Three months ago, a doctor asked me how Alex sleeps. "Great!" I replied, with the enthusiasm common to those about to stride into spinning propeller blades. "Eleven hours a night!"
Overnight, Alex has gone from 11 hours to about seven.
The decline and fall of my evenings started late last year, when Alex figured out how to open the door of his bedroom from the inside. For a long, sweet time, this knob alone had been worth the purchase price of our Manhattan apartment: It worked stiff, and had a small, smooth surface that Alex's tiny hands couldn't turn enough to open the door. We'd put him and Ned, who's still crib-bound, in the bedroom about 7:30, read to them for half an hour, dim the lights, start the lullaby cassettes, and head out to the living room to do what all loving marrieds do when they're alone and the kids are in bed at last: watch "Seinfield" and eat our goddamned dinner in peace.
For as long as half an hour, though, Alex would come to the door every few minutes and rattle the knob and screech until one of us had to get up and order him to bed. After half a dozen of these rattle-screech-order drills, Alex would go to bed and all we'd hear through the door was the peace of sleeping kids.
In a way that would make me proud if it didn't make me exhausted, Alex has adapted. Even that is not as bad as it sounds. On weekends, for instance, when I've run him through two or even three playgrounds and kept him steadily outside from about 10 a.m. until late afternoon, he still curls up with binkie and stuffed Elmo around 7:30. Maybe 8.
But most nights, once, twice, even more time a night, we're yanked awake as he squirms between us, clacking Elmo's huge plastic eyeballs on our headboard. "Alex, be still!" This would be fine with me if he just came up and passed out, but he wiggles around, kicks, even screeches until one of us has to cast back the blankets, grab him by the wrist, and say, "Go back to bed, Alex!" We take him back more roughly, I'm ashamed to admit, as the night goes on and the obese green numbers of our clock radio keep going in the blackness: 1:35; 3:52; 4:46.
Sometimes Alex sleeps through until six. Sometimes.
We've been keeping him up later in the evenings, letting him fall asleep on the couch, watching the kind of TV I've spent a lifetime wanting to share with my son: "Star Trek," Tora Tora Tora, Horatio Hornblower. Sometimes he sits quietly on the couch, hugging the cushion before darting into our bedroom to return with T shirts to cuddle with. Sometimes. Other times, he's up every two seconds, just as I settle into the recliner, and I can't keep him on the couch no matter how often I present the plain choices: Couch or bed. Couch or bed, Alex, couch or bed, until I sound like a worn-out parrot.
Last night, when he wouldn't stay on the couch around 9 p.m., and afterwards he still wouldn't go to bed, I slapped a bin of plastic zoo animals across the room. Jill covered her face with her hands. "It's like we're in one of those commercials with the bad family situation," she said. "The out-of-control child, the angry dad, the depressed mom."
What saps us here is the potential endlessness, how even after he's back in his room these nights, we're left staring at the clock (... 1:35; 3:52; 4:46 ...) and wondering just why this should end, why he shouldn't be doing the same thing at age 6 and 16 and 26. Maybe, though, it will get better in the winter: It's bright this time of year in the morning, and we have only venetian blinds in the boys' room. Also, next year, he'll be going to a school that has a playground.
Maybe by then I'll no longer wake up at six like I did this morning, unable to get back to sleep because I kept hearing something go thump. It woke Jill up, too, and she said, "I'm not sure what that is, but I don't think it's Alex." But it was. (August 2003)
Dear Reader Judy writes: "I've noticed that lately your essays regarding Alex have reflected a kind of despair. I hope you're feeling more positive again."
I'd begun to agree with Judy two weeks before her note even arrived. At that time, I noticed that recent Ned essays were about cute stuff, like giving him cocoa or taking him to the movies, and recent Alex essays were dire reports on erratic new sleep habits or my terrors about giving him ADD meds.
Jill once said that no matter what I wrote about Alex in the NICU days, I always maintained his dignity. I hope I still do that. I've left the poop issue alone -- haw haw - just in the interests of such dignity, and I do try to remember that Alex might someday read this stuff. If I want one of my kid scowling at me, I'll tell Ned we're out of cocoa.
I've also begun to fear Alex would never read much of anything at all. Maybe the last five years are catching up to me. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe it's the lengthening chats with Ned, how I'm getting to know him, and how it frustrates me that I don't yet speak Alex's language. "There's somebody in there," I told Jill the other night on the phone, "and I don't know how to find out who he is."
