Bagel The Terrifying Beagle

Bagel, in noble profile

This is a bit of a digression from My Son’s Brain, a story which starts here. When my three year old son, Ben, had a series of suspicious smell hallucinations, I brought him to the E.R. at The Montreal Children’s Hospital. In the last installment, a team of neurologists informed me that Ben’s EEG results indicated very unusual activity, “deep in the brain.” There will be more tests, a 24 hour EEG and an MRI. But in the meantime, they suspected epilepsy.

I’d told Dr. J that there was no one in my family who suffered from epilepsy. But I’d forgotten about Bagel, my parents’ beagle.

If that name conjures up the image of a dense, but comforting presence at a Sunday morning breakfast, nothing about Bagel could be further from the truth. Except maybe the denseness, in his later years, when he became too fat to terrorize our mealtimes with the same intensity of his leaner, meaner youth.

My parents discovered Bagel as a six-month old puppy in an animal shelter in Kennebunkport, about fifteen minutes from their summer cottage. He’d already been brought back twice for “disobedience”, but my mother fell hard for his show hound looks.

Bagel’s coal black eyes, naturally lined with black, were hypnotic. His soft oak brown ears weren’t quite basset hound huge, but big enough that if you didn’t know him well enough, you’d be tempted to take a quiet nap on them. No doubt, somewhere in Southern Maine is a portrait of Bagel’s ancestors proudly sniffing out wild turkeys from the prow of a pilgrim boat sailing up the Kennebec river. But pretty much from the moment he set paw in my parent’s house, the dog was a non-stop holy living terror.

Except when he wasn’t, and for that five minutes a day, he was the most loveable, affectionate, adorable creature on earth.

The rest of the time, he was a nose. A nose that lived most of its life to the soundtrack of Jaws. No matter how many pre dinner protective rituals we followed, Bagel always seemed to find a hole in our defenses: a chair left untilted, from which he could leap onto the table, or onto the kitchen island where the food was being prepared. If we somehow failed to properly assign whose task it was to lock him out of the house at mealtime, a snout inevitably flashed up from the lurking depths beneath the table, precisely targeted at a piece of meat on a plate. In time, we took to eating family meals, slightly stretched towards the center of the table, where we’d, hopefully, pushed our plates out of range.

My parents paid trainer after trainer to work with Bagel. They tried aversion therapy, and took to spritzing him with vinegar and water. They re-organized their family life to send him a different message about his place in “the pack.” But inevitably Bagel would re-organize those rituals right back; because for all our many talents and wonderful qualities, nobody in my family, is, or ever will be, an alpha personality.

The only one who ever successfully dominated Bagel was Blitzen, my Jack Russell, which she did from the first time she visited my parent’s house, as a two month old, five pound puppy. Blitzen was the Justin Bieber of puppies. She was that cute. But she also had the speed and instincts of a rat. If Bagel even looked at her food, within seconds he’d find her hanging, clamped so hard to his upper lip, for a week it would probably hurt him too much to even think about snarling. Needless to say, he fell passionately in love with her. The lovelorn baying that would invariably announce her arrival, followed by the two hours of ecstatic chasing around the house, was almost enough to make us forget the otherwise constant food bullying.

Bagel, getting some love

But while it was nice to see that Bagel had a heart, the dominant body part was always his nose. Until the nose became something worse, the teeth.

Sometimes it was merely fingers getting in the way of a sandwich too close to the edge. But around the time Bagel’s epilepsy started to emerge, he took to unpredictable biting. It seemed to happen most often when he was having one of those rare sweet moments, pupils dilated as though in appreciative love of all we’d put up with, and then with no warning growl, he’d lash out with a vicious snap.

If my parent’s had any thought of finding some kind of Beagle rescue organization, those were dashed when Bagel had his first grand mal seizure.

It started at around the age of three, at least once a month, he would fall to his side as though hit by a car. His body would twitch. In particular I remember one hind leg stretched out long and taught, as though he were half way between being electrocuted and working on his ballet stretches. His bowels and bladder would evacuate, so that when he did come out of it usually about five minutes after it started, he would wake up in a puddle of his own piss. Eventually he would roll back up to standing, his royal white and black speckled haunches settling back to normal, albeit smeared with feces.

