by Alana Terry
“How’s she doing right now?”
I hear something in the background. A bathroom faucet, maybe. I can picture Dr. Bell splashing cold water on that flawless face. Why did I do this? How big of a fool am I?
“She’s having a really hard time breathing. It’s ...” I dig my fingernails into the skin of my forearm. Anything to get my mind off these tears that threaten to humiliate me. “It’s the worst I’ve seen her.” I keep my voice low. I’m the only one in the room with Natalie, but I already feel guilty, like I’m going behind everyone else’s back. “I don’t know what I should do.”
“You know, at this point, I’d really need to defer to the doctors at Children’s. They’re the ones who are most familiar with your daughter’s case. But if you’re asking for my personal opinion, not my professional one ...”
“Yes,” I interrupt. “That’s what I want.”
She sighs. “Are you having second thoughts about cancelling the DNR?”
I search her voice for signs of displeasure. Will she think I’m a monster if I choose to let my daughter die? I think about what Eliot said over dinner, how much his fiancée suffered at the end just to eke out a few more months here on earth. “I don’t know,” I answer.
“What are you doing?” A gruff voice breaks my illusion of Dr. Bell sitting in a quiet, serene room surrounded by white frilly curtains and flower arrangements in crystal vases.
“Hey, hon. Sorry I woke you.” There’s a hint of strain in her voice. Is she afraid? “It’s the mother of one of my kids.”
“Get back in bed.”
I’m embarrassed for her. I don’t know who this guy is or whether or not he speaks to her like that when he’s well-rested and content, but I don’t imagine it’s the kind of conversation she wants someone like me to overhear.
“You need to go,” I say. “I’m really sorry I bothered you. I just ... Well, thank you. For talking things through with me.”
I don’t know what to expect next. More yelling on other end of the line? Dr. Bell giving me an award-worthy pep talk about believing in my daughter no matter how bleak her prognosis looks?
She sighs and keeps her voice down the same way Jake and I used to hush ourselves up whenever Patricia was around. “Listen. You need to do what you think is best. No one else can tell you what that is. You’re Natalie’s mom. You’re going to make the right decision.”
I want to thank her, but I’ve lost my voice. By the time I find it again, she’s already ended the call. And none too soon. Natalie’s monitor is beeping again. Her oxygen levels have just dropped into the seventies. A minute later, the PICU doctor is in here frowning over her crib.
“Unless you tell me otherwise, it’s time for us to intubate.”
CHAPTER 71
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.
CHAPTER 72
It’s Sunday morning. I can picture Sandy over on the East Coast, sitting in the front row of her husband’s huge church. She’s wearing one of those floral-print skirts that rustles when she walks, and her hair’s in that long French braid, and she’s so busy worshipping God she’s not even thinking about my baby on a ventilator.
No, that’s not fair. She’s thinking about Natalie. I know she is. I texted her last night to tell her what was happening. The doctors got Natalie hooked up to her machine just fine. Her oxygen levels are holding steady. By the time I woke up this morning her fever was down to 102. Everyone says I made the right call.
I’m still not sure I believe them.
It’s one thing if Natalie’s on this ventilator for a day or two while they get her fever under control. I get that part of it. But it’s totally different if we start talking about weeks or months. I mean, at some point you just have to say enough is enough, right? I know Natalie’s totally knocked out, but what if that only means she can’t respond? What if she can still hear and feel everything? What if she’s scared? What if she thinks I’ve abandoned her?
I can’t even hold her anymore, not while she’s on all these machines. I’ve seriously started to wonder if it’s good for me to stay here, but I don’t have anywhere else to go, and of course I’ve got to stick around in case something changes.
Something has to change eventually, right? That’s what’s got me so scared. The thought that we might be here in this limbo for months. It’s Christmas in a few days. Big stinking deal. And what if Easter comes and she’s still on this stupid machine?
I should call Jake. I need to talk to him, but my phone’s almost dead and my charger’s stuck in Orchard Grove. I sent him a quick text last night. Didn’t even have the heart to tell him Natalie was back on the ventilator. I just said it was something the doctor mentioned as a possibility. I’ve got to warm him up to the idea or he’ll completely freak out. I told him to call the hospital room when he wakes up. I can’t waste my phone batteries anymore.
Sunday morning. I saw something about a church service in the big chapel downstairs. Maybe I should go. There’s nothing really for me to do here. But I know I won’t be able to bring myself to leave. What if Natalie wakes up? What if she needs me?