Jill was on Cape Cod with Ned, at a cousin's house. I had elected to stay in New York while Alex finished his last week of summer school. I'd also stayed behind out of fear that being somewhere strange for a humid week with Alex might be more work than my aging frame could stand. It was sweaty enough trekking him from playground to playground as he and I kicked off the Week of Me and Alex. During that week, I'd pick him up from school and we'd head off hand in hand on a mission to tire him out enough so he'd pass out and let me watch "Star Trek" in peace at 8 p.m.
Not a lot comes from Alex, I told Jill on the phone. It's sort of all about him and you have to guess what he wants.
One of the toughest things about being the parent of little kids is that's hard to just stop and look around. Alex may not have cocoa or Nemo, for instance, but he's got things going on. Jill asks if I think he has "abilities." I do.
He's submitting to tooth brushing better and better. He's begun to sit at the dinner table with all of us, at least for a few minutes and especially if there's company over. He's even eaten Chinese beef. The evaluation from his year of music therapy arrived the other day; turns out he has an affinity for the ukulele. He sings "Sesame Street" tunes in what sounds to my tin ear as on key, and he carries the notes of Ernie's "Imagine That!" in good pitch. He sure didn't get this talent from his father.
Often now in the evening, when Ned has gone to sleep, Alex will sit beside me in the recliner and watch TV. The other night he turned to me out of nowhere and said, "Give me five!" and he held up his hand. His slap, palm to palm, was firm and manly. I've had nothing close to conversation with him, but "Anything he says, he says very clearly," Aunt Julie notes.
Alex gets his biggest points lately for picking up stuff, like parts of the wooden train and his plastic letters. "Alex, time to pick up, clean up!" As if priming a pump, I'll drop a few toys into the bin to get him started, and he generally keeps at it until the stuff is off the floor and the bin is sealed. He's doing this quicker and quicker -- which makes it more infuriating to me when he stops, stares vacantly, and puts one of the toys in his mouth. I don't know what to do at such a moment. He's never had seizures -- not even, as far as I can tell, the infamous "Stop 'n' Stares."
He climbs our living room furniture. He screeches. He kicks Ned, whom he has also bitten. On playgrounds, he roots in other people's bags and carriages for the bright, crinkly bags of junk food. Most people don't mind, but Jill tells me an old Chinese lady yelled at him on one playground the other day. "He didn't go back to her, either," Jill says.
He usually gets down when I tell him. The other night, during a screeching fit, I actually told him to "Shut up!" -- not only was that wrong, it was useless -- and Jill produced a scented candle and said that one of Alex's special-ed. teachers told her once that smells can sometimes distract and quiet a screeching kid. Lately, he just puts his teeth on Ned. Ned hasn't noticed the difference in the experience, but I have. I hope this gets reflected in my essays.
I see I haven't done a good job here of accentuating the positive. Future Ned essays deal with taking him to an amusement park, and watching "Star Trek." Future Alex essays will probably deal with the tough transition to kindergarten, and more worries about his "abilities."
Yes, he has abilities. I know he can learn. We all can. Someday I might even learn how to talk to him. (September 2003)
Alex has opened his bedroom door for the third time since being put to bed. He scoots out to try to catch Jill and me eating Cheez Doodles and watching Elmo, which he knows we do every night after putting him and Ned to bed.
"C'mon, Alex." We take him by the hand and back to bed. A while later, he rattles the door open and emerges and stares at us with squinting eyes, hugging one of Jill's T shirts and wondering why we put him to bed at just 9:40 p.m. "C'mon, Alex. Morning comes early."
Eight and a half hours later, the alarm wakes me in what feels like the middle of the night. The bed is warm. The air is cold. The windows black. Alex's bus comes at 7:10 a.m. now - an hour earlier than last year - and I stumble to his door, rattle it open, and find him solid, still, and warm, usually on his stomach with his hands curled under him.
"Alex, c'mon. School."
We've been doing this pre-dawn dance for a little over a month, and almost every morning sends me back to high school in Maine, a part of our great nation where, especially in winter, God invented a special cold for that hour before the sun comes up. Inky dark and unmoving, the world asleep and me with it, warm as a womb. Then the white rectangle of hallway light would explode in the doorway, and a shape became my mother, dark with the light to her back, and her voice touched me. "Jeffrey? Time to get up, honey. School."
