Alive on Opening Day Read online

  “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 spring, 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.”

  “There has to be something you can do!” Clara exclaimed. “Or something we can do,” she added, looking to David. He squeezed his wife’s shoulder.

  Parks moved closer to the couple and touched their hands with his. “He’s in the right place, Clara,” Parks assured her. “Nothing is going to happen to your son, but this is one of those situations we can’t force. The human body is resilient, especially when it’s a young, healthy body. Dan just needs time, and I’m confident he’ll come back to you.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?” David asked. “Could he be like this forever?”

  Parks shook his head. “No, David, we won’t let that happen. If nothing has changed in a couple of weeks, we’ll reconsider our options. For now, though, let’s give Dan a chance to figure this out on his own, OK?”

  David and Clara nodded, but neither one looked confident.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Swaddled

  “So I was hibernating?” Dan asked as he scraped the last bit of egg onto a piece of toast with his fork. “Like a bear?”

  Clara nodded. “I know it sounds unbelievable, honey, and, trust me, I didn’t want to accept it, either. But there was simply no other explanation.”

  “Whoa!” Dan said, looking to his mother with wide-eyed marvel. “So what happened next?”

  He might well have been asking Clara for a recap of the latest blockbuster movie rather than nine months in his own life. “I mean, how did I get from a hospital in Indianapolis in June to my bedroom by the following March? Seems like I’m still missing quite a bit of information here, Mom.”

  Clara poured another serving of orange juice into Dan’s empty glass.

  “You’re right, Dan. There’s more,” she said. She sighed and then launched into the rest of the story.

  Two more weeks had passed, and Dan’s condition had not changed one whit, but Dr. Parks had still been reluctant to intervene. He believed as long as Dan was stable, they should continue to give his body the chance to heal itself. Clara and David pushed hard, though, and eventually sought a second opinion. When the second doctor was more aggressive in his treatment ideas, Dr. Parks consented to try some sort of hormonal therapy if the Hodges would call off their hired gun. David trusted Parks and wanted him to care for Dan, so the Hodges agreed, but with the understanding that they wanted to take any and every action necessary to bring their son back to consciousness.

  After several weeks of hormonal therapy, augmented by periodic adrenaline shots and other revival attempts, Dan was still unresponsive. While these measures did boost his heart and breathing rate temporarily, they never brought him close to consciousness, according to EEG readings, and he soon slid back to his slow baseline pulse and breathing rates. It appeared no matter what doctors tried, Dan wanted to remain asleep.

  These results bolstered Parks’ resolve to let Dan work through his condition naturally, and he resisted further suggestions from the Hodges that they try new techniques. The second-opinion doctor agreed nothing seemed to be helping and so he flopped his recommendation to match Parks’. When a third and fourth, this latter brought in from Chicago, also concurred further treatment may do more harm than good, Clara and David finally had relented and accepted the fact Dan would not be forced into consciousness. They eventually settled into a routine of visiting their son as much as possible, with Clara spending most days at the hospitals and David coming on weekends and most nights.

  By late summer, Dan had turned 19, and the insurance company at HBM began to make noises about discontinuing coverage for the boy’s care. Their argument was that he was out of high school, well past legal age, and should therefore be responsible for his own care, while David and Clara contended Dan was a dependent child who should continue to be covered under David’s policy. As cool fall breezes blew across the brilliant Indiana landscape in October, the issue reached a tipping point, and the Hodges were forced to hire a lawyer in order to stay their coverage while the legal wrangling played out.

  Two weeks before Christmas, the two sets of legal counsel worked out an agreement, though David and Clara had little input into the decision. Under the new arrangement, the insurance company would cover expenses for Dan to receive three in-home visits per week from a nursing center, and he would be covered for any medical emergencies which arose. No longer would he be able to stay in the hospital, though, with constant monitoring. The agreement was to take effect on January 1, 1974, but Clara decided she would have her son home for the holidays.

  So, on Christmas Eve, Clara and David drove to Methodist together, checked their son out of the hospital, and brought him back to Pickens County for Christmas.