My phone beeps with an incoming text. How’s she doing?
At first I think it’s Jake, but then I realize it’s coming from Eliot. Back on the ventilator, I tell him then add Phone’s about to die. Can’t really chat.
I’ve got a Bible I borrowed from the peds floor chapel. I figure even if I don’t make it to church, I can spend some time in here on my own. I swear I’ve done more praying in the past week than I have in the last three years combined.
It’s hard to believe it’s already Sunday. Hard to believe that a week ago I was whining at Jake for making us go to some dumb country church. If it hadn’t been for Grandma Lucy, would I have let them intubate my baby? If Jake hadn’t gotten the itch to make things right with God last week, would my child have died sometime overnight?
Her color’s better today. Not so ashen. I always thought it’d be creepy to see a baby go blue, but really it’s that sick grayish yellow that’s the most frightening. Like they’re already a corpse. No, I can’t think like that. Natalie needs all my positive energy today. She’s going to be healed. That’s what Grandma Lucy said, and that’s what I’m going to believe.
Any other alternatives are too horrific to fathom.
CHAPTER 73
I spent four years living with a pastor’s family, but I had no idea the Old Testament was this stinking depressing. I’ve been flipping through some of the books named after people, you know, Isaiah and Jeremiah and all those guys. Man, if I was trying to focus on positive thinking today, I really picked the wrong material. So far, it’s been about God punishing his children, calling them whores, warning them about all the plagues and devastation he’s about to visit on them for their idol-worship.
And still I keep flipping from page to page. It’s like when your body’s so anemic you can’t stop eating spinach and red meat even though the best you can do is gag them down.
Here’s a passage about the day of the Lord, except it’s not all trumpets and angels like Sandy’s husband preaches. No, this is a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger — to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it. See what I mean about real happy images here?
I’ve had enough of this. I check the clock. Is it really almost noon? I’ve had this book open on my lap for an hour and a half, and I still haven’t received a single word of comfort.
I really need God to speak to me like he did last Sunday through Grandma Lucy. I need another promise like that, something I can hold onto. Heck, I’ll take anything just about now as long as it’s not a verse about dashing someone to pieces like pottery. Who knew the Old Testament got so dark?
I’m in Psalms now. It’s Sandy’s favorite book. Says she can always find encouragement there. Well, the first chapter I read ended with something like, You’ve taken everything away from me, and the darkness is my closest friend.
Thanks, Sandy. That’s real comforting right there.
What am I doing wrong? Sandy and her husband are always talking about how the Bible’s this living, active entity that God can use to speak to you directly. I’ve been searching its pages for almost two hours and haven’t gotten a single message from the Lord. Don’t you think he knows I’m waiting?
I pray. Somewhere in the back of my head, I remember that youth pastor with dreadlocks saying we should ask God to speak to us before we read the Bible. Maybe that’s where I made my mistake.
My prayer isn’t fancy or long or anything. I just ask God to tell me something about my daughter. Let me know if I did the right thing putting her back on the ventilator. If she’s not going to make it, I need to be prepared. I’m so sick of false hope.
I don’t feel any better after I’ve prayed, but I remember that same youth pastor telling me God’s the same no matter how we feel.
I flip to the middle of the Bible. Psalm 118. My eyes scan the page and land on one verse as if it were highlighted in neon.
I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done.
And there I have my answer.
CHAPTER 74
Sandy used to talk about folks having a life verse, something sort of special just for them. I don’t know how much I believe her. I mean, there’s billions of people in the world, and definitely not that many verses that can mean something unique, especially if you take out all the ones about who begat who and all those passages about God’s wrath and punishment.
When I graduated high school, Sandy picked a verse for me. I hate to admit that I don’t even remember what it was now. She said she prayed over it, and I’m sure she did. Probably spent a week’s worth of morning devotions pouring over her Bible, hunting for just the right passage that would apply to me, but I don’t recall being very impressed when I read it.
There’s something different about this verse, though. This time, I almost feel certain the words are meant for me. Or more specifically, they’re meant for my daughter. I will not die but live. It’s too much of a coincidence that this is the very first verse I read after I asked God to tell me something about Natalie’s future, right? I mean, it even lines up with what Grandma Lucy said.
For a minute, I wonder if she’s online. Maybe I can find her profile page or an email address or something. I don’t know what I’d say if I did, but I’m curious enough to risk the last bar of my cell phone batteries.