Then I would begin another day in 1978 or 1979 or 1980. Before I had published a word, or even read much. I thought Mourning Becomes Electra was about getting up early and turning on the lights. I hadn't had a girlfriend or much of anything I'd later come to know as thrills. Mum was a great cook -- lasagna, clam chowder -- and of course I didn't have to think twice then about emptying a bag of Cheez Doodles over a night of TV. But life then was a sleepwalk past the scenery of my birth, and where I was starting to sense that security might be overrated. I got plenty of sleep, though. Mum saw to that. Eight or nine hours a night, begun right after "M*A*S*H" or "Barney Miller" by her announcing, "Well, I think I shall urinate, and go to bed. Morning comes early."
Mum was of an evaporating breed of Yankee, born to the woods and rising with the dawn for decades, first for school, then for work as a shoe factory laborer (should've seen her jab with that awl!), and finally for her day shift as a hospital nurse. Early mornings were so ingrained in her that it didn't occur to me until my early 20s that I could habitually sleep until 10:30 and still lead an non-decrepit life. Even at that time, it would still be almost 10 years before I laid eyes on Jill, almost 20 before the word "Alex" would be part of the reason I'd be again crawling out in the dark, hollow hours.
And longer still - say, until right about now - before I'd start to think that maybe one of the reasons Mum "habitually" got up early was because she had kids to get to school.
My alarm goes off at 6:10. Jill and I have been alternating days up early for Alex and school, allowing the other to sleep for another hour or so. But if it is my morning, I grant myself five minutes to surface before going to rattle open Alex's door. One shake, two. I go pour a cup of coffee, let five more minutes go by while my brain absorbs the caffeine and the morning weather report. Breezy, seasonable, plenty of sun. It's still early November, and this isn't Maine.
Generally, 10 minutes and two shakes (...Time to get up, honey ...), and I have Alex at least to the living room couch. Where he keels over.
"Alex, eat your Cheerios. Bus is coming."
Slurp and sip. More weather. I keep the volume off so as to not disturb Jill and also - much, much more importantly - to not wake Ned. Pictures drift by wordlessly: fires, celebrities, the mayor. Alex isn't moving anymore. "Alex, eat your Cheerios."
"Cheez Doodles?" he said.
This morning he grumpily swept the coffee table clean of papers, toys, and his own school clothes for that day before climbing up and sitting cross-legged over his cereal. He munched. I sipped. I opened the venetian blind and saw a slice of dawn ignite the trees of the park across the street. Might be a nice day. "Time to get dressed, Alex," because it's no longer as early as it was. (November 2003)
The other day Jill and I ran into one of Alex's therapists from his old school. He asked how Alex was doing, and said that Alex's old teachers have checked this site but lately hadn't seen much written about him.
"Well," Jill offered, "there isn't much to write about."
Thank god. This is approximately the 178th essay about Alex, so I have to think I've covered a kid who's not yet half-way through kindergarten. Still, the topics have wavered off Alex lately, off doctors, oxygen tanks and special needs, and onto the antics of full-term Ned, potholes and hilltops of marriage, and mental doodles about novelists and air travel. Some readers have said the topics have wavered too much.
It has been a busy year regarding Alex. In late spring we started scouting for the right public school. By summer, we were arguing with the Board of Ed. for the right public school. By fall, we were lifting Alex onto the bus to take him to the right public school. Alex's schooling has, in many ways, been the best thing about the second half of 2003. Last month, I attended the first of what I suspect will be 15 years' worth of PTA meetings, many of which will be on behalf of Alex, whose education will require, well, special needs in the age of budget cuts (one PTA mom reported she donated paper towels to her school by stuffing the rolls into the seat pocket of her son's wheelchair). Most nights, one of us sits with Alex and does real homework, at which he is becoming more comfortable; the other night he and I were making F's hand-over-hand; my fingers felt him take over on the downward slash and the two lines across, his own featherweight force guiding my hand through the letters.
He's talking more. We've taken a solitary "Please" and built it into "More, please," "More, please, daddy," and "More pretzels, please, daddy." "Thank you" and "You're welcome" we're all using in almost the correct order. We get the clearest utterances out of Alex when he's uncomfortable: Once when we had a fever, he said, "I'm thirsty." Once when he was tired he snapped, "Tired! Take a nap!"
