This one will take a (very extended) bit and I won’t blame you if you can’t make it all the way through it, or if you want to count your losses and bail out now. I promise. I am nothing if not a thorough person. It’s what makes me unique, even if long-winded and in turn exhaustive to befriend (my apologies, sort of). I don’t half-ass much, except for apparently my sleep and sometimes gym and eating habits. And I had never half-assed work – I’ve loved my job for so long – until it hit far too close to home for me.

Let’s venture back to February of 2015 for this one. I had been a 911 dispatcher for 5.5 years at that time with a plethora of training and a steeled mind against most everything I’ve encountered. It can seem cruel to some, and I realize most of us who do this job have a twisted sense of curiosity and humor, but it’s what gets us by. And I mean that. You will NOT survive this job if you can’t put a barrier between yourself and what you’re dealing with because it WILL take a toll on you. This is not to say we are not compassionate, but rather far from that. We are empathetic and attached and somehow we are also just solid. We save our emotions for the drive home; the days off; the breaks we get in between calls. We are robots and we have to stay this way so we don’t break down in the middle of a traumatizing 911 call and lose the ability to help you through your worst crisis ever. See…it makes sense, right?

Things here become routine. I’ve talked so many people through CPR on a loved one, coached them through hostage situations, listened to them cry out of pure fear during a domestic violence incident when their whole world has been uprooted in the worst of ways, given them instructions during febrile seizures on their newborn babies and I’ve also had my heart torn in a million pieces over so many losses along with my coworkers. You never expect it’s going to pay a visit in your own home. All of the things that get thrown our way, and somehow we are emboldened enough to feel exempt from it all; as if working this job gives you a free pass to coast on through any of these problems. Reality check: it doesn’t.

February 7th, 2015 – I was working my normal graveyard shift and my sweet 1-year-old baby girl was with Grammie for the night. She absolutely loves going there because it means she also gets some time with her other favorite tiny human, “Cuzzy!” He is 10 months older than she is and they are inseparable. They are so much more like siblings than cousins, and they shriek with excitement every time they see each other. My mom took them to a friend’s party and was headed home to tackle the bathtime-bedtime routine (daily parenting survival test – especially with 2 babies under 2!). I’m shortly into my shift when I get a call transferred to my line from a coworker saying there’s a call for me by name. I will always vividly remember this, because my first instinctual reaction was “Who in the world would be calling me here? My (now) husband knows where I am, Jet’s dad knows how to reach me…Mom just texts me if she has questions…I haven’t called anyone for work-related stuff that needed a call back and I always use my operator number….”

I was running through the rolodex of possible answers to the original question when my mom was suddenly on the line barely holding herself together. “Elisabeth, Jet’s having a seizure. You need to leave work now, we are in the medic unit and going to the hospital. I’m so so sorry. They can’t get her to stop seizing and she’s not getting air….” I have an obligation to my job. I have an obligation to my officers, my units, my coworkers, the public; I can’t just get up and leave. I have to wait to be relieved from my console, where I’m tethered to a radio, before I can drive like a bat-out-of-hell to get to my baby girl. The baby girl that isn’t breathing anymore. Nothing in my 5.5 years of service here could have prepared me for this. It all faded away and I instead became that person I am so used to serving on the other end of the line. The panic, the fear, the dread and the devastation sacked me. What am I going to do? What if I can’t get to her in time? What if they can’t save her?

The “drive carefully” wishes on my way out the door had no place in my life at that moment. I didn’t care. I drove like a complete asshat to get to my daughter. Meanwhile, I have to call my mom back again and find out where they are going, tell my now-husband, and most importantly: get Jet’s dad on the phone. I start calling him on repeat to no avail, when I finally get a text asking what’s going on. At this point, we were still not getting along regularly and communication was sparse. I finally get an answer and he tells me he’s at the airport boarding a flight back to Arizona. I caught him just in time to deplane and also bolt to the hospital to meet us. I’m still so grateful for that timing. I needed him there – I couldn’t do this alone, not without Jet’s daddy.

I sprinted into the ER fueled only by adrenaline, to my daughter on a table with 8 people surrounding her including the medic unit officers and ER staff. The seizure finally stopped after about 25 minutes, but she still wasn’t breathing. Her clothes had been cut off, and this tiny human of mine looked so larger-than-life and just different in those moments. That couldn’t be my baby; there must be a mixup. No way is that her lifeless and purple body I’m looking at. She seemed so swollen and beat up as if she had been in a horrible accident. I went through so many stages of shock and grief in just those few moments that I remember first trying to rescue my mother, who was understandably a wreck, to then complaining that Jet’s brand new clothes were ruined when I had run out of things to say, and at last nearly collapsing myself as I realized what was really happening. Mom keeps running the staff through what exactly happened while the doctors are getting me caught up to speed as well:

Mom was driving on her way back from the party with both babies in tow, with Jet in her rear-facing carseat, when she smelled some vomit. Jet only drinks goat milk since she weaned, which is quite the caustic and distinctly repulsive odor, so she knew it had to be Jet even though she couldn’t actually see her. They had been driving on the freeway and due to road noise she couldn’t hear anything at the time, but as she exited she heard some more gurgling sounds. Mom figured she was spitting up some more, so she kept heading for home which was only a few minutes away. Then, it got worse: actual choking. She raced the last couple of minutes home and when she got out of the car she found Jet in a full-blown seizure and asphyxiating on her vomit. Her teeth were clenched, causing her to choke repeatedly on it with no relief. The medics were there within minutes and after 4 rounds of anti-seizure meds she still wasn’t recovering. My mom rode along in the medic unit and was on her way to the hospital, while my step-dad took over watching “Cuzzy.”

