"Winning & Losing the Lottery"

WINNING & LOSING THE LOTTERY

September 20, 2005

Expectations can change. In this case, they did so quite drastically.

Last month, a family friend of ours named Laura suggested that Karen and I might want to consider putting in our names for the lottery drawing to get to drive into Denali National Park after the close of the regular park season. She said that each person chosen is allowed to drive a car all the way into the park—the full 90 miles of the gravel road to Wonder Lake and back, an area otherwise closed to all but park bus traffic—during set times in September and October. Each entry in the lottery, she said, costs $10, and usually she, her husband Jeff, and their two daughters put in their names; at least one of them has been chosen every year but once. Karen asked me what I thought of the idea. I said that I liked it. I hadn’t been to the back end of the park since 1970, and I thought it might be fun to drive back there with the kids. So Karen wrote up four $10 checks and mailed them off with lottery entries. Two weeks or so later, we got the news: All four of us—me, Karen, Olivia, and Kelty—had had our entries drawn. We’d put in three times for our most desired date, Saturday, Sept. 17, and once for our second choice, Sunday, Sept. 18. We got ‘em all.

At first, I was very excited. I began envisioning our trip, driving slowly through the high alpine surroundings, catching breathtaking glimpses of Mount McKinley, spotting huge bull moose and brown bears, hiking up to watch Dall sheep, listening to marmots, following streams sparkling in the autumnal sunshine, driving along high cliffs and eyeballing the deep valleys below. I imagined filming with the video camera, capturing images with my regular camera, and writing about our adventure as I’m doing now. I knew that it was a 7- to 9-hour trip to the park from here, but I pictured us tooling along, stopping finally at some comfy lodge that had just dropped out of its awful summer rates, gritting our teeth as we used our credit cards to paid outrageous backcountry fuel prices.

And then things began to get complicated. Karen said, "Laura and Jeff got drawn for Sunday. If we give them one of our Saturday permits, our families can go at the same time. If we give another permit to your sister, she and her husband and daughter can go, too. And maybe if your parents want to go, we can all squeeze into three cars once we get to the park entrance." Laura and Jeff were interested. So were my sister (Janeice) and her family. My dad was interested but my mom wasn’t, so my dad’s enthusiasm cooled. Then Laura learned that Jeff’s sister was coming up and wanted to go to the park, but Saturday wasn’t going to work for her; they’d have to go Sunday instead. Laura was considering taking our permit, anyway, and just taking her daughters, leaving Jeff to take his sister by himself; then, his sister was injured in a train derailment and couldn't come at all, and that incident simply let the air out of their far-too-inflated plans. Then Janeice (a forensic scientist for the state crime lab) learned that she had been called to testify in a trial on Friday the 15th—all the way up at the top of the state in Barrow. She wouldn’t be home in time to go on Saturday. And so quickly it was just the four of us.

Then things got more complicated, and something inside of me said that maybe, just maybe, we weren’t meant to go.

I found out that Olivia had a field trip on Friday, so that we wouldn’t be able to leave early in the morning, as I’d hoped. Olivia, who attends the Montessori school in which Karen now teaches, would need to be in class until at least about noon. At that time, Karen would bring her home. Next I found out that the long-range forecast called for rain. Lots of rain. Then I learned that Kelty had a field trip, too, a two-day affair that began on Thursday morning at the Outdoor Education Center off Swan Lake Road deep in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and that ended on Friday afternoon after a four- to five-hour hike along Kelly and Peterson lakes. Kelty could do all of the Thursday activities, we decided, but he would have to be picked up on Friday morning and taken away from the hiking. He was not thrilled by our decision, but acquiesced when he considered the fun that he would be having in Denali. Since I would be taking a personal day on Friday, I would have to be the one to drive all the way out to the OEC to get him early on the 15th. And then Kelty’s teacher said she needed a male chaperone to stay in the boys’ cabin—and without one the entire field trip would have to be cancelled. Kelty begged me to help. I talked to his teacher and told her that the best I could do was this: After work on Thursday, and after making my lesson plans for my Friday sub, I could drive out to the OEC and spend the night, then take Kelty home with me after breakfast on Friday morning. She was thankful for the offer, especially since no other father had volunteered to do anything.

