Alive on Opening Day Read Online Free PDF

walk with me,” Parks told the Hodges.
     
    David walked along on
Parks’ left side, while Clara scrambled around to the right side of
the gurney and grabbed Dan’s hand. She looked across her
unconscious son and pleaded with her eyes. “Is he going to be OK,
Dr. Parks?”
     
    “ Clara,
it’s just too early to know that with any certainty,” Parks told
her. “What I can say is, he is breathing on his own, and his pulse
is fairly steady, even though it’s slow.”
     
    “ Why is it slow? And why
does he have that mask on if he’s breathing on his own?” she
demanded.
     
    “ I don’t know why his
heart is beating slowly, Clara,” Parks said. “That’s what we have
to find out. And that mask just helps to make sure he’s getting
enough oxygen. Even though he’s breathing on his own, his
respiration is slow, too, which could lead to hypoxia — low oxygen
levels.”
     
    David could see Clara was
on the verge of coming undone, so he interjected. “So what do we do
now, Doc? What’s the next step?”
     
    “ Well, first we need to
get an x-ray of his head,” Parks said, and he leaned toward Dan as
they walked to get a better look at the right side of the boy’s
face. “Looks like he got whacked pretty hard out there this
evening, and we need to see what kind of damage he sustained. He
could have brain swelling, and we have to find that
out.”
     
    “ Oh no!” Clara exclaimed.
“What happens if he does have brain swelling?”
     
    Parks looked first to
David and back to Clara. “Let’s not worry about that unless we have
to, OK, Clara? For now, the important thing to keep in mind is, he
appears to be stable.”
     
    Clara nodded, and the
Hodges walked along with Parks into the first available exam room,
where he gave Dan a more thorough inspection before accompanying
him to radiology.
     
    The next several hours
were a blur of tests and discovery, partial answers and new
questions. By midnight, Parks had moved Dan to intensive care and
was sitting in the waiting room down the hall, telling the Hodges
what the hospital staff had found.
     
    Mostly, the news was good,
Parks said. Despite the fact Dan had been knocked unconscious by a
pitch to the face, he hadn’t sustained any broken bones.The x-rays
did show deep bone bruising in both his cheek and his temple, and
he would be sore for many days, maybe weeks. Depending on his pain
level when he woke up, they may have to consider wiring his jaw
shut for a time, which would mean a liquid diet administered
through a straw.
     
    The force had twisted
Dan’s neck around at the end of a swing, which surely strained it —
he probably had whiplash — but there did not appear to be any real
structural damage to his neck, either.
     
    The final piece of news,
Parks told David and Clara, and really it was great news, was there
was no swelling in Dan’s brain. There did not appear to be any
bleeding inside his head, either, but Hodges warned them that
sometimes these symptoms were latent — they only developed hours or
even days after an accident, so Dan was not necessarily out of the
woods yet.
     
    And then there was the bad
news, which was why Dan was in the ICU and not curled up on the
couch at home with an ice pack on his head, maybe sucking on a bowl
of ice cream. The fact was, despite a lack of any sign of real,
permanent damage, Dan was still unconscious. For now, Parks said,
he was calling it a concussion because he could see a quarter-sized
dark spot, a bruise, on Dan’s brain near the front right side,
where the ball had crashed into his skull. It a was fairly common
occurrence, and Parks suspected many athletes’ concussions which
were never diagnosed at all.
     
    What was particularly
worrisome in Dan’s case was, not only had the young man been out
cold for hours, but his breathing rate and pulse remained
depressed. In fact, they had actually slowed down since Dan arrived
at the ER earlier in the night. Some of that may have been because
the