Saturday was just another day. Lucy and Ava had to get up early for a Columbus Day Weekend Soccer tournament. The Hunter Tournament at Abbington High School. The rain was coming down so hard by 7am that my hopeful pre-caffeinated prediction was that the tournament would be cancelled. But no such luck, the games were on!. And that meant I only had 15 minutes to dig out last winter’s Under Armour, find extra pairs of matching socks, and prep the chocolate chip waffle batter. The girl’s were cranky. Lucy didn’t have a ride and she was screaming something about Ava using her favorite tea mug. Next she grabbed the mug and threw it, tea, honey, and milk, out the front door. “ Really Lucy?”

These pre-dawn battles make no sense to me. I did not have a sister growing up and don’t understand why sisters get so possessive over inconsequential things like sweaters, nail polish, pencils, half eaten sandwiches, and now tea mugs. “It’s mine! “ makes me cringe. Having lived such a medically fragile life with Leta, I have no patience for the petty fighting over THINGS. I am allergic to sweating the small stuff. And besides, I was late for picking Leta up at school for the weekend. In a moment of calm, I asked the girls. “Are you bleeding?” “Do we need to call an ambulance?” “Is your life in jeopardy?” “ If your answer is “NO” to any of the above, then get over yourselves and get ready for the tournament.” This is the only area of parenting where I seem to be able to assert my mama tough love. The girls know I will do anything for them, and they normally take full advantage of my pushover status. But this morning, I had run out of patience. I left; slamming the front door behind me. And I set out in the rain to get Miss Leta.

She had spent the night at Narkie’s house, her Camphill caretaker extraordinaire, who had now moved off campus nearby with her boyfriend. Narkie offered to watch Leta on Friday nights if we had conflicts. When I arrived to pick her up, Leta was so excited to show me the loft where she had slept. We said our good-byes and then I made a quick pit -stop at Camphill to drop Leta’s winter clothes off at Rowan House, her new dorm. Carsten, one of her house parents, and Leta were waiting on the porch. He handed me her bag of medicine, while Leta ran to the car. I buckled her in, put the medicine in the front seat and then carried the box of clothes inside. The other kids were eating breakfast so I stopped by the table to say Hi. One of the older boys, kept introducing me….”Lainey Moseley is here..Lainey Moseley is here….that’s Leta’s mom. She lives in Philadelphia.” I was so impressed he knew all this information about me. I’m used to Leta’s non-verbal status and I forget that many of the other kids in her house are really talkative.

I ran back out to the car, and Leta was sitting in her car seat as before, but something was wrong. She was not buckled, and the medicine bag was now on the floor of the back seat, unzipped. And all the medicine bottles were scattered on the floor around her. Except one. A 20 oz container of liquid Potassium that Leta was in the act of chugging. I screamed her name. The medicine was dripping from her mouth, with an orange Got Milk? mustache above her upper lip. And a bottle of zyrtec, with it’s cap off, lay empty in her lap. Leta was all smiles, probably thinking I was going to praise her for taking her medicine by herself. ”Leta, SHIT…what have you done…shit, shit shit…this is serious,” I yelled. And it was. High doses of potassium can kill you. I ran back inside to find Carsten, who handles all her meds, and asked him how much had been in the bottles. His reply was not what I wanted to hear. He had just refilled both prescriptions this week…triple shit!. That means she had already managed to drink 40 0z of medicine. My mind raced through the options: Drive an hour to CHOP, try to make her throw up, call an ambulance?…how much time do I really have? Carsten suggested I drive to The Paoli Hospital. I agreed it was probably the safest option.

Leta has taken potassium medicine her entire life because of her lung disease or what is also called pulmonary edema. This means her lungs fill up with extra fluid, and she needs to take heavy doses of diuretics every day to get rid of the fluid. But the diuretics also cause her to lose potassium which is critical for metabolic and electrolyte balance. I knew enough about the medicine to also know that if she had too much or too little potassium it could do very bad things to her body, very quickly. In medical jargon it is called “K” . Too little K in your body can lead to kidney failure, Too much K can lead to lower pulse rate and heart failure. Or is it the other way around? My mind was spinning. I did not have time to do a Google search. I strapped Leta back in her car seat and GPS’d Paoli Hospital. All I knew was that my god-son had been born there 12 years ago and the GPS said it was 23 minutes away. The odds were in my favor that neither the potassium or the zyrtec would be immediately toxic, but then again, I just didn’t know.

My mind tends to race to very dark places quickly when bad things start to happen, so my thoughts were already wandering to the reality of Leta having a heart attack in my car, or just collapsing and dying before I made it to the hospital. I kept looking back at her. She was all smiles and seemed to be acting normal. But I was not going to relax until I was safely in the arms of a hospital doctor. I managed to get to The Paoli Hospital in 18 minutes and rushed her into the ER. The waiting room was empty and a doctor saw her immediately. She was stripped down to her underwear, and an ECG was ordered. Her heart needed to be evaluated for any signs of abnormality. If she was about to go into heart failure this test would pick it up. I could tell she was in good hands, but I still doubted my decision to bring her here and not to CHOP where they knew her. This hospital had no pediatric gowns, and the IV team was struggling to get an IV into her arm for blood work. At CHOP, the Pediatric Phlebotomy team knows she has wiggly tiny veins and knows she will spit at you in protest as the team trys to do the stick. In anticipation of Leta’s behaviors, the CHOP nurses always arrive wearing plastic face guards. The nurse at Paoli was not very happy with her spitting in his face, so he called in two burly techs for backup. They wanted to hold her down in a straight jacket position to get the IV in. “Absolutely Not” I argued. “Leta will eventually comply, she just needs to like you first.” I knew the bloodwork needed to be done quickly, but I also was not going to put Leta through more trauma. Matt, the nurse, left us alone in the room and soon returned with a dancing chipmunk toy. Leta was amused and calmly stuck her arm out for the IV team. We got the bloodwork done, but was she going to be ok? The bloodwork results would take an hour to be processed and would determine what happened next. While waiting, Leta wandered around the room, asking for crackers, getting into her usual trouble opening any closing all drawers that were not locked shut. And then she started peeing all over the floor, a lot… and she kept on peeing. A lot. I called the doctor in and he seemed relieved and said her peeing all over the floor was really good news. Leta smiled. As far as she understood, this was just another day at a hospital getting attention from some nice doctors. Her normal. The doctor went on to explain that peeing meant Leta’s body was not absorbing dangerous amounts of the ingested potassium into her blood system. Her body was smartly self regulating her electrolyte levels. And shortly thereafter, her bloodwork came back and confirmed this result. Her electrolytes were normal and Leta would be fine. After only 3 hours at Paoli Hospital, we were discharged. I realized that we could still make Lucy’s 1pm soccer game if we hurried. I had no clothes for Leta except her soiled ones, so I found some of Ava’s oversized pajamas in the trunk. I wrapped Leta in my coat, put her summer sandals back on without socks and we headed to the game. Leta didn’t care what she looked like, she was excited to go watch some BALL!

Soon we were on the sidelines cheering the U14 girls Blue Lightning Team on to hopeful victory. I looked around at this normal fall day, parents laughing and cheering for the girls. And I realized that like Leta this is not my normal. And I thought about where it is that I am most comfortable. What makes me feel alive, if not at a kids soccer game? And I realized that my normal is with Leta in the hospital… I don’t think I’m at risk of being Munchausen by proxy, needing to rush Leta to the hospital for my own sense of meaning. But that is what I have been forced to do the past 17 years and it has defined my life. Leta’s bouts of respiratory failure, kidney failure, dehydration, tongue lacerations, falling down the stairs and now toxic poisoning has been constant. Everything else, even this fall day, seems just so…ordinary.