In general, however, I drift on Alex day to day. Yesterday, for instance, was the second afternoon of a snowbound weekend. Jill and Ned were at a neighbor's. Alex sat at the little table, zipping through a simple jigsaw puzzle. I was watching the Redskins-Giants game with the volume off; I heard the puzzle come together with little clicks. I'd brought the red tricycle into the living room, but Alex wasn't interested. Untouched toy cars littered the toy garage. I doubt he was tired, since all we'd done all day was walk down the nine flights of stairs to get the mail and tour the battleship-gray basement of our building. Forget outdoors: On Saturday, for some reason I'd figured Alex might like a little walk in a blizzard. Trouble was, Alex had already looked out the living room window, and as we neared the door of our building he grabbed the railing and dug in as though trying to keep his footing on a capsizing deck.
"Oh, c'mon Alex, let's take a little walk!" Misguided faith, I guess, propelled him into the wind chill. By the end of the block he did what any sensible person except a father would do, and waded and slid toward the convenience store. "Cheez Doodles!" I heard him plead into the wind. "Cheez Doodles, PLEASE!" No, no Cheez Doodles (I should've bought him some), but yet another pointless corner or two before he spun into my abdomen and pleaded to be carried the block and half home. About the only thing that walk accomplished was maybe teaching Alex the word "lunatic."
On Sunday, as football players moved around the field without sound, it struck me that I don't spend enough time educating Alex. Even on a Saturday of lousy weather I'd opted for the kind of easy activity I've been doing with him since the days of having to slide oxygen tanks into the bottom of the stroller.
Nowadays, there's art and reading. There's wrapping his fine fingers around crayons and feeling his pressure create more letters. There's planting the easel in the center of the living room and discovering how much Crayola was lying when they printed "washable" on the paint bottle. There are the F's. There is the future. There's more than just no more oxygen tank. (January 2004)
We've been trying to string three or four words together. Not me and Jill, although it's difficult for us to do that lately, too.
I mean Alex.
"Pretzul!"
"What do we say, Alex?"
"Pret-ZUL!"
"'Pretzel please, daddy!"
"Pretz'lplezdaddy!"
We'll work on spacing later. I'm just happy, as I unload a handful of Utz salt and dough into his bowl, that maybe the idea of communication is getting through to Alex. Never mind that pretzels sometime wind up being his dinner. Right now we're working on conversational nutrition.
Ned's talking is functional. He'll answer questions: Last night, Jill asked Ned if he loved daddy ("Yes"), if he loved the cat ("Yes"), if he loved Alex ("Yes"), if he loved grandma and grandpa ("Yes"), and if he loved mommy ("No"). Ned also employs such fallback exclamations as, "Okay," "Kitty, get down!", "Whaddya doing?!" and "Alex, you already had a bath!", among others. I'm this close to be able to chat with Ned about not being so bossy.
Alex's word count is more limited. When excited, he usually screeches and squeals rather than says a word, though when he's really annoyed he snaps, "Ned!" When he wants to be tickled he says, "Again?" After watching ads on Elmo for the "Sesame Street" Web site, he thinks "WWW" is a word. Only after a day and a half of fever did he say a sentence ("I'm thirsty."). I feel that the desire to speak and to have his words caught and realized is somewhere in him. I can't find where; I can't ask. I don't know who he is.
Before Alex came along, I never realized how hard it is to connect with someone who simply doesn't speak much. He stands in front of the closet, for instance. He raises his hand, palm up, above his face, as if shielding his eyes from the sun. "What do you want, Alex?" I ask. I'm pretty sure I know what he wants: the Orange Bob the Builder truck.
"Want!" he replies.
"Say the word, Alex."
"Word!"
Do over. "You want the orange truck?"
"Want!"
"Then you have to say the word." I once met an autistic man at a special needs conference, and he said that when he was boy his mother always forced him to ask for what he wanted by name. Always. If not your parents, then who? The orange truck is easily within my reach. "Do you really want the orange truck, Alex?"
"Truck!"
"'Truck, please.'"
"Truckpleasedaddy!"