The vet put him on phenobarbitol to control the seizures. It didn’t work. He upped the dosage, but warned us that in time it would probably damage his liver. But the alternative was to allow the seizures to progress, each one damaging the brain more deeply and permanently. Bagel was doomed, but my family continued to care for him, each in their own way.

My father began to study epilepsy and was convinced that the biting was probably a reaction to petit mal seizures, hallucinations, like Ben’s smell hallucinations, that were triggering Bagel’s anxiety and aggression. I rolled my eyes, at the time, chalking this theory up to my dad’s life time grudge against behavioral therapy.

My mother simply processed the experience as the inevitable consequences of loving too much. And then proceeded as she always had, to love him too much, until one of her fingers became so infected from a bite, she could barely move it for three months.

My brother, who had a tendency to form, in my opinion, unreasonably strong attachments to our family pets, became committed to the idea that Bagel could be healed by the kind of constant loving attention and holistic therapy that people pay private nurses and occupational therapists yearly salaries to administer.

I quite simply, argued, whenever the opportunity arose, for his euthanasia. But I was never Bagel’s biggest fan. I tolerated him before Ben was born, even during the stage when my mother started referring to him as “the grand dog.” (A name thought up long before the seizures started, and not intentionally directed at either of her childless adult children, of course.) It didn't help while I was in Central America and the only dogs I'd seen for two months were skeletal village spectres or roadkill, that my mother would send me pictures of Bagel suited up in his own lifejacket, heading out for a motorboat trip to Old Orchard.

But my heart did warm to him when he developed his crush on Blitzen. Then around the time Ben reached the age where I had to be constantly on the alert for a dog who might bite my curious toddler for no reason that we understood, I lost whatever theoretical compassion I once had for my foster nephew.

Finally, after he bit a long time family friend, my parents made an appointment to have him put down. But at the last minute my brother decided to take Bagel to live with him. To my brother’s credit, he accomplished a lot with the rehabilitation plan. His acting career gave him time to take Bagel for long walks on Mont-Royal (Montreal’s Central Park, a 4 mile long forested carriage trail also designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted.) Bagel lost about fifteen pounds and seemed happy enough.

Then my brother found a great apartment in a neighborhood about five miles away from Mont Royal. The week after he moved, he brought Bagel back to the park, hoping to keep doing their mountain hike at least a few times a month. It was a cold winter afternoon, with few people out walking, and my brother thought it would be safe to let him off the leash.

But Bagel immediately disappeared into the forest after the scent of a muskrat, or chipmunk, or whatever. My brother spent hours looking for him, with no success. He called up friends from his old neighborhood to come and help. When it got dark the search party gave up. Grief stricken, my brother returned home, only to find Bagel beached on his front balcony, fat as a whale from all the garbage he’d consumed on the five mile trek from Mont Royal to the upper duplex they’d only been living in a week.

That had happened a few months before I took Ben to the hospital. So by the time I was remembering all this, I’d radically changed my opinion of Bagel. The dog was obviously in dog terms, a genius. He was meant for a life at the head of the pack, hunting animals, or maybe as a working dog, finding bodies or sniffing out drugs at airports. Instead his brilliance had been focused on outwitting my family out of sandwiches.

Still, if he had lived a more useful life, I wonder if he would have had owners who were willing to stick it out with him during the worst of times. At holiday season that year, I felt bad, and agreed that my brother could bring Bagel over for Christmas dinner, as long as he was kept locked up in the basement.

I’m not a believer in karma, but as I was numbly processing the information that my son now probably had the disorder of my enemy, I can’t say it didn’t cross my mind that there was some kind of spooky syncronicity to this situation.

To be continued

Spiderboy

If you want to find out how I ended up at the E.R. of The Montreal Children’s Hospital with my three year old son, Ben, waiting for a room in the neurology ward you might want to read The Smell or The Only Thing Worse Than Not Being Taken Seriously.

