Karen Heller | Child in ER: You don't even want to be ready

Life goes along in its usual flutterbudgety way, a pair of keys misplaced, a tumbledown tire ignored, a gathering forgotten, and then a brutal hole bursts through the ordinary chaos and the keys, the tire, the dinner hardly matter.

Instead, we sit in an emergency room, one of two that will be visited in 13 hours, bridged by an early-morning ambulance ride, possibly the strangest and certainly the most expensive transport taken in our lives.

The EMT driver travels cautiously, though the urgency seems otherwise. Popeye cartoons blast in the belly of the truck and the nurse is proffering photos of his dogs while first one, then two, then three infusions of morphine drip into my child's arm.

Morphine was the drug administered at the end of my parents' lives, when the pain was too great. Here it is at the start of my daughter's ordeal. In the coming days, and busier nights, there will be more drugs than can be remembered, a foreign, unpronounceable stew, a pharmacy of one's own.

During a 12-hour shift, I develop an emotional attachment to the assigned nurse - her story, her dedication, her tranquil manner, her ability to look great in such a setting - only to see her disappear, possibly for good. In the dry, airless room, smelling as it does of both sickness and meds, the staff comes and goes. Only the patients, and their families, are constant.

The goal is not to be the constant.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is one of those astounding institutions that you don't appreciate until it's needed.

The problem is you never want to need it.

Then, when you do, it's like entering another country, a place unlike most life that appears to function with absolute efficiency, professionalism and calm. That's what gets to me: For a citadel of sick children, babies crying through the night, there's a serenity coursing through the immense building.

If a child must spend six days in a hospital, a perforated appendix is low on the panic scale, though the pain, severity of unattended complications, and lengthy recovery can't be dismissed. Still, across the hall, there's a little boy no longer with one foot. A girl is admitted into the room only to be moved to another floor until someone can determine what's causing her severe distress. This is a post-op wing. Nothing can be done until a diagnosis. You don't think of asking the parents of crying babies what their troubles are. At least an 11-year-old can point to the pain and describe the symptoms.

One mother advises that we really want to be in the wing across the bridge, the new one where there's wifi, DVDs instead of the antediluvian VCRs, and all the rooms are bigger and private.

No, the nurses tell me, you don't. It's for transplants and long-term recovery. Once my daughter is more mobile, we walk past one boy's room where there are a dozen stuffed animals, five bouquets of balloons. At Children's, these are all the signs that something is not right.

There are playrooms sprinkled throughout the hospital like bakeries, sanctuaries of unexpected joy simply because of their quotidian charm. The resourceful Child Life staff, devoted to restoring the ordinary in the patients' days, organize a back-to-school block party. Many children aren't going back to school any time soon. There's a DJ, and the kids in the wheelchairs, with colostomy bags and without hair, with the halos and stitches in their necks and heads, are dancing up a storm. I am reminded of Lorrie Moore's astounding short story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," about the twilight world of very sick children and their parents. But here, even clapping on the sidelines, you get some sense of relief. We're lucky. This afternoon we're going home.

This is what amazes me most. A dozen nurses in our ward, out of 70, are pregnant, many for the third or fourth time, three carrying twins. These nurses have cared for the sickest of children, seen them die. One veteran tells me this is her fourth pregnancy, though she adds calmly, "I lost my first."

Here, in the midst of everything, I can't find better examples of devotion and faith.