know I did.

Sure, winter had been much too dry. But there had been that beautiful snow in April, that wonderful rain in May. The threat of drought had been eased. Not erased – my pleading lawn was testimony to that—but at least, pardon the phrase, damped down.

On Monday, I made the fatal mistake. I told someone that this summer didn’t look too bad. Certainly not as bad as last year.

Some words should never be spoken. By Tuesday, the match had been lit.

The last time Colorado burned, we had presidential contenders cris-crossing the state. I took up a friend’s plea that they all withdraw and give their Colorado advertising money to fire relief, where it would do more good than a thousand finger-pointing ads.

Didn’t happen.

This year, we’re at least spared the indignity of leaders-in-waiting fiddling while home burns. A small comfort, I suppose. Very small.

But then, everything seems pretty small against a wall of flame.

Especially our own efforts.

So often, that’s what keeps coming back to me. What can we do? We all want to stop it. To turn it off. To make it not happen.

And we can’t. That’s in the hands of a few brave men and women, putting everything on the line to save the rest of us.

But we can do two things. Remember. And prepare.

We all have a responsibility to be ready for the next battle.

When I was a kid learning to cut the lawn, Dad drilled me on the three things every mower needs. Fuel. Air. A spark. Take away even one, and you don’t have a lawn mower, you have a lawn ornament.

Wildfire works by the same rules.

Air, we can’t do much about. Colorado winds are what they are, erratic and sudden.

The spark? Common sense can help a bit there. But danger can still leap from the sky in a lightning strike or emerge from the embers of a seemingly-doused fire pit.

But the biggest thing we can do is remove the fuel.

And in the mountains especially, that means firebreaks.

I know. It’s beautiful to have a “hidden home” in the mountains. It’s prettier to have the trees come right to your door. I’ve seen it. I agree, it is nice.

But capricious as fire is, it still needs a path. A tree-shrouded home offers it a six-lane highway.

Clearing a space may not guarantee safety. Neither does wearing a seat belt in a car. But both do a lot to improve the odds. Three years ago, those spaces and a shift in the wind helped spare Gold Hill from yet another wildfire. In aerial photos, it looked like the homes were surrounded by a moat.

That’s what a firebreak is. A moat of dirt. A defense against the next battle.

A way for the militia – all of us – to help the regular defenders.

We’ll endure. We always seem to. The fires will recede, the destruction will end. The smoke will fade.

But the memories and the lessons shouldn’t.

And maybe next year, we can meet the fire season with more than hope.