It was now early evening and the E.R. at The Montreal Children’s Hospital was crackling with the incendiary energy of sick or injured young children who had missed their naptime. Ben had no memory of that morning’s twenty-second smell hallucination. He was cranky, and starting to crash from vending machine junk food. All he wanted to do was fall asleep in my arms, but the neurology resident wanted him to do a blood test while the ward prepared a room. We were waiting for the nurse to call us.

Before we’d left for the hospital I’d grabbed a copy of Good Night Gorilla, and his two favorite versions of Spiderman (Spiderman 2 was about to be released, so the stores were flooded with various incarnations, from retro red and electric blue to the recent oil slick black of shadow spidey.) I wished I’d brought more things from home. The Children’s had the typical meat and potatoes E.R. of a Canadian hospital. It was cluttered with the dreary donated toys that most kids wouldn’t miss from their rooms.

For about fifteen minutes I kept Ben busy howling along with a rubber wolf figurine, pretending to be part of his pack. But I knew pretty soon faux howling was going to turn into real howling. It was time for me to explain to my three-year-old son why they would be taking several vials of his blood and hooking him up to a headful of electrodes tomorrow. So I did what parents have been doing since the dawn of time to explain the random, unknown, terrifying future. I made up some bullshit story that his childhood narcissism would be unable to resist.

“Honey. I didn’t want to tell you this before because I don’t want you to be disappointed if it’s not true. But the doctors think you might have radioactive blood, like Spiderman. You probably don’t. You’re probably just a normal kid like all the other kids. But there is a slim possibility that you have superpowers. And if you do, we need to find that out now to prepare you for the huge responsibility of being a superhero.”

"I’m a superhero?" Already he seemed a little calmer.

"Maybe. We don’t know. I’ll be honest, probably not. But you’re still going to have to act like a superhero and do some medical tests that are going to hurt a bit. It’s really important that we know what’s going on, because if the superpowers suddenly appear out of nowhere, you might hurt people. You might accidentally push a friend at daycare and then your friend would go flying across the room."

Of course the possibility of such dire disaster inspired more glee than concern. But the giggling loosened him up. "You laugh now, but if your friend is really hurt by your tremendous strength you’re not going to feel good."

"Okay mommy."

This kept him stoic enough through a five-minute blood test. Fortunately we had a nurse who played along and created a tiny band-aid for Spiderman too.

I knew the spiderboy story was not going to be a good strategy if it actually turned out that there was something seriously wrong with Ben. But I kept focusing on what Dr. J had said. By all outwards appearances Ben was healthy, and that was the most important symptom. I had brought my son here to confirm that there was actually nothing wrong with him, and that was the plan I intended to stick to.

E. (Ben’s father, who doesn’t live with us, for those of you just joining in) and I had agreed to do shifts for the next 24 hours. He’d gone back home for a few hours, and Ben still didn’t have a room when he arrived back at the hospital. I left them in the E.R and went home myself to get more toys, some better food, and walk my dog.

When I returned, Ben had room. He was asleep and E. was playing hearts on his cell phone. It was about 10 p.m. “The EEG is going to be tomorrow at 8 a.m. They say it’s going to be six hours long.” E whispered
“Six hours?!”
“SHHHH!” an exasperated sigh came from behind the curtain that surrounded the bed across the aisle from us
We went into the hallway to figure out tomorrow’s shifts, agreeing that I would stay the night and bring Ben downstairs to the EEG labs. E. Would take over in the morning so that I could bring my dog out to my parent’s house, then I would return for the last few hours of the test.
Ben’s room was dark, and I didn’t know the set up well enough to figure out where a bedside light was if there was one. So I turned on the television briefly with the intention of just getting enough light to figure out where I was. Unfortunately this set off the mother in the bed across from us who started chewing me out in fractured English.” I have two children ‘ere, I be three nights since we sleep. You must be quiet.”
She was obviously on edge and tired and worried, so I didn’t bother to explain that I wasn’t actually planning on watching television. As I would soon find out, however, she also kind of a bitch. As I started dozing off, Ben, who’d always been a very active sleeper, started having a bad dream and began to softly cry.
SHHH!
Not that it would have mattered if I’d decided to watch T.V. or Ben had decided to stay up all night to cry or even play. About an hour later the ward was flooded with piercing, tortured screaming that would continue in spurts throughout the night. As I would eventually learn, there was a young girl down the hall being followed for severe chronic night terrors. She’d been here for three months.