Again, all of the training in the world and my career could not have steeled me enough for this. Mom and I held each other and stood outside of the ER room while they were working on her and we looked on so helplessly. Then, at last, she was breathing. Oh Sweet Baby Jesus, my daughter is alive and You are so good. She had to be intubated, but she was breathing again. She had yet to wake up, but that was to be expected with how much medication she had been given. Then, Daddy walked in just in time (missing all of this initial drama) for us to be moved to the PICU and get settled in for the next part of this ride.

Next order of business: Why? She had been sick for the week before, running a mild temperature, but nothing too unusual. She had been a little loopy and crabby when waking from her nap that day while I was on my way out the door to work, but no one likes to be fussed with when they just wake up. Febrile seizures are so common in my job, so it’s something I know a decent amount about, but this wasn’t it. Those generally last for a few minutes at a time and go away just as quickly as they came on. Jet’s seizure was estimated to be at 25 minutes from the time it was known, which doesn’t speak for the amount of time she may have been seizing prior to it being witnessed. The doctors immediately got to work with a huge team and started drawing up all of their options. Could it be meningitis? Could it be a brain tumor? Had she had any recent falls aside from the usual bumbling early-walker toddler phase? Any notable head injuries? What? What? WHAT? Nothing. We have nothing to give. And we have no history of these, no genetic predisposition we can come up with.

The neurologist comes to visit and we instantly love him. He’s a ginger, just like Jet, so that’s a given. He asks us if she’s always had a lazy eye and we panic. She was extremely drowsy from all of the meds, but she had started responding some, although her left eye wasn’t tracking at all. He says in this case, it’s likely from all of the medication, but we will need to keep watching it in case it’s something related directly to the seizure. And now it’s time for testing – they want an EEG and MRI done, but to do the EEG they need her to be asleep for the majority of it, and it’s quite the lengthy process of attaching all those electrodes to a wiggly (even when sedated) toddler. Then they need to wake her up toward the end so they can measure the change in behavior upon waking. It’s a long day and a long process, and then she gets to be sedated all over again to go through the MRI. It was so painful putting her back under and whisking her away after she had finally started responding to us again, then anxiously waiting since we weren’t allowed to go in.

The wait was impossible – how do you distract yourself while you can’t hold your baby and all you want is answers? There’s no consolation in this. The cafeteria sucks. The hallways suck. The aimless walks suck.  The rooms suck. The people suck. Suck suck suck. Everything sucks and nothing is sufficient. Then they come back and tell us everything is normal! That does NOT suck. The EEG doesn’t show any seizure activity, which is good because so far that means it’s isolated, but it still begs so many questions about why. The MRI is also normal, even though she has slightly more fluid on the brain, which we learn about at her follow-up appointment later. We’ll take it! We’re issued a recovery medication for her that has to be put up her tiny little baby butt if she has another seizure, due to the severity of this one, with the hopes of decreasing the length if there’s a next time. We’re released sometime on day 2 and we go home and zone out. Lots of sleeping, lots of drooling, not a whole lot of recollection of the next few days while we readjust to everything.

Jet has always been very vocal with quite the expanded vocabulary. After this, she has lost most of her motor skills function, has an awful lazy eye, and can’t walk. She can’t talk to me at all except for what sounds like garbled attempts as if she’s had a severe stroke. We are back at square one and learning all over again for about 2 weeks while her medication side effects wear off slowly. It’s devastating to see and it’s honestly so damn hopeless. Will this be our normal now? She gets so frustrated trying to tell me what she wants because she can’t get the words out, so she breaks down screaming and thrashing. It’s not her fault. She knows the words; she just can’t speak the right language. Her (also adored) pediatrician assures us it will all come back to her with just a little more time. Being patient is hard, but he was right. Fortunately, she is back to her bounding and joyful self within a couple weeks.

We have a follow up appointment and we pelt our much-adored neurologist with everything we can think of. Mostly: How can we be sure when she’s having another seizure? He tells us that it’s most likely for them to occur while she’s waking or falling asleep – that in-and-out of consciousness state – and that there is absolutely no way for us to really know. We can’t hover over her 24 hours a day (although in my head I’m thinking “why the hell not?!”), and there’s not really any device proven effective enough to warn us of any change in breathing pattern or muscle spasms. So we just have to be diligent and avoid being around anyone who may be sick in case it was febrile-related. Although the neuro team hasn’t really heard of a seizure quite like hers, it still somehow falls into a “normal” range of seizure activity, even if it can’t be categorized for now.

It was only this solo occurrence that we were aware of, so we decide to just keep moving forward and hope it’s still an isolated incident. Of course this is not without some psychotic hovering, checking the baby multiple times per night, an increased (as if that were possible) lack of sleep, and mental and emotional unrest on my part. And this is all normal, in my opinion, by the way. And yet somehow I try to coach the rest of you through this on the phone and try to assure you it’s not a big deal. Ha, I’m a joke. And I’m now ruined for good at my job. I go back to work a week later and right away I work an extended febrile seizure call for a little baby while I’m dispatching for the fire department. I instantly puke in my trash can at my console and break into subsequent tears. I lose my shit. I lose it hard. I can’t cope….