I raised my head from the starchy pillow on the twin hospital bed, weary.
After a full week in the ICU with our daughter Lucy, I couldn’t see straight with the exhaustion. From the time she stopped breathing, 12 hours after she was born, to the moment we could leave the ICU to the standard hospital room, I had not cried once.
How could I cry?
Each moment had been filled with beeping machines, EEG readouts, blood draws from so many parts of her body that they took blood from her forehead once, the next shift of nurses at 1 am, residents who swept in on the energy of their over-confidence, the attending doctors who gently corrected the resident when they found out he had given our 3-day-old baby morphine because “she seemed like was in pain,” the visit from my parents who were so terrified that the knitted baby cap someone had gifted us had fallen on the floor and my mother wanted my father to take it home so she could burn it, the sweeping boundary I created in the moment, asking them to leave; the day my left leg swelled up so enormous that I couldn’t walk, so I had to leave my baby daughter laying inert in the ICU to get an ultrasound to make sure I didn’t have a blood clot that could slip up to my brain; fitful 30-minute segments of sleep to wake up to the beeping again.
That beeping. I’ll never forget that beeping.
Friends arrived to bring us food, so Danny wheeled me to the visitors’ room, where we’d tell the stories of the long days and nights, again and again, trying to master this trauma by sharing the stories, but we’d leave after drinking blood orange juice and eating gluten-free pumpkin muffins, thanking our friends for their connection, and enter the trauma room again.
The neurologist showed up every night at 11, wearing the same plaid jacket in earth tones, blue shirt, red tie, and brown pants. When I asked a nurse if he ever changed his clothes, she told me that no, he didn’t have the time to think about clothes, so he had 7 versions of that outfit in his closet. Every day he put on a new version and showed up to work looking exactly the same.
Our four-day-old daughter was having seizures and this man figured out the medication that stopped them. I no longer cared what he wore.
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