Klingon Spinal Taps and Van Johnson’s Never Heard of Van Johnson

Yeah, so a few short weeks back this happened…. That’s our youngest son, six-year-old Jonathan, parked in the triage room of our local ER…..for the second time in three months. It all started on a Saturday when the lad began running a mild fever. Clocking in at about 101-ish, and showing no other symptoms, his illness du jour didn’t seem like anything worth making a fuss about. We poured a couple milliliters of Tylenol into one of those plastic medicine shot glasses and he downed it like a cowboy tossing back two fingers of Redeye at the local saloon.  After a while his fever broke and he was his usual, happy self … for a couple of hours. Eventually the meds wore off, his temperature spiked, and we repeated the process all over again. And again … and again.

Make mine ibuprofen, in a dirty glass.

Saturday night he began complaining of headaches and a stiff neck which the wife and I attributed to the general crappyness one often feels when down with a cold … because as two people with liberal arts degrees we’re entirely comfortable making medical diagnoses. Then Monday morning came. By then he was still running a temperature and the pain in his neck had progressed to the point where he couldn’t turn his head. We decided to keep him home from school and the wife suggested that I bring him by the doctor’s office … an idea which I was tempted to dismiss as needless “helicopter parenting” and the waste of a $15 copay.

I knew, based on my years of experience dealing with sick children, that at the end of the day this was just going to be a simple fever and the doc would send us home prescribing nothing but bed rest and Gatorade. But the thing with his neck was … pretty weird. In the end I decided to toss my apathy (and that $15) to the wind and bring him by our doctor’s office.  I carry Jonathan in, because he’s now having trouble walking,  and plop him down at the nurse’s station. As she’s taking his vitals (temp, blood pressure, etc.) she asked the reason for our visit.

“He’s had a fever for a couple of days. Oh, yeah and he’s got this thing with is neck.”

“Thing?” she asked. “It hurts.  He says he can’t turn head.” This is the point in movies where you hear that sound effect of a record being scratched to a halt.

“Wait here.” The nurse said in a somewhat alarmed tone.

She came back seconds later with our family doctor who does a lighting round rendition of his usual examination then says, “You need to take him to the ER.”

“Like now?” I responded. Which of course is a stupid question, because when somebody says your child needs an EMERGENCY ROOM there’s seldum an implicit “whenever you get around to it” attached. The doctor explained there was a chance young Jonathan might have meningitis and would need a battery of tests to make sure. I scooped the boy up and headed back to the van. On the way to the hospital I stopped by our house and picked up what we now refer to as “Jonathan’s Hospital Bag”, a small backpack filled with coloring books and toys … then made the obligatory, “It’s probably nothing, but I’m taking him to the ER” call to my wife.

We rolled into UCLA’s Santa Monica Hospital about noon and handed them a note from our doctor explaining the  concerns. “Just have a seat,” the admission person said. “We’ll get you right in.”

Sitting in the waiting area it dawned on me that I really had no idea what meningitis was. I pulled out my trusty Iphone and did a quick Google search. The first words I read made my heart skip a beat: “A potentially life threatening condition….”

Oh, crap.

Turns out Meningitis is an inflammation of the protective membrane that covers your brain and spinal cord, most often caused by some viral or bacterial infection. It’s principal warning signs are fever … and neck stiffness. Ding!

Some other fun facts I discovered were: “If untreated bacterial meningitis is almost always fatal.”

Double, crap.

You waited how long to bring this child in? Nice job, dill weed.

There were also long paragraphs, often in bold red letters, talking about the importance of early detection and prompt treatment. Patients who are even suspected of having meningitis are often put on antibiotics before their lab work comes back because any delay can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system. This is especially true with young children where “there are several potential disabilities which can result from delayed treatment such as sensorineural hearing loss, epilepsy, learning and behavioral difficulties, as well as decreased intelligence…” And remember, Jonathan had been sick for days before we even considered taking him to the doctor.

Triple crap.

So there I was, composing my acceptance speech for “Father of The Year”, when my lovely wife arrived. By this time Jonathan had been moved to a bed in the ER and was hooked up to an IV and several machines that go PING. I brought her up to speed on what had happened … minus the part where my laxidasical approach to seeking medical care may have endangered the life of our child.

“Where’s the doctor?”, she asked.

As if he’d been waiting for his queue, the doctor walked in. He was an older gentleman with a name embroidered on the front of his lab coat that looked as though it’d been assembled from a random handful of Scrabble tiles. He explained, in an accent that could have been Dutch, Hindi or perhaps even Klingon, that the only way to confirm (or rule out) meningitis was to perform a “lumbar puncture”. Essentially sticking a needle into his spinal cord and drawing out some fluid to be tested for signs of infection.

It's just like tapping a beer keg. If by keg you mean a thin tubular bundle of highly delicate nervous tissue and by beer you mean life sustaining cerebrospinal fluid.

As a mother, my wife became instantly nervous at the thought of somebody sticking a needle into her six-year-old’s spine. As an attorney she became double secret nervous when we were asked to sign a special liability waiver for this specific procedure. We were given a moment to “talk it over”, but since there really wasn’t a Plan B to fall back on, we gave the okay to press on.

At this point our nice Klingon doctor (I’m just going with that) explained, because this maneuver requires the patient to lay perfectly still most physicians nowadays will put young children under general anesthesia to keep them from wiggling. On the surface that seems reasonable, but there are always added risks and potential complications associated with “putting somebody under”.