Alex has been chanting the days of the week and the months of the year. His teacher reported that in school the other day, he counted to 20; I don't know if anyone asked him to. He can recite passages of Tom and Pippo. He can sing the songs of "Sesame Street" (and to his credit, they sound, like all the songs he sings, much more like songs than when I sing them). He asks for a binkie by name, and with force. Once when he was tired, he barked, "Tired! Take a nap!" It was nine o'clock at night.
Trying to chip away at the fear that I may never have a real conversation with Alex, I start with manners.
"Alex, say, 'May I ... '"
"May I!"
"'Please have ... '"
"Plez hav!"
"'Pretzels, daddy?'"
"Pretzelsdaddy!"
"'May I please have some pretzels, daddy?'"
"PLEZ!"
By this point in our conversation, Alex is stamping with either excitement or a need to go to the potty. Oh well. I'm not sure I could have recited all that, either. But language specialists have told me that this is an excellent way to begin with him. "So is it comprehension?" I ask. "Or just rote to get something he wants? Or is that all words are really, anyway?" "That's a good question," one doctor said. He can get his point across without words: In the middle of the night last night, he appeared beside Jill in our bed, got her up, took her hand, and led her into his room and straight to the changing table. His diaper was dirty.
What are words, really? Whatever the answer, I know of no other way to get him to put the words together, other than to get him to put the words together. (February 2004)
Alex has puzzles of a garbage truck, a tow truck, and a dump truck. Each has 49 pieces, each piece a little bigger than a quarter. In the dump truck scene, there's also a guy laying bricks, a red-headed driver, and, in the background, three birds and a crane. The garbage truck scene includes a sanitation worker in an orange jumper, a stone wall, and a guy strapping a bike to the roof of a red compact. The tow truck scene has a smashed-up blue car, a cop, a photographer, a guy in red coveralls working the winch, and a dog on a leash staring right at Alex as he softly snaps the pieces together.
I timed Alex the other day. Garbage truck: 11 minutes. Tow truck: 9 minutes. Dump truck: 15 minutes. The three birds and the crane must slow him down.
These are not Alex's first puzzles. He also has a 36-piece school bus, big pieces but a ton of blue. I dumped it out the other night, to keep him occupied while Jill and I entertained our friend Jessica. Jessica and I watched Alex trying the pieces this way and that, never lifting his head. "He's fast," Jessica said. The bus took 10 minutes, and he then began trolling for something else to do. Sooner or later, such searching leads him to screeching or to Jill's dresser, where he roots out her stuff. I dumped out Ned's two Thomas the Tank Engine puzzles.
"Is Alex doing two puzzles at once?" Jessica asked. He was. Before he brushed his teeth and asked for his binkie, Alex also completed his 24-piece Elmo and 24-piece Clifford. At the same time.
Alex has been doing puzzles almost since he could sit up. He started with big plastic shape-sorters: squares, circles, and rectangles of red, blue, green, purple. Before he'd even eaten by mouth, I think, he was plunking the shapes through the right holes. "That'll translate into good skills with letters when he's older," a therapist noted. Then came the wooden puzzles: a "Sesame Street" farm, barnyard animals, boats and copters, a school bus, a fire engine. Each piece in these puzzles tucked into a cutout in the wooden base. These puzzles are now entombed in the boys' dresser. I joked to Jill the other night that Alex could do one of these now just by looking at it.
"I don't know about that," she replied, "but I do think he could do one of them with his eyes closed."
Even though he's in kindergarten, Alex still doesn't have many words, so he couldn't tell us about his talent. "Does he ever do puzzles here?" Jill once asked his pre-school teacher.
Oh yes, all the time, the teacher replied.
"But ever jigsaw puzzles?" Jill wanted to know.
Yes, of course jigsaw puzzles, the teacher said. Twelve-piecers!
Ned started doing puzzles for the same reason he bit a plastic ruler in half last night: Alex does it. Sometimes the brothers do puzzles next to each other at their little table. The quiet of concentration blankets the house. The quiet of a library, of a chess game, of craftsmen. But right now, Ned is more like the guy in that office who talks when everyone is busy. Once over puzzles Ned softly chattered support to Alex, who at last got so fed up and distracted that he left the garbage truck unfinished.
"Daddy, I need help!" Ned will say. "I can't do it!"
"You are doing it, Ned," I say. Alex doesn't even look up, his attention anchored on the 49 pieces. "Stay on it, Alex!" I call, as I fly into the kitchen to do the dishes or bag the trash or some such chore that seems more important than watching my son do puzzles, but in fact isn't.