On Wednesday, I awoke with a sore bump behind my right ear. I knew there was some sort of gland back there, but I wasn’t sure what it was. And I knew that sometimes when I had had a cold or flu in the past, I’d had a sore spot back there. However, since I felt pretty good otherwise, I basically tried to ignore it. Thursday, though, the bump was a lump, and much more tender. Still, as I watched the rain pour down on the parking lot outside my classroom window, I taught, I whimpered a little, and when the school day ended I did my paperwork, got myself some dinner at a drive-thru, and then headed down the long gravel road to the OEC. I arrived there at almost exactly 7 p.m., to find the teacher, Mrs. Keating, leading nearly 30 soggy fifth-graders in a series of outdoor games in the rain that had finally reduced itself to a drizzle. While the kids played, I counted the number of boys (8) and then checked out the cabin that I would be in charge of: It was small, maybe 16 x 16 feet, with a bunk in each back corner. By the door, were two limp piles of soggy clothing, a jumble of wet footgear, and a layer of sloppy mud and sawdust that had been tracked in from the trail outside. The rest of the floor was covered in gear—sleeping bags, pads, pillows, sacks and bags, etc., all of it rumpled and tousled, the very picture of disarray. The only bare floor I spotted for myself was the muddy delta by the door. So I determined at that point to impose my own martial law and create some space for myself. After later building a fire for the kids—thank God for lighter fluid, which overcame all the dampness—so they could have s’mores, students were told to brush their teeth and prepare for bed. I moved boys around: two on the top of this bunk, two on the bottom, two on the bottom over here, one on the top, one on a pad on the floor between the bunks. And me: in the dry spot in the corner away from the door and the bunks. Isolation. Peace. Dryness…. Well, sort of. There were several dismaying things about that night: (1) The boys wanted me to read them horror stories, and I just wanted to read my own book and then curl up and go to sleep. (2) The boys were hyped up on sugar and adrenaline, and therefore took hours to go to sleep, despite my multiplicity of threats. (3) The room, with all its wet clothing and wet air and wet people, became a treasure trove of condensation. The walls and the door were skimmed with wetness. Everything felt misty, even drippy. (4) My neck and ear pains burgeoned and intensified and kept me from anything even remotely resembling a decent night’s sleep, as I tossed and turned in my sleeping bag on my air mattress on the floor amidst all the wetness and the unruly boys.

I “awoke” positively miserable. And as Kelty and I drove away in the rain a couple of hours later, I informed my son that we would not be heading directly home as originally planned. We would, instead, be driving to see Karen and telling her that I was going to go to the doctor. Something was not right. At the clinic right across the street from Karen’s school, I was at first informed that I couldn’t get in until 3 or 4 p.m.—but then they said they’d try to squeeze me in at 10 a.m. I was pleased, especially since it was 9:45. Shortly after 10, I was ushered (with Kelty) into the back, was weighed, and was directed into a room where the nurse (a woman I’d taught in 1990-91) took my blood pressure (142 over 80), my pulse (70-something, I believe), and the history of my ailment. Then Dr. Marguerite McIntosh arrived. She proceeded to feel behind my ear, which by this time was more swollen and very sensitive. She looked inside my ears and my nose and down my throat, humming concernedly a time or two. Then she said that this was a little different—more acute—than she’d seen before, and she sat down to look up some information on her computer. She said that it seemed to her that I had mastoiditis—an inflammation of the mastoid sinus cavity behind the ear—and that she wanted to be sure about treatment because it could potentially be a very serious problem: Mastoidal infections had been known to pass into the brain, which could be deadly. Then she said she was going to consult with another doctor. When she returned, the other doctor followed her in, and he, too, peered into my facial orifices and hemmed and hawed and appeared concerned. They conferred, and then he left and then she said was going to go call Dr. Zirul, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon over in Kenai, to get his opinion. The upshot of the doctor’s visit went like this: (1) Dr. Zirul recommended that I be started on a three-week prescription of Augmentin and be sent to the hospital for a CAT scan. (2) Dr. McIntosh said there was no way I could drive up north with my family because a worsening of my symptoms would likely call for me to be hospitalized and fed antibiotics through an I.V. (3) Our trip was, therefore, cancelled. (4) Kelty was pissed off because he’d missed out on his hike in the rain, only to now miss out on the entire journey to and through the park. (5) I would need to return to Dr. McIntosh on Monday to determine whether things were improving.

I interrupted her P.E. lessons to inform Karen of all the bad news, then took Kelty home to cool my heels and wait for my 1:15 p.m. CAT scan. On the way home, Kelty began to cry because he was worried about me. Our conversation, while he sobbed for a few minutes, basically went like this: (I had just mentioned waiting for the CAT scan.) Kelty: “First Grandpa, and now you!” Me: “Hey, it’s gonna be all right.” Kelty: “You … don’t … know … that!” Me: “You’re right, you’re right. But I prefer to think about things positively. I don’t want to think about the worst that could happen. That doesn’t help me, and it doesn’t help you.” (The sobbing diminished after this.)

Later, Karen came home to get me and take me to my appointment. We took Kelty to my parents’ place. Olivia stayed in school; heavy rains had cancelled her field trip, anyway, and so she just decided to stay in class. Besides, she said, she didn’t think she could handle seeing me sick just then. (She, too, had cried when Karen told her the news.) Before the CAT scan, we dropped off my prescription at Soldotna Professional Pharmacy. After the CAT scan, we returned and were told that they had been unable to fill the prescription because, well … they were out of Augmentin. Obviously, I needed the antibiotics. My acute symptoms indicated that I needed to get started on my dosage ASAP, so we returned the ‘scrip to Dr. McIntosh’s office and asked them to please call around town and find us some of the drug. Karen took me home.

Later … we were called about the CAT scan. Negative for the spread of the infection.

Later … Karen came home with the Augmentin. Sort of. The best that any local pharmacy was able to do was to fill HALF of the prescription. Oh well, I least I had SOME of what I needed. I could get the rest in a few days. I opened the bottle of pills. They were white and huge: Seven-eighths of an inch long, three-eighths of an inch wide, and five-sixteenths of an inch thick. I was to take two every 12 hours, with food. I checked out the possible side-effects: upset stomach, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. (I appeared to be in for a great weekend.)