Many years ago, my youngest son, Kyle, who was only about 8 months old at the time, started running a pretty high fever. Since he is my fourth child, his mother and I had had plenty of experience with sick kids and after taking his temperature, we did all the normal things that parents do. We poured as many fluids into him as we could, gave him a teaspoon or so of infant Tylenol, gave him a nice warm bath, and then put him to bed without too many covers on top of him.
The next morning, his fever hadn’t measurably decreased, so we bundled him up and took him to see his pediatrician. After what seemed to be a pretty thorough examination, the doctor told us that Kyle had a virus that was going around and it would just have to run its course. He assured us that Kyle would be as good as new in a couple of days and reminded us to keep giving him fluids and the appropriate dose of Tylenol.
Later than evening, my wife told me that we were almost out of Tylenol and that she was going to the store to purchase some more. She deposited Kyle’s hot, almost lifeless body into my arms and told me to rock him until she got back. When she returned, not more than 15 minutes later, she took one look at Kyle and with a very worried expression on her face, said, “What in the world is that?”
“What?” I asked with concern.
“The side of Kyle’s face that you can’t see is real red and beginning to swell up.”
Upon closer examination, it was obvious that my wife was right, and we quickly put in a call to Kyle’s doctor, who of course was no longer in his office, and we were finally told to take our son to a night clinic where a doctor we didn’t know would take a look at him.
With me watching our other three kids, my wife wrapped up Kyle in his Cookie Monster jacket and rushed off with him to the night clinic. To make a very long story short, by a simple twist of incredible fate, Kyle ended up getting examined by the head of Sutter Memorial Hospital’s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, 35-year-old Dr. Robert Moody, who had just happened to drop by that night to see how things were going.
When my wife called me and gave me an update on Kyle’s condition, she said, “Don’t be alarmed, Daryl, because all the nurses are telling me that the doctor who is taking care of Kyle is the very best pediatric doctor in the whole city, but he’s putting Kyle into the hospital and I think you should get down here right away.”
I got to the hospital just in time to be the one elected to hold down my terrified 8-month-old son as Dr. Moody put an I.V. into his little arm so that massive doses of antibiotics could start making their way into his system. After that awful task had been completed, my wife took me aside and said, “Dr. Moody took one look at Kyle and immediately knew what to do. He said if we had waited even an hour longer, something horrible could have happened. Kyle has a very serious bacterial infection that is rapidly working its way towards his eyes and his brain. Dr. Moody thinks he will be okay, but we won’t know for sure for a couple of days.”
Well, thanks to a young doctor I had never even met before, and whom his friends recently described as “A brilliant leader in his field and a significant player in medicine in this town and state” my son was released from his caged hospital bed three days after he had been placed in it and my wife finally got to stop sleeping in chairs.
Last night, as I was thumbing through the newspaper, I came across an obituary with a photo of a man I vaguely recognized next to it. I began to read: “Robert R. Moody, a former Sacramento physician whose efforts helped develop state regulations mandating trauma units for children, is dead at the age of 47. Dr. Moody ran pediatric intensive care units at Sutter Memorial Hospital and UC Davis Medical Center before he retired four years ago and moved to Hawaii. He was killed Nov. 24 in a fall from a building in Maui.”
I reluctantly handed the obituary to my wife, who read it in sad disbelief.
“Daryl,” she finally managed to say, repeating the almost exact same words she had said to me that wonderful morning a decade or more earlier when Kyle had finally started acting like him normal self again, “you know, if it hadn’t been for Dr. Moody, we may have lost Kyle.”
There will be a Sacramento memorial service held for Dr. Robert R. Moody on December 12th. My wife and I, who never saw or talked to him again after we profusely thanked him for bringing our youngest son back from the edge of death, will be there.