Corazon
As soon as my daughter was born, she was taken away from me. They cut her out of my wife, showed her to me and immediately took her to another room. From a distance I saw a dozen figures in white coats and green pants, gloved and masked hovering over her like bizarre angels. They brought her back, but all sorts of tubes and wires hung off her, protruding from an awkwardly wrapped blanket. They let me hold her. Soon we went to where my wife was crucified on a metal table and a lime green sheet covered a doctor who stuffed her guts back in. My wife smiled and said hello in a drug addled haze. They took my daughter away again and I had to wait until they told me where to go.
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Down a maze of halls and through the echoing cries of infants, I was led to a ward. On a small and slightly inclined bed my daughter lay under a heat lamp that shone down like a single sun ray. It looked like 1,000 tubes where stuck or wrapped or taped on every extremity. A nurse in teddy bear scrubs was sitting on a high stool behind a boxy podium facing my newborn. The nurse was writing something and was oblivious to the weak wailings of the other creatures in the room.
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On either side and down the ward from my daughter were small clear plastic boxes with sky-blue light glowing through the blankets that were draped over them. Weird alien hands and feet shook or clutched at the glowing air. In one corner two nurses were bathing one of these creatures. It looked like a human, but small and red, not pink or white like my daughter’s skin, but red and blushed, and they were so small, so so small.
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My daughter was not like them. She looked healthy. She slept soundly under the warm white light and under the watchful eye of the nurse whose sole job was to watch my daughter, and only my daughter, while scribbling notes and looking up everytime one of the myriad of machines beeped or dinged. My daughter was full term, the rest were preemies. My daughter was a planned C-section, who knows how or why the tiny bodies around us came out so early. My daughter was not at risk for infection, or vitamin deficiency, or developmental disorders. What she did have, was a flap of tissue in her heart, millimeters small, that was stuck; and that little sheet of cells caused our world to implode around it.
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A year later, a year to the day, on my daughter’s 1st birthday, they cut her open. They bypassed her heart so they could try to fix it. I sat in a waiting room with my wife while somewhere in the bowels of the hospital my daughter was splayed open and more tubes fed cocktails of chemicals and blood to her lifeless body. After they sewed her up, she was taken to a room where the A/C wasn’t so cold. Why is it always like a freezer in hospitals? Is it to store the meat?
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My 4 year old son was prepped by a professional. She was like a kindergarten teacher in scrubs. She had this teddy bear that was bandaged and plugged full of IV tubes just like my daughter. She explained to him what all the tubes did and what they did to my daughter like it was show and tell. It was then that I realized maybe I needed some prepping too. I hadn’t really thought about what she would look like. I knew all year we were headed for this, but I tried not to think about it. I’d cross that bridge when we got there, and now I was looking down over the railings to the raging river below.
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In the PICU they had written ‘Happy 1st B-day’ on the windows to my daughter’s room with hearts and balloons in different colors. From the outside, I could see my daughter laying on a bed easily ten times larger than the one the year before, and now a different nurse, in teddy bear scrubs, was sitting outside her room scribbling notes, watching a computer monitor with different colored waves and fluctuating numbers. My son and I went into the room where my wife and mother in-law already stood over the tiny bed where my daughter lay.
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She was on her back, naked save for a diaper only to cover her catheter. Tubes and wires snaked out of her, some pumping fluid in, some sucking fluid out; there was a bag half full of blood and a three inch bandage was stuck to the middle of her chest. She had a pacifier hanging from her mouth that had a small furry kitten attached to it, and her eyes were closed.
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After a quick rub with that slimy hand sanitizer, I boosted my son so he could see his little sister sleeping on her back in the hospital bed. When he said her name, she opened her eyes and turned to face him. She looked at him and from her dark and heavy eyes there was a look of recognition, of giddiness, as if she forgot for a moment what she had been through, what she was going through. She closed her eyes again, and turned away. Aside from a coo, a grunt or a whimper, she went back to sleep and didn't wake up before we left.