| |
I’m crying. I feel like such a baby, but I can’t help it. I couldn’t be in the room, not while they shove those tubes into her. My throat is raw just thinking about it.
They’re giving her some kind of drug. Putting her in a coma while she’s on the ventilator.
I’m in the chapel while I wait. Not the main one where they do services or anything, just a little room connected to the peds floor. It doesn’t look exactly like a church. There’s no crosses or anything, but they do have a piano and pews, and there’s a few Bibles and a hymnal and some other religious texts on a shelf when you come in.
It’s quiet in here. Of course it is. Everyone else on this floor who isn’t working is asleep. I should be home with Jake, with Natalie in her room beside ours with her apnea monitor on so we’ll know if she runs into any problems. None of this is right. It’s not even like a bad dream. It’s like an emotional hangover. That’s how confused and sick I feel right now. I’ve got a scratch in the back of my throat, too. If I get sick, are they going to keep me from my child? And if I feel this bad from a little tickle, how’s it going to be for my daughter getting the back of her throat scraped raw by these invasive tubes? I can’t stand the thought of looking at her with that stuff shoved down her windpipe. I almost want to leave her here and tell the nurses to call me once she gets better.
If she gets better.
There’s no guarantee, even being intubated. This might be it. She might never wake up.
I hate Grandma Lucy. That crazy lady’s what got this whole thing started. If it hadn’t been for her, for the way she told me with so much confidence my child would be ok, I would have never gotten this false hope, never signed those consent forms. I should have never let my guard down. This fear and disappointment and shock, it’s all my fault.
My throat’s burning up. It’s like I can feel the scraping of that horrid plastic tube they’re shoving down her windpipe ...
Having a machine do all your breathing for you. Can you imagine what that’s like? How claustrophobic you’d feel? What if you have to breathe faster, but the machine won’t let you? What if you hyperventilate? The worst part of it is this is basically the only life she’s ever known. Sure, we had those two months together in Orchard Grove. She was relatively tube-free, except of course for her feeding pump and that Yankauer attached to her suction machine. But now she’s back at Children’s, and she’s too little to even know this isn’t what her life is supposed to be. It’s like those rescue animals who’ve been caged up their entire existence. They don’t even know that things like sky or grass exist. The argument could be made that they’d be better off dead ...
Better off ...
No. I can’t go there. I made up my mind, and I’m not looking back.
But even so, there’s no guarantee she’ll recover. Will my daughter die without ever feeling the summer sun warming up her cheeks? Will the whirring sounds of her equipment and the beeps from her monitors be the only noises she knows? What about music? What about laughter?
She can’t die. She can’t. But how can I sit here and do nothing while that doctor puts her in a coma? Who puts their own child through torture like that? What if she never wakes up? What if she’s in the coma for months? Years? It would be easier to keep her off the machine from the start than one day having to pull the plug.
Pull the plug. Is that the next major decision in my future?
If I keep her off the ventilator, I’m not actively responsible for what happens next. If she doesn’t recover, it will be her lungs’ fault. Not mine. But now that I’ve let them put her on that machine, that means one day I might have to make the decision to take her off it. I’ve just invited myself to become an active participant in my daughter’s death.
How could you ask that of anybody?
I’m sobbing. I’m glad I’m in this room where nobody’s around and nobody can hear. I’m sure other parents have come in here and cried like this. What’s that depressing passage the old woman quoted? Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. I’m not the only parent who’s suffered through this. Right here in this room, others have come before me. I can picture them if I want to. The husband who holds his wife in the same arms that carried their child into this hospital, only now they’ll be walking out with nothing but an empty backpack. The woman who has to find a way to tell her grandchildren that their brother won’t ever come home. The parents whose kid has been in a coma for a year, and the doctors have given up all hope.
Time to make the choice ...
I don’t hold a monopoly on grief. I’m not the first mom who’s suffered like this, and I won’t be the last. And life goes on. That’s what’s so stinking depressing. My baby could die. She might be gone before I ever go back to her room, but tomorrow the sun will rise, folks will wake up for their morning commute, waste their money on their frilly lattes and cappuccinos, dull their senses behind their computer screens and smartphones. Life will go on without Natalie just like it went on before she arrived.
That’s why I’m crying. I realize I am Rachel, the woman refusing to be comforted. Because what kind of comfort can I ever hope to find if God takes my child away from me? After all the promises I made, after how hard I tried to be a better person, after the way he got my hopes up with that stupid Grandma Lucy stunt, he could whisk my daughter off to heaven any minute, and I’m powerless to stop him.
And that’s not a feeling I’d wish on anyone.