“But I’m old school”, he said.  “With your permission I’d like to keep Jonathan awake. We’ll give him something to numb the area and I’ll have my assistant hold him still.” Hey, if that’s they way they did things back on his home world, who was I to argue?

Nurse get me a 25G bevelled spinal needle with stylet....and more Martok blood wine!

There was a quick flurry of activity as the hospital staff prepared for the procedure. Trays of instruments were brought in, lights were moved around and the doctor dawned his mask, gloves and other surgical garb. Jonathan was rolled onto his side and tucked into a fetal position by a large ER tech who then essentially laid on top of him to make sure Jonathan held still.

Now I imagine there’s two schools of thought when it comes to this question … how much do you explain to a six-year-old what’s about to happen? Some would say be vague and sugar coated. But that’s not the way our doc rolls. Instead we got: “Okay, Jonathan I’m going to stick a little needle under your skin and put some medicine in. It’ll feel a little like a bee sting. Then the medicine will make everything all numb. Okay. Now I’m going to use this other needle to go between your backbones. I need you to keep still so I get it in the right spot….”

You’d think something like that would panic a young child, but the guy had this super calm and confident cadence to his voice that was actually reassuring. Jonathan, while clearly not having fun, stayed relaxed and motionless during the entire ordeal. Our son wasn’t the only one mellowed out by the doctor’s air of uber competence. It was working on me as well. After a few moments I thought to myself, “this cat clearly knows his stuff. Between his talent and God’s good grace, everything’s going to be fine.”

From that point on I could not have been more relaxed if I was at home watching the procedure on the Discovery Channel. And what a fascinating procedure it was to watch! In my head I thought they’d just stick a syringe into Jonathan’s back and draw some material out like it was a blood sample. In actuality he slid a surprisingly large, hallow needle between two vertebra and let the fluid drip out into an open test tube that he held in his hand. It was literally like watching water drip from a faucet.

Naturally like any twenty-first century, middle class,  American man, my first instinct was to whip out my Iphone and start posting photos of it on Facebook. The wife saw me reach for my phone, immediately knew what I was up to, and shot me an icy look that said I’d be kneed in the groin if I started taking pictures.

At that point I began to think, “maybe I’m a little too relaxed here.” Clearly I need to feign some level of concern, if only for appearances sake. I called upon my years in the entertainment industry and did my best impersonation of somebody auditioning for the role of “Concerned Perent #2”. I furled my brow, paced nervously and wiped faux sweat from my forehead. It was my greatest performance! And it lasted about five seconds….

….at which point I became wildly distracted by the ER Tech holding Jonathan still. Or, to be more specific, I became distracted by his name badge which read “Van Johnson”.

Nope. I've never heard of me.

“Hey, are you any relation to the actor?”, I said.

“Pardon me?”, he replied.

“Van Johnson. The matinee idol from the 50’s and 60’s. He was in all those great movies.”

“Never heard of him.” He said abruptly, his arms still wrapped around Jonathan while the doctor continued to drain spinal fluid.

“Really?”

When somebody says they’ve never heard of so-and-so, well that’s the point at which common decency says the conversation should end. But come on! How could a guy with the super unlikely first name “Van” and the last name “Johnson” be totally unaware of that other guy with the super unlikely first name “Van” and the last name “Johnson” who…oh by the way…just happens to have played oposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Caine Mutiny”? I guarantee you each of the fifty Jack Webbs listed in the Los Angeles Yellow Pages know who Sargent Joe Friday was.

The Obsessive Compulsive and Film Nerd receptors in my brian were charged with dopamine at this point and I wasn’t about to let it go. I explained that he was in  “Battleground” , Vincente Minnelli’s “Brigadoon” with Gene Kelly and played that crew member of the Ruptured Duck who lost his leg in “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”.

“Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you, sir.” he said….clearly ready to move on.

“He did TV too. Love Boat, Fantasy Island….oh and he played himself on an episode of I Love Lucy, it was that one where the girls are trying to enter a big dance competition at the club but Ricky and Fred….”

My wife… strangely unimpressed with my knowledge of Korean War era Hollywood celebrities….began moving into within groin kneeing distance when the doctor suddenly announced: “What I’m seeing here right now is telling me that we’re not dealing with meningitis.”

Wait…what?

Apparently spinal fluid, when it’s infected, usually has a cloudy and/or discolored appearance. What was coming out of Jonathan was crystal clear. “We’ll still send a sample to the lab” he said, “but I’m pretty confident it’ll come back negative for meningitis.” Which….an hour later….is exactly what happened.

All of which begs the question, if he didn’t have meningitis….what did he have? We never really got a straight answer, but knowing that he DID NOT HAVE a deadly infection was really enough. Later I noticed that Jonathan’s discharge papers were stamped with the phrase “Diagnosis: Pyrexia”.

Pyrexia, come to find out, is the fancy medical way of saying … he just had a fever. A day later Jonathan was up on his feet and back at school. In the end the doctor sent us home prescribing nothing but bed rest and Gatorade.

You should have come here first and saved the co-pay, dill weed!

For those of you keeping score at home Jonathan has so far this year been rushed to the ER with symptoms of appendicitis (which he didn’t have) and symptoms of meningitis (which he didn’t have).

Walking back to the car I turned to my wife and joked, “Five bucks says he’ll show signs of menopause next.”

…and was swiftly kneed in the groin.