IN MY SHOES: A Healthy Meal Nearly Took Their Son’s Life
Here is a moving story about one family’s anguish over their son becoming critically ill and hospitalized after contracting an E. coli infection from a home-cooked meal of a baked, boneless, skinless piece of chicken on a small bed of spinach. "Here you think you’re feeding your child a great, healthy meal," Dennis Krause said sadly. "But here I was, poisoning him":
The hardest moment came when Elaine and Dennis Krause’s 9-year-son, who had stoically undergone kidney dialysis, blood transfusions and drug treatments that made him hallucinate that spiders were all around him, quietly asked his parents whether he was going to die.
"What do you say when your child asks you, am I going to die?" asked Elaine Krause, who has spent nearly all of this month beside her son’s bed at a hospital here, watching his skinny, lanky body do battle with E. coli. "I told him, ‘These people are trying to help you, and you are getting good care.’ But the truth is, I couldn’t answer him directly. We didn’t know." …
For the Krause family, of McFarland, Wis., the illness began a few days after a family dinner on Aug. 24. First, their 15-year-old daughter grew ill. Then their 9-year-old, who was healthy enough that he had a perfect attendance record last year in third grade, grew even more ill, and has suffered debilitating effects, including acute renal failure, fluid buildup near the heart, raised blood pressure, soaring blood sugar.
In a hospital cafeteria here, miles from their home, the Krauses at first could only bring themselves to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Everything else — lunch meats , salads, everything — scared them.
"For me, there’s anger and paranoia and fear for others — for the safety of food we get that’s supposed to be monitored," Ms. Krause, 47, said. "I don’t know what to trust. Should we grow it all ourselves?"
On Friday, their strawberry-blond boy lay weakly in his hospital bed, surrounded by balloons and cards from the school where he says he fears falling behind his class. He had physical therapy, then occupational therapy to begin rebuilding his body. He told his father he only wanted to be well, to somehow rewind to the day before the spinach.
A few days ago, his body seemed to turn a corner and doctors removed him from the dialysis machine, a crucial step toward recovery. His parents have not asked when he might be well enough to go home; they said it was too early to look ahead.
"I keep thinking we will at some point go home and it’ll all be like it was," said Mr. Krause, 52. "But we don’t know yet what the long-term effects are. He will be monitored probably for the rest of his life. It’ll never be the same."
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