Less and less, Alex needs help on a puzzle. He prefers to link the first two pieces, then work and sort by color, and test-fit pieces almost one-by-one. He used to need me to find the corners. He used to need me to find the edges. Now he just needs me to dump the pieces out of the Zip-Lock bag and put them right-side-up. Sometimes. I wonder if he could do this too, but thinks it's nice to let me help. Wise guy. Where's that 60-piece Noah's Ark? (March 2004)
"I hope to God you're right. I've seen kids with this condition trash their lungs by the time they're five." - a doctor, to us, in Alex's PICU, 1999.
On Monday morning, Alex is sleepy and shakes his head "no" when I ask if he wants to go to school. He seems fine, though tired -- which is no surprise since was bouncing on our bed at 4 a.m. I put him on the bus and head to work. I get to work and see the message light blinking. "Well, we're off to a bad start," Jill's voice says. "Alex was coughing and threw up on the school bus. Call me back."
The school says he's in the nurse's office but seems to be recovering - and, in fact, is jumping around the gym by 9:30. "You know these school buses," the nurse says. "It could be the motion." Later she reports that he was coughing a lot in gym. Call if you need us to come get him, I say. They don't call.
On Tuesday, Jill meets Alex's class at the New York Aquarium, for a field trip. "He was great," she reports later that day. "He sat in the stands during the whole show. I had my arm around him, and when I moved it he took my arm and put it back. He was very good."
Too good? That afternoon, Alex has an appointment with his pediatrician for a physical. Under the doctor's neon, I suddenly notice purplish rings under Alex's eyes, though he seems perky. Coughing a little. "This should go pretty well," Jill says. "You can never tell what a doctor's going to say," I warn her. The doctor comes in. He plots Alex's growth and notes that although Alex is still slightly below the normal curve, he's following his own curve consistently. Amazing: once upon a time, this now-casual subject was the crux of heated appointments with doctors.
The pediatrician agrees that Alex is perky and coughing a little, though. Then he drills in on what looks like a swollen eye. Swollen pink eye, in fact. "Yeah, it's definitely pink eye," the doctor says. "I can prescribe some drops that will clear it right up, but he definitely can't go to school tomorrow like that."
By Tuesday night, the cough wracks Alex. Deep and piercing, right through my chest as well as his. Alex puts his whole heart into it, and once again illness enwraps him in mystery. Because he has little language, we can't learn exactly how he's feeling. Even Ned, if sick, will already let us know what's wrong. But a sick Alex is a little like a sick pet: the same guessing, the same limpness to the being in my house who should be scampering. I wish he had a few phrases: stomach hurts. blow my nose. Something. This is like three weeks ago, I say to Jill, pointing to our cat Toast. Toast ate something she shouldn't have earlier this month, and wound up costing $450 at two vets.
Alex stays home Wednesday; fever sets in. By that night his feet are hot the touch. Jill and I begin the 6 to 8 p.m. dialog, which starts with "He may not go to school tomorrow," and ends with Jill saying quietly, "He's not going to school tomorrow." He declines all food. "He won't eat Cheez Doodles," our babysitter reports. "My boy doesn't want Cheez Doodles."
I call the doctor on Thursday and say that we'll be in touch Friday morning about either an appointment or a note so Alex can go back to school. He misses Friday. Good news is, by Friday morning, Ned is coughing, and I feel raspy. Maybe, thank god, it is just a cold. But Alex is still wracked. "I think he could have a chest infection," says Jill. We get ready to haul Alex back to the doctor. What's a chest infection? what does that mean? lungs. And he's five. I keep hearing that doctor from what suddenly isn't very long ago.
Jill calls on Friday morning to tell me that Alex has an appointment that afternoon. Twenty minutes after the appointment time, Jill calls again. "In and out," she says, "wham bam, thank you, ma'am. He said Alex didn't sound wheezy, but did sound a little rough, like there's something in there." I've always liked the way this pediatrician gives news.
So we get a liquid, and another liquid for if the fever breaks. Alex is usually a beast where medicines are concerned, but after the first couple of messy tries, he sips this stuff almost calmly from a little plastic cup. He gets better: the cough stops; he returns to Cheez Doodles and, eventually, chicken nuggets. Right back to where he was eating not very long ago. (May 2004)
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