II was on a third-year medical school rotation in the pediatric intensive care unit in January, 1986, on a team caring for a baby girl with Listeria meningitis, spinal cord stiff and curved into a C-shape, head reaching back for her heels, as if stargazing. She was in an isolation room in a crib, lying on her side; she couldn’t lie flat on her back. Through the sliding glass doors, her small space was golden and shadowy and her metal crib was steel gray.

Late morning that day, just after 11:30, a rocket took off from a launchpad in Florida ferrying a crew of seven, one of them a school teacher. The shuttle left the earth on a cold day after multiple delays.

Many times, in the subsequent years, I’d ask a child, or a parent, some version of the question, “Can you touch your chin to your chest?” Each time, the image of the Listeria baby girl would rise up to remind me what it looks like, the extreme version of that “stiff neck” I was looking for. She was the first patient I’d ever seen with opisthotonos, that half-moon posturing indicative of a devastating neurological problem, and I hoped to never see it again.

On a TV screen hanging from a wall outside the pediatric intensive care unit, it looked just like a little toy rocket. A piece of smooth plastic you’d buy in a museum shop. At the appointed time, it lifted gracefully, vertically, into the air atop a plume of fire, careening skyward, then adjusting direction at an angle, surrounded by purple and pink slightly-strobing hues.

No one wanted to tell a parent that their child needed a spinal tap, but we used to do them a lot in the pediatric emergency rooms when kids presented with very high fever, looking punky. There was a male nurse who could scoop a child into a ball, opening up the space between two spinous processes so that the needle slid into the subarachnoid space easily, with a satisfying pop. I can’t imagine how a spinal tap was done on that baby girl, all bent like that, in the wrong direction, arching backwards. Her blood culture must have grown the Listeria, because we were sure it was that particular bacterium in her cerebrospinal fluid. I pictured thick pus full of rod-shaped organisms coating her brain and spinal cord and I felt sad for her mother. Felt the doom of the diagnosis.

Less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger burst apart, a white cloud of smoke widening on the TV screen, the announcer still describing the action and then becoming quiet. The smoke split into arms, like a firecracker, and billowed into tunnels, debris falling back toward Florida. I stood outside the intensive care unit staring, surprised, at the screen. Where had they gone? I imagined grown-ups everywhere hurrying to place their hands across children’s eyes. “Don’t look, don’t look.” But it was too late.

After completing her pediatric residency, Laura Johnsrude worked as a general pediatrician before settling in the Louisville area. Once in Kentucky, Laura began writing picture book manuscripts, short stories, and creative nonfiction. She was published in the March 2017 issue of Hippocampus Magazine and in the spring 2018 issue of Bellevue Literary Review, and received Honorable Mention in the  Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction for her piece “Drawing Blood.” Her essay “Look at My Chest” was published in The Spectacle and she has a piece in a new collection, The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation.