Free Ten Days by Janet Gilsdorf

muffin.
    She turned back to the children. “Hey, Sawyer.” She tapped the boy’s chubby hand as it palmed another fist full of o ’s into his mouth. “No more eating or you might not have enough Cheerios to finish the necklace. Keep stringing.”

Chapter 8
    Jake
     
     
     
     
     
    C hris lay curled like a lynx in Jake’s lap. His son’s right ankle dangled between his calves, the pajama leg pushed up past the scratches on his knee, the result of a disagreement with Bullet. Chris, still asleep, squirmed and his fingers clawed at the uppermost scratch. He caught his son’s hand, clamped it against his chest.
    Anna slouched in a chair in the corner of the waiting room, the hem of her nightgown taut against her knee, her eyes hidden behind her hands. Maybe she was asleep or maybe she had retreated into her own world. He couldn’t tell which.
    Something about the lighting—the olive green glow from the plastic seat cushions, the electric blue glare from the fluorescent lights, the dark blond striations of Anna’s uncombed hair, the apricot tint of her cheeks—made her look old. As people walked in and out of the room, their shadows, eerie shades of gray, wafted ominously across her forehead.
    “Excuse me, Dr. Campbell.” The papers in the young man’s hands quivered, his voice was tentative. “My name’s Sunil Patel and I’m the med student in the ER today.” He picked up a National Geographic and set one of the papers, askew, on the cover for support. “Your son needs a spinal tap and Dr. Easterday sent me to get the consent form signed.” He pointed to the sheet of paper on the magazine.
    Jake didn’t read it. He knew what it said: The possible complications of a spinal tap include bleeding or pain at the needle’s insertion site, post-spinal headache, nerve damage, hematoma, paralysis, and herniation of the brain stem into the foramen magnum.
    Foramen magnum. Big hole. It was the drain hole at the bottom of the skull. He winced, shook his head, tried to banish the images that raced through his mind. Brain stem herniation. Eddie’s soft little brain stem, the command center for his breathing and his heartbeat, could jam through the drain hole during the spinal tap, shoved downward by the pressure inside his head. A near instant killer.
    He shook his head again. The risk of herniation was minuscule; Eddie’s open fontanel would protect him.
    Chris wiggled. Jake stroked his leg. Was Eddie’s fontanel still open? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt his baby’s soft spot. No matter, the risk was tiny, the rest of the complications relatively minor.
    He pulled a pen from his scrub shirt pocket, turned the form to fit squarely over the magazine cover, and scribbled his signature on the line at the bottom.
    “Date?” he muttered.
    Sunil glanced at his watch. “Um . . . April fifteen, I believe.”
    Jake wrote the date on the next line. He stared at what he had written. “Jacob S. Campbell, MD.” The trailer “MD”—med-ical doctor, the signature of a physician—was scrawled beyond recognition. He wrote those two letters behind his name a hundred times a week—on insurance forms and prescriptions, on medication orders and X-ray requisitions. Sometimes, at home, when he wasn’t paying attention, he wrote them on checks to Detroit Edison or on the income tax return. Last week he had written it on a birthday card Anna had passed in front of him, her finger pointing to the white space beneath the greeting. Here, his signature, Jacob S. Campbell, MD, was on the consent form for his son’s spinal tap. It seemed very wrong, an error of colossal proportions. Something had gone badly awry.
    He knew what was happening on the other side of the door to the patient area—he’d done maybe ten spinal taps himself, back when he was a medical student. Eddie would be lying on a gurney. One of the nurses would be holding Eddie, his body folded into a C, against the sheet. One of her hands would be