____________________________________________________

The next morning I learned my three-year-old son was going to be required to sit quietly at a little table for the duration of the six-hour test. Spiderman was not going to be enough. Neither was the dismal collection of VHS Disney movies the hospital had provided to pass the time. I thanked God his father would be showing up soon.

E. had a real way with kids. Before I’d become pregnant we’d done a six-month road trip from Utah to Costa Rica, and in every town we entered he was like the Pied Piper. Kids just couldn’t stay away from him. Unfortunately, neither could women. But that’s a whole other story that I may have to explain eventually, but not now.

The technician was a friendly woman a few years from retirement who looked like she’d been doing this since before I was born. She attached each electrode with a dab of conducting gel, a challenging task given that Ben had clearly inherited his dad’s impossibly thick Jew fro.
“Sit still, honey,” I said “otherwise we wont be able to find out how radioactive you are.” The technician shot me a quizzical look. “Like Spiderman”, I explained.
“M’okay”, she said, in a tone that was understanding enough, though a tad jaded. I tried to imagine what it was like doing this job day in and day out. Of course all the kids wouldn’t be three. But she must have heard some pretty tragic stories.
She was about half way through Ben’s electro-do when E. arrived. I stayed long enough to get instructions. Our job was to keep Ben sitting and busy and to keep our eye out for any seizures. Crammed near the desk was a bed Ben could go to if he needed to sleep. The room seemed to me, unnecessarily small and cluttered with furniture and machinery. But I understood this better when it became clear that as much as possible we needed to keep Ben’s face in view of a video camera that would be recording, along with the EEG brain waves, any evidence of seizures. We were also given a chart and a pencil to record whatever we observed.

I went home, ate a decent meal and called my parents to explain the situation. I needed to get a more complete family history for Ben. Neither of my parents was especially close to their brothers and sisters. But I had close to twenty first cousins spread out across North America, (including Jocko whose brain tumor I wrote about earlier.) As far as I knew none of them had any neurological problems, but I figured I should ask my parents to check with my aunts and uncles anyways.

When I got back to the hospital Ben was sleeping, and E. was decidedly grumpy. “So if I understand this correctly, they have to catch him in a seizure to get any valid information” he said with just a touch of accusation.
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“But he hasn’t had a seizure right!”
“Well they seemed to think the smell hallucinations were seizures.”
“Okay. But what if they weren’t hallucinations. Maybe he just smelled something, or tasted something.”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t have brought him here if I thought that.”
“So what happens if there’s no seizure.”?
“I don’t know.”
“What’s going to stop them from keeping him here forever.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because that’s what THEY do.”
It had been a long time since I’d had to wrestle with the problem of THEM. I wouldn’t go as far as calling E. a conspiracy theorist. His interest in these things usually bordered more on campy than paranoid. But like many people, the world just seemed to make a lot more sense to him when it was being controlled by somebody’s nefarious plan. I’d indulged him early in our relationship, enough to endure one romantic night in Nevada, under the starry, stealth bomber dotted sky of Area 51. But I’d also spent way too many hours defending my “naiveté” about the moon landing, and learning way more than I wanted to know about the Rosicrucians. I wasn’t in the mood for this now. But neither was I in the mood for an argument.

“Yeah. I’m not going to worry about that. Let’s just find out what the tests say.”
“They’re not going to say anything. You just don’t get it do you?”
“No I don’t. And to be honest THEY can keep us here as long as they want, as long as it ends with THEM not finding anything. I would way rather be mourning the loss of my time than my son.”
“Well. I’ve got to go,” he said giving me the condescending look I’d long since learned to ignore. And it’s a good guess there was a look on my face he was also ignoring.
“Thanks for staying this long” I said and I meant that sincerely. The truth was if there was a crisis E. would be there in a second. And his insights would probably be invaluable. He just wasn’t so hot in the times of non-crisis. And I hoped very much this was one of those times.

Ben had a nice long nap, and by the time we finished watching an incredibly lame Disney version of Peter and the Wolf staring a younger Kirstey Alley as Peter’s spacey single mother, his EEG test was finished.
We went upstairs to spend the rest of the day in our room in the neurology ward ignoring and being ignored by our sleep deprived roommates.
I was really ready to leave this place. It was well past the 24-hour danger period and I hadn’t seen anything I’d recognized as a seizure. I was sure they wouldn’t keep us here another night.

At around 5 p.m., a team of doctors entered the room, led by another pretty Quebecois neurologist. It was 2004 and Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t on television yet, but in my memory (perhaps because of my date with Dr. J) it was kind of like that except bilingual. Dr. D was blond and small, kind of like a cross between Izzy and Miranda. She had such a stern look on her face when she entered the room surrounded by what appeared to be her students, my first thought was she was pissed with me.

Maybe she was angry that we’d been admitted at all, wasting valuable bed space and EEG time. Maybe she was about to show the residents surrounding her just how to kick neurotic, cyberchondriac mothers out of her ward and make sure they never come back. Fine by me. Before she’d even opened her mouth I was mentally and physically preparing to get myself out of here as soon as possible.

“Hello Mrs. Waters. How’s Ben? Any problems since the test.”
“No. Nothing” I said in a tone meant to convey how willing I was to be sent on my way. “I think he’s ready to go home.”
“Well…” the serious look on her shifted slightly to a look I would get to know all too well. At the time I didn’t realize how much of a neurologist’s job involved managing expectations. But she had what I can now call her warm wet towel look. I don’t know if this was something cultivated in med school or in front of the mirror, but it seemed to me a look carefully calibrated to dampen hope, but not entirely extinguish it.
“Ben’s EEG results were highly unusual for a child his age.”
“ Unusual?”
“Normally the results we saw would indicate something very deep in the brain. But as I said it’s very rare to see results like this in children so young.“
“Deep in the brain?” The words seemed to move across my tongue like wooly ice cubes. I’d brought him in here because I suspected there was something wrong, for some reason I hadn’t actually prepared myself for there actually being something wrong. And “deep in the brain” sounded really wrong. I went immediately into denial. “You know, I forgot to write this down. But at one point he scratched his head and moved one of the electrodes. Do you think it could be that? ”
She gave me a tiny smile that was pretty much like giving the warm wet towel a little squeeze. “No that’s not what it is. We need to do some more extensive tests. I’d like to do a 24-hour EEG and we’ll probably follow that up with an MRI. I don’t know when we can get an MRI appointment. We’ll try for as soon as possible. But right now I can’t tell you how long you’re going to be here. I will say, though, my gut feeling is it’s epilepsy.”
I was numb. My mind wasn’t even ready yet to register the word epilepsy. “24 hours?? He can’t sit in that room for 24 hours.”
“Don’t worry. The surroundings are more comfortable for the longer tests. They do it up here in the ward.”
Leaving me with that not very reassuring reassurance, she and her team continued on their rounds. There was not much else now for me to do but call E.

To be continued

The Only Thing Worse Than Not Being Taken Seriously

Ben, Self-Portrait #2

You may want to read the first part of this story, The Smell--if you want to find out how I ended up in an examining room at the E.R of the Montreal Children’s Hospital with my three-year-old son, Ben, his father, and a doctor I’d recently dated

“Yeah, the Internet. It’s bringing a lot of people in here these days” he said with more of a Brooklyn accent than I remembered from our date.

I’d just finished explaining the reason for our Emergency Room visit to Jason who will henceforth be known as Dr. J (because as I would later discover, he had changed his mind about quitting his medical residency. His plan was now to finish it, but probably quit medicine eventually to pursue a deeper dream, party DJ.)

I did feel mildly insulted that he saw me more as a neurotic mother than an astonishing self-taught diagnostician.

