Waiting is awful on a regular day. Waiting for news on a baby that means more than the world to you is a special kind of hell.
All of the favors I’d called in were coming to fruition and yet I still felt so incredibly helpless. The ambulance ride had been too quick. They’d taken her from us too fast, whisking her to surgery, which had always been the plan, but it felt so wrong. She should be with us, not with strangers. Not with people she didn’t know. People who didn’t love her like we did.
“What’s her name?” They’d asked when we finally got Kelly settled into a hospital room and looked over.
We’d looked at each other and laughed until tears sprang to our eyes. We’d never even thought about names. Our thoughts had been too full of other problems, other worries. So we’d cried tears of laughter at our thoughtlessness. Those tears wouldn’t stop and then they’d changed to a different kind of tears. The terrified kind. We cried together and held each other, both so damn frightened we didn’t know what else to do.
“Hope,” Kelly had said when we’d finally quieted. “Abigail Hope, but we’ll call her Hope.” Her tear-filled eyes looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. How could I argue with what seemed so very perfect?
Now we waited. And I wasn’t used to it. Kelly lay quietly in the bed next to the chair I sat in. They called the room with updates almost every fifteen minutes.
“She’s in the OR.”
“We’ve intubated her.”
“The first incision has occurred.”
And we waited, each time the phone rang, making us practically jump out of our skin. Every phone call seemed too damn important and pivotal and it was. I knew how fast it could all go wrong. How quickly we could lose her. I wasn’t used to it. I knew Kelly wasn’t either, but I really wasn’t.
It was different being on this side of things. I was so helpless, so very out of control. I wanted to march down there and demand to be let in. Demand to see that they were doing the very best for Hope, but I’d already been warned away. There couldn’t be any emotional ties in that operating room and what I felt for Hope was beyond emotional ties. She was mine. It was in my bones, my love for her. I loved her like she was my own, and if I had anything to do with it, she would be.
So, I stalked around Kelly’s hospital room feeling like a goddamn failure because I couldn’t oversee the surgery. Because I couldn’t make this better for Kelly. I paced. I went from anger to tears. I ran my hands through my hair and barked orders at the nurses like a complete asshole. I decided I was really bad at being on this end of things. And it was only going to get harder.
This was Hope’s first surgery and it wasn’t even one that was going to help her. It was only a small fix to give her heart time to grow bigger so we could do this again and then again until her heart was fixed. We had a long road ahead of us and it was a scary one. There was no guarantee she would pull through. I saw it all the time. Babies were so fragile, so susceptible to infection. A million things could go wrong and I went down a bad path that day, one I shouldn’t have traveled, obsessing over every one of them.
That’s how I missed it. I was being too selfish. Too caught up in my own grief that I didn’t notice how oddly solemn Kelly was. How strangely quiet and distant she’d become over the hours.
Then she voiced it. I was pacing the room, pulling at the roots of my hair when I heard her. I almost missed it she’d said it so quietly.
“It was something I did.”
I paused, finally really seeing her for the first time since we’d arrived at the hospital and they’d taken Hope from us.
She looked tired but still so beautiful, and already her stomach was smaller where she’d carried Hope. It made me sad. Hope had been so very safe in there.
Kelly had been the kind of brave today I’d only seen in movies or read about in books. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I already knew she was the type of woman who would walk through fire for her child. She’d shown me that by showing up at my office months ago.
I walked to the foot of her bed and stared down at her. “What did you say?”
She wasn’t looking at me either and I realized all day she’d been lost in her head, too. She still was. Immediately, I felt sick. I hadn’t been there for her.
“It was me. It’s my fault,” she said to the wall behind me. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. It was too vacant, too gone. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.
Walking around to the side of the bed, I asked, “What’s your fault?”
I ran my hand over her forehead and her eyes finally met mine. “It had to have been something I did, right? Or something I didn’t do?” She stuttered the sentence and it came out stilted and cluttered, the words seeming to trip over one another.
My eyes burned at the emotion behind those words. I knew what she was asking me, but I hoped against hope I was wrong.
“That’s why she’s sick.” Tears poured down her face. “It was me. I didn’t eat enough vegetables or maybe I had a drink before I knew I was pregnant. I did this to her, right?” She sobbed at me, her voice becoming louder and heavier with remorse every sentence.
I climbed into bed next to her, shoes and all, and lay on top of the covers. I was way too big to fit, but we would just have to make do. We needed each other right now. We needed to be as close to each other as possible because clearly apart we were a damn mess.
That was us. Together we were unstoppable. Apart, we were hopeless.
Pulling her head onto my chest, I said, “No, baby. We don’t know why these things happen, but this is not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. It just happens sometimes and it fucking sucks, but you are not allowed to blame yourself. Do you understand me?”
I breathed in the scent of her hair while she wrapped her arms tight around my middle. She didn’t answer me, but she sobbed into my T-shirt and her cries broke me because if that baby didn’t make it, she wouldn’t make it. Maybe I wouldn’t either. It would break us all.
I knew firsthand how losing someone you love could rip a family apart. How grief could inevitably crush a family’s soul beyond repair if you let it.
I vowed from that moment on, I wouldn’t get lost in my head anymore. I’d be there for her. I’d be strong despite how weak I felt.
I held her to me and petted her in the way I knew she loved while more phone calls came in with news of Hope’s surgery. My mother and Kelly’s arrived and we all waited together, cuddled up on that bed; every one of us wrapped around each other, holding one another together, making sure all of our pieces stayed intact.
It was one of the hardest days of my life. The waiting. It does a weird thing to a person. We prayed and begged to a God we hadn’t talked to in a very long time. We made promises. We bargained. We pleaded.
In the end, God came through that day.
Hope and faith won, and our pleas were answered.
Hours later I wheeled Kelly down to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, where there lay our Hope almost completely unrecognizable. Kelly cried again as she held Hope’s tiny hand.
And me. I just stared at Hope. I couldn’t quite believe it, how I’d seen hundreds of babies like that. The tubes that seemingly came from everywhere, the gauze covering the long incision on their chest. The intubation tube that almost seemed as big as she was. My heart hadn’t ached for those babies like they did for my Hope. My eyes hadn’t burned with emotion for them.
Tears poured from Kelly’s eyes endlessly as she looked her baby over. I wanted to soothe her. To make it better, but there wasn’t a better in this situation. It just was. And we just had to make do. The nurse on duty worried for Kelly and eventually covered Hope with a small blanket up to her chin, rubbing Kelly on the back, telling her it was sometimes too hard to see and that she should take a break.
I hated this feeling, the sadness. The worry, I loathed it. Being on this side of things was excruciating. And the weeks to come would try us beyond anything we could even imagine. They would test our faith. They would push our limits. They would make us question everything every second of the day. But we’d lean on each other. We’d cry together with worry. We’d smile at every small accomplishment. And we’d get through it all.
Together.