The Department of Health

Bringing a new child into my home is not the easiest thing I've ever tried to do.  Certainly it rates with finally quitting smoking (eleven years ago this summer, yay!) and having a baby.  Bringing a sick child home is even harder.  My beautiful little four year old doesn't seem to feel sick or act sick, but according to all the tests, he is sick.  Quite sick.  Israel has TB and lead poisoning.  So the Department of Health has become quite involved in my life.   TB and lead poisoning are "public health issues" and the DOH takes them (as they should) very seriously.  So on top of adjusting to life with a new child, my family and I are also adjusting to life with the DOH. 

I have to prove to the DOH that we are giving Israel his medicine.  For TB, he takes four different anti-biotics that I have to crush and mix with maple syrup and rice milk and administer through a syringe into the back of his mouth, making sure he swallows every drop.  (If a child doesn't swallow, the DOH recommends holding his nostrils closed to force him to swallow in order to open his mouth to breathe.  I can tell you that this is quite an effective method.)  To prove I am doing this, I can either wait all day until my recently assigned caseworker arrives or go to the DOH with my two boys and administer the medicine there in front of the nurse. 

Friday I spent the entire day waiting for my caseworker to arrive.  At eleven am the door buzzed, and a voice said they were from the DOH.  I was thrilled to be able to get this out of the way.  I flung open the door and welcomed a man I'd never seen before. 

"Is that peeling paint?"  he said, staring at my steel-exposed door. 

J.  is from the DOH, lead division.  He had come because I didn't answer my phone yesterday.  Israel has lead in his blood, and my home needs an assessment.  He scheduled a three hour tour for this coming Thursday.  He inspected my window guards.  He shook his head at what he seemed to assume was lead dust everywhere.  He lectured me on children eating paint chips from off the floor.  While J. lectured, Israel ran hysterically through the house with different plastic objects in his mouth. 

"You know you shouldn't let him put anything but food in his mouth," J. told me. 
 I nodded and agreed with J. 
 "You own this place, right?"
 I could only nod again.
 "You know that you will have to do whatever we recommend," J. said shaking his head sadly.
 I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.  As soon as he left, I got out my HEPA vacuum. 

My TB caseworker was kind enough to call me at noon and remind me that yesterday she had mentioned that she wasn't coming til the afternoon, but I had been flushing syringes into Israel's mouth and forcing him to swallow while holding down his arms and nose and responding to my seven year old head-butting me and whining to be allowed to use my ipod in a room the size of my bathroom with two nurses from the DOH watching, so I never did realize (until that moment) I could have taken the boys to the park all morning.  But then I would have missed the lead guy!  She then explained that her car had broken down on 100th Street so she would be a while longer.

Israel is supposed to take his medicine about an hour after eating.  At home on my own, I feed him breakfast and give him his meds an hour later.  But I had held his lunch, hoping to feed him after his meds.  I fed him as soon as I got her call thinking she would be late.  Israel eats a lot when he eats, so he sat down at quarter after twelve to dine, and he spent about an hour at the table.  He ate salmon salad with crackers (his first request).  He ate a turkey sandwich with salad and honey mustard (because he saw his brother eat one).  He waits patiently in between courses preferring to watch me cook from a chair he likes to stand on beside the counter.  He ate a bowl of rice and beans (because he said he was still hungry).

When my caseworker called again at one, because Israel was still eating, I was almost relieved that she still hadn't shown up.  She was calling to tell me that even though I corrected the paperwork at the DOH the day before (in that little room I mentioned with my two boys struggling for my attention), I guess I hadn't been emphatic enough, because she was lost.  Her paperwork still read, "Israel Seaman on Sherman Avenue" instead of Israel Sherman on Seaman. 

When she did show-up, I had to give Israel his medicine.  I couldn't say, "he just had lunch", so I gave him his medicine, and he ran to the toilet and made retching sounds.  I told him he wasn't allowed to throw up and rushed him to the kitchen where I handed him ice cubes to suck on.  He didn't get any ice in the Congo, so the novelty and the coolness helped to keep him from puking his meds. (Or maybe it was the desperate look on my face.)

I asked the caseworker about the schedule for the following week, but she couldn't promise me anything better than "some time after noon".  I tried to explain that I just couldn't do that, and she asked me if I worked.  I tried to explain that I homeschool, and that we have classes to attend, and she looked at me like a basset hound might look at a rabbit doing a handstand.  I tried to explain that I had to take my other son to French class on Tuesday morning and that on Wednesday morning Israel starts Early Music Classes, plus we have recess and playgroups and violin three times a week plus Hebrew School in the afternoons.

"Well," she told me, sweet little old lady that she is, "you have to do what you have to do." 

It was decided that I would take Israel to the DOH every day according to my own schedule for the next six months.  With the meds and the milk and the maple syrup, the spoon and the dish to crush the meds, and the funnel for the little bottle and the syringe to shoot it down his throat, and maybe a leash to keep him from running in the hall there.  And new ipod programming for my big boy.

J. in the lead department is completely unconcerned with Israel's health, because his lead number is too low to chelate according to the DOH, and yet it is high enough to warrant two visits from a man who I am sure my tax dollars are paying.  I wonder what Israel thinks of all this.   

Israel will probably never even remember that this happened, whether or not we paint the windowsills or have a gut renovation.  He won't recall the little room where we went for six months where Eddie whined while he drank strange stuff shaken up in that tiny bottle with the green lid that made him pee bright orange all day.  He will probably only ever talk about the day he first had ice.