(“So, Juliet Waters, in one morning you taught yourself enough about medicine to detect your apparently healthy three year old son’s developing brain tumor?”
“Yes, Oprah. Though, honestly, my googling skills and impressive instincts would have led nowhere if it weren’t for Canadian Medicare and the on-line personals at Salon.com”)

But I also felt relief. What mother wouldn’t choose an embarrassing case of cyberchondria over brain tumor related terror?

One of the advantages, however, of talking to a guy you had recently dated and lost interest in, over a doctor you might want to impress with your responsible character, is you can say things like: “Yeah, it’s probably just me being a crazy overprotective mother. But it was weird, the way Ben reacted to this smell. The way he shifted so quickly from this intense anxiety to total calm. It was like he was on acid or something.”

“Hmm…Well, first things first, we should do a medical history” said Dr. J, switching back into doctor mode, which he was surprisingly good at when he put his mind to it. “Any history of neurological problems in the family?”

“Not that I know of” said Ben’s father. “But most of my family is back in Israel, so there could be stuff I don’t know about.”

“My uncle has Parkinson’s” I offered, “but that didn’t start until he was in his 70s. And he had a really strong brain until then. I do have a cousin who had a brain tumor when he was young, which is probably why I’m being so vigilant.”

“You have a cousin who had a brain tumor?” asked Ben’s father, who will from here on be known as E. (The first letter of his name.)

“Yes my cousin, Jocko”

“Jocko? You have a cousin named Jocko?

(Potential single mothers, think about having children with ex-boyfriends you only lived with briefly. It can be a real time waster in the E.R.)

How about “epilepsy?” Dr J asked

We both shook our heads.

“What about your delivery? How was that?”

E. let out what was now becoming his signature sigh. “Oh man, if you let her start talking about that, we’re going to be here for hours.”

I shot him a dirty look. “It was a pretty bad delivery.”

“In what way?” asked Dr J.

For a helpful memory aid I flashed back to our pre-natal course reunion class, where we were all invited to come back and tell our delivery stories. When we entered the class the teacher had drawn a big chart on the blackboard with every intervention, natural and unnatural, that could happen in a delivery: water breaking, labor induction, bad fetal position, episiotomy, forceps, and caesarean. As she called out each intervention those of us to whom it had applied put up our hands and received a checkmark in the appropriate box. “Ohh… kay, Juliet, I think we’ll be saving your story until last” I remember her saying when she noticed that every single box under my name was full.

To complete the story I had to add a few things, like the 9 lb 4 ounce birth weight, and the four hours of pushing with a cheerleading midwife while the doctors were on shift change.

I still remember how the midwife warned me just before they were rolling me into the operating room that when they handed me my baby, I should be really careful not to form any first impressions. But even with his black and blue swollen cone head and a bloody gash on his forehead from the forceps, I was smitten (or to be neuroscientifically accurate, still high on oxytocin, the natural bonding opiate the female brain starts pumping during labor. After twenty-six hours of contractions and four hours of pushing, I must have been totally whacked on that shit.)

Dr. J. wrote down the important details of my heroic story of endurance, love, and hospital negligence and then asked: “Any head injuries as a baby?”

Silence.

“This will be a shorter story” E promised. And now it was time for my sigh.

“When he was almost a year old, I put Ben in this new stroller, and I guess I hadn’t quite figure out the breaks. And I forgot my purse, which was right in the vestibule, like ten feet way. But while I was reaching for it, somehow Ben managed to propel the stroller off the porch and down the stairs onto the sidewalk.”

“The concrete sidewalk” E added.

“He had a pretty bad contusion on his forehead, but we brought him right in for x-rays and they seemed to think he was fine.

“Did he pass out?

“No.” Suddenly I realized what with the forceps gash, and the stroller skull bashing, Ben’s head had already taken quite the beating in his relatively short life.

“Anything else?

I quietly shook my head.

“All right I guess it’s time for me to get to know Ben.” He started with the usual doctor stuff, reflexes, heartbeat, and then he asked him a few questions to test his intellectual development.

“Can you count, Ben?”

“Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelvethirteenfourteenfifteen—“

I interrupted. “He’s been counting to fifty in three languages since he was two.”

“Three languages?” said E.

