What keeps you going?
After our time in the pediatric cardiac ICU, we brought home a healthy baby. Others made funeral plans.
When we returned to the room, my daughter was sitting up in bed. Puffy—her lovingly battered stuffed rabbit—was tucked under one arm. She was sipping apple juice from a straw. A Barney video was playing on the TV. And every nurse on duty in the pediatric cardiac ICU surrounded her bed, laughing and clapping.
At 18 months, our daughter had undergone open heart surgery. At her physician’s direction, we had left the room while they took her off the ventilator.
The weeks-long buildup to the surgery, the hours of waiting for the procedure to be over, and finally the helpless agony of watching our daughter’s terrified eyes plead with us to remove the tube from her throat had left us knackered. The relief and the joy we felt at seeing her holding court with those nurses was a welcome contrast to the dread and the emotional nausea wrought by the ordeal up to that point.
