A Mother's Trial Read Free

birthday.”
    “Let’s keep our fingers crossed then,” Sara said.
    Priscilla studied Mindy as she held her. Priscilla tried to avoid comparing her children, but sometimes this was inevitable. She saw none of Tia’s beauty or charm in Mindy, who had a broad nose, slightly flattened against her high cheekbones, much yellower skin, and a wider face. Now even the bangs which Priscilla had proudly cultivated—thicker than Tia’s had ever grown—had been shaved off with a razor so an IV could be placed in a scalp vein. This mutilation had been accomplished, Priscilla had complained to Steve, by a doctor without children of her own. Apparently it had never occurred to Dr. Janet Specht how a mother would view the results. Priscilla thought the uneven shave made Mindy ugly and destroyed her best feature, and for no reason. Dr. Specht could have used a different vein for the IV.
    And Priscilla found Mindy less gratifying a child than her sister had been. Mindy did not accept things the way Tia had. She was a fighter—noisy and hard to please when she was irritated, which was often. She screamed at night, sometimes for hours. Still, Mindy had been with them only three and a half months—she was not legally adopted yet—and her previous experiences in a Korean orphanage and a Korean foster home hardly amounted to a stable home environment. Priscilla was a trained social worker, and she knew how hard it was for children to adjust to new family situations.
     
    The doctors didn’t really know what was wrong. They knew she had gastroenteritis, but they couldn’t find a cause. Perhaps it was because Mindy was Korean, Priscilla had often said. It was a point she and Sara had discussed. After all, Priscilla had been told by the adoption agency to expect diarrhea at first. That was a standard warning issued to all adoptive parents of Asian children. Or maybe it was just a bad attack of flu, she had suggested. They had all come down with it in the days before Mindy’s hospitalization. Priscilla and Steve, Erik and Jason. The whole family.
    Priscilla moved awkwardly on the uncomfortable chair. She had learned a great deal with Tia’s illness. She knew all about IVs and NGs, about electrolyte values and blood tests, about reducing substances and special formulas and dehydration.
    She had always insisted on total involvement, repeatedly informing the medical staff that nothing bothered her more than to be left out of things. Once an ugly scene over Tia’s care had developed at the Kaiser hospital in San Francisco. That had been in July, when the new year’s group of interns joined the staff, fresh from medical school. Some of the new doctors reacted defensively to her questions at first, but she had explained that she only wanted to help, and certainly she was proficient. In fact, they ultimately allowed her to take Tia home with an open tube in place that led directly to her heart. Priscilla believed herself to be the only parent they had ever trusted to handle this procedure without supervision.
    And she knew she had earned the respect of most of the nurses on the ward. Some had become real friends. In the beginning, Debby Roof, one of the pediatric nurses, couldn’t stand Priscilla—thought she was high-handed and bossy—but Priscilla had won her over with her constant devotion to Tia.
    Priscilla bent over Mindy’s wriggling, slight figure and without a trace of false gentleness competently adjusted her bottle. When Mindy was finished, Priscilla swung her over a shoulder and began a brisk patting. So far Mindy had been on oral feedings and a naso-gastric tube had not been necessary, but the bottle alone could not provide enough fluid. Priscilla knew that Mindy needed the IV for rehydration, and that when her peripheral veins—which they preferred to use for the IV—had been depleted, Sara and the other doctors had been forced to try two other sites for cut-downs, to get down to the larger, deeper veins in Mindy’s ankles.