“Yeah” I replied, surprised he didn’t know this. “English, French and Hebrew.”

“Hebrew? I don’t speak to him in Hebrew.”

“You must. He’s been teaching me Hebrew for months now. Just last week I asked him the word for eggs and told me it was peers.”

“That’s not the Hebrew word for eggs!”

We both looked at Ben, who giggled.

“We really don’t have any concerns about his intellectual development” I said to Dr. J. Though it suddenly hit me if Ben was already mastering, at the early age of three, the fine art of fucking with me, we may have solved the whole smell mystery right there.

To my surprise Dr. J didn’t see it that way. “I should really go right now and see if I can catch the neurology resident before she heads off on rounds” he said, looking at his watch. “But, listen. The important thing to focus on is that he’s obviously really healthy and bright. What you described, though, does kind of sound like a temporal lobe seizure. It’s one of the first things they teach us in med school. So, you were right to bring him in.”

Twenty minutes later, the young, pretty Quebecois neurology resident agreed. She wanted to admit him overnight until they could get an appointment for an EEG the next morning.

“What worries me” she said, “is that this seizure you’ve described has happened three times in the last 24 hours. These could be signals something bigger is about to happen. So I’d be happier if we kept him here until we have a better idea of what’s going on.”

And that’s how I learned, to paraphrase the great Oscar Wilde, that there are times when it does feel like the only thing worse than not being taken seriously is -- being taken seriously.

Next episode: I learn that the only thing worse than an extended stay in the neurology ward of a children’s hospital is pretty much nothing.

The Smell

Ben, self-portrait

“Oh, Mommy, it smells. It smells.”

Ben rubbed his hand hard into his face, as though the smell would only go away if he wiped his entire nose off. It was early spring in Montreal. And we were in the park, a thawing freezer full of smell. Month old dog crap, maple tree mulch, six month old litter, a flattened dead starling only now starting its decomposition, its tiny soul, hopefully, long gone from here.

The smell disappeared as quickly as it arrived. So, I didn’t think twice about it.

Later that day he complained the same way about the smell in our living room. But our living room pretty much always smelled back then. I’m a very (and I’m being kind to myself here) poor housekeeper. Still, he’d never complained about the smell before. He was three, and stubbornly opposed to toilet training. The source, not usually the diviner of smells.

And he'd never complained about a smell that I couldn’t smell. When you live in a persistent state of low-grade squalor you actually develop a pretty keen olfactory sense for anything new or actually dangerous. Which may be why we were both so robustly healthy (or at least that's the theory that I'm sticking with.)

Maybe this was a new development stage? Learning just how to shame your overwhelmed single mother and her various smells? But before I could start to take this personally, it disappeared. The smell, the anxiety about the smell, the whole problem.

Which was weird in itself. A good couple of years had passed since anxiety was a mood that flashed quickly across my son’s forehead. Transient emotions were for babies. By three, kids have long learned the trick of nurturing a negative emotion into its fullest possible lifespan.

No mother worries about a stillborn tantrum. Not the first time.

But then it happened again over Cheerios the next morning. This smell so intense it brought him to tears, but so ephemeral that after twenty seconds he didn’t seem to remember it.

“What does it smell like, sweetie.”
“Cheerios.”
“No, no, the smell you were so upset about just now.”
“What smell?”
“The one that made you cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“No, before …” But I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere.

I decided to try a different tack inspired by vague memories of something I’d read, somewhere, once: “Was it a burning smell?”
“Buhning?”
I searched my head for examples of burning, but he was a city kid. We didn’t build fires. I’d given up smoking almost five years before. There were no matches around for him to play with. And it was clear that his interest in this conversation was long over.

It was Monday morning. I brought him to daycare, and then went for a morning run. But I couldn’t seem to get rid of that image of him, forehead rutted with anxiety, tears sprouting out of his eyes and the palm desperately twisting into his nose. And then the sudden and total evaporation of whatever it was that was causing this.

That wasn’t my kid. When something bothered him that much, he didn’t move on. This kind of flash fluid relationship with emotion. Like I said, that was babies, and maybe later, teenagers experimenting with mushrooms. And smell doesn't work that way. Any smell strong enough to cause that level of anxiety wouldn't just disappear, it would linger. And wouldn't I be able to smell it?

So I came home and did what mothers do in this day and age. Surfed the Internet until I found enough information about smell hallucinations to totally freak myself out.

It was possible that I was just looking for distraction. I’d recently handed in the manuscript of my first book, so I had time and a brain that had already started trawling for a new obsession. But it was also possible, according to what I was reading, that Ben had a brain tumor.

I called our family doctor, but she had just had twins, was on half maternity leave and her secretary was referring anything that couldn’t be dealt with next month to community clinics. I didn’t want to spend three hours waiting in a clinic until they did one of two things: dismiss me as a one of those Munchausen’s mothers who were appearing on pretty much every 10 o’clock drama on network television that year--you know the ones who invent faux medical symptoms for their children just for attention--or send me to emergency to wait another five hours so they could dismiss my healthy child and me, as a Munchausen’s mother.

Suddenly I remembered the medical resident I had met online a few months before. Damn what was his name again? And why exactly had I brushed him off?

Oh yeah, because he had shown up at our date with a copy of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and told me that he’d recently decided to quit med school, three months before the end of his residency, to become a writer. And he was short. Really short. Not a bad thing in my opinion, since he was cute, in an unfortunately Roman Polanski kind of way, but still cute. The last unusually short cute guy I’d gone out with, however, had really broken my heart. And this whole quitting med school three months shy of a degree, while reading a book Musil spent twenty years writing, and which he actually never finished before his death.... it all seemed more like an emotional crisis than an actual life plan.

And at the time I had a looming book deadline and a scary book contract with a big New York publisher. So I decided to, just this once, throw the fish back in the water and forget him long before it all started to fall apart, or undermine my already chaotic life, like these crisis relationships with really short men always did.

And just this once I was doing a really good job of it because I couldn’t even remember his name.

But I couldn’t seem to forget the possible brain tumor. My cousin had been diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of 18. They fucked up the surgery and now he was a paraplegic. A heroic paraplegic, who had spearheaded the students with disability program at the Montreal University I’d attended and was currently completing a masters in art therapy. I admired him, but despite the good life he'd built for himself, I couldn't take even the possibility of a brain tumor lightly.

So I called Ben’s father and asked him if he had the time to spend the day hanging out with us in Emergency at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. He did, though that didn’t mean he believed that anything was wrong. On the way to the hospital he asked Ben to describe the smell. “Caca!” Ben said proudly with the cute little Quebecois accent he was picking up a daycare. I suspected he was liking the word more than remembering the smell, but his father took this answer as permission to commence what would turn out to be roughly six hours of impatient sighing.

I’m not sure, now, why I thought it was a good idea to bring someone who was going to be so relentlessly skeptical. Oh yeah, because as his biological father, he was the only person obligated to share the responsibility of keeping Ben entertained while we wallowed for most of the day on the low priority list. And if Ben did have a brain tumor that needed immediate removal, but might risk disabling him for the rest of his life, I would probably be obligated to talk the situation over with him anyways. And, frankly, I probably thought that if both parents were there, they might take the situation more seriously.

But I can’t say I blamed him for the skepticism. It was hard to look at our energetic good-humored son, running around the E.R. playspace and believe anything was wrong with him. So after five hours, Ben’s dad had almost succeeded in talking me into going back home.

We were just gathering our things to go when we heard our name being called on the intercom. Ben’s father heaved one final long suffering sigh and followed me though the maze of hallways until we reached the examining room, where we waited another half hour, until the resident who had been given our case entered our room, all confidence and charisma.

And that’s when I remembered his name. “Jason!”

Unfortunately he didn’t look as happy to see me as I did him, and his cheerful entrance soon evaporated into the awkward “Hey… how are you?” you get from a guy whose last e-mail you kind of never got around to answering.

But I remained thrilled, because fate it seemed, had put me in the path of the one doctor in the city of Montreal who probably wouldn't suspect Munchausen's. Though at that point I obviously hadn't thought deeply enough about why fate might want to do that.

To be continued