WASHINGTON — Slow down.
Everyone says they want to: almost no one does. Yet two weeks ago, I actually found myself moving slowly — as my husband and I pushed our son’s wheelchair down a corridor at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
During one measured step, it hit me.
Our 6-year-old had become one of them.
He had joined the slow-moving throng whose paleness and immobility, whose unaccustomed pace announces that something has gone wrong. Suddenly, he was one of the people we see — or try not to see — limping, stumbling, being ferried about. He was a child whose misfortune draws strangers’ stares, curious gazes that plummet guiltily to the floor.
Skye was lucky. Recovering from surgery for a congenital heart defect, he was weakened for just a few days. Doctors warned us several months ago that the symptom-free hole they’d discovered in his heart would, as the decades passed, become dangerous.
"If you don’t get this fixed," one cardiologist said in the most soothing of tones, "it will be your son’s cause of death."
We slowed down. We realized we had to be there, steeped in the faith, fear and the blanketing, sterile smell that combine to whisper "hospital."
Navigating Skye around other patients’ wheelchairs, it was impossible not to empathize with children who are born to lives on wheels. It was impossible not to ponder every youngster forced off his or her feet — and who must remain there for weeks, months or forever.
Many of them, we learned, didn’t have to be there.
Nathaniel, the adorable 4-year-old with whom Skye briefly shared a room, wouldn’t have been at Hopkins — sporting an arm cast and a humongous patch over a purplish eye — had a speeding driver not slammed into his father’s car.
Kristina Bedsworth’s mischievous little brother, Jeremy, wouldn’t have been there if an SUV, which a witness says was speeding, hadn’t collided with the ‘88 Buick that was carrying him and his brother, Jerry, to a nearby park.
Jerry, 9, died at the scene, nine days before Jeremy — who’d sustained multiple head and chest fractures — learned of his death after recovering in intensive care.
I watched as Kristina, 15, struggled to process how her family had gotten there. I listened as the Havre de Grace, Md., teenager explained how she keeps straining to hear Jerry calling her. About how his annoying, always-running PlayStation used to keep her awake.
Now, she said, its silence pierces her sleep.
Last Thursday, Jeremy came home. He’s wobbly, and his right eye hasn’t opened, but even doctors marvel at his progress.
Kristina marvels at something else:
"I used to like speeding — I’m the kind of girl who liked fast cars, watching cars race illegally. Now that somebody took my brother, I don’t want to speed."
Her mother, Debbie Holmes, who "always loved life," says she’s now "scared of tomorrows."
"If (people) would just slow down," says Holmes, 40. "Where is it that they’re trying to get to? There’s no job, no place that’s worth it."
"People don’t think your heart can break. Your heart can break."
Rasa Kregzdys of Vienna, Va., knows. Her daughter, Marzhan, was at Hopkins because a truck swerved into her Honda CRV three weeks ago. Kregzdys says Marzhan, 9, may be alive because she was going slow, traveling several car lengths behind the next vehicle.
Kregzdys remembers nothing about the truck’s impact. What’s vivid is awakening to pain, screams and the horror of her daughter being whisked away by medevac — alone and bleeding from a life-threatening head wound. Nurses phoned to say Marzhan was in "very bad shape" and needed surgery.
For two weeks, Kregzdys — herself recovering from a broken rib and lacerations — clutched the hand of the girl whose scalp had to be reattached and whose hip, femur and elbow were reassembled with pins.
Amazingly, Marzhan — who doctors said was lucky to be alive — is now home. Kregzdys has learned plenty about her daughter’s "genuine good nature," about how painful it is to be a parent, about "the goodness in others’ hearts."
"It’s been a very weird trip," she says.
Weird enough that Kregzdys says she’s surprised "that we don’t have more accidents." She advises others to "remember the simple driver’s ed stuff that everybody forgets," and "to know where the dangerous roads are — because you don’t want to be there."
You certainly don’t. But sometimes, we all find ourselves there, precisely where we’d rather not be. For Skye’s protection, we told almost no one about our imminent trip to that scary place. Today, he’s doing so wonderfully, you’d never know he had the surgery we would have given anything for him to avoid.
Of course it is there, among them, that we remember: There is no them. There’s only us.
There, forced to slow down, we learn what life would teach us.
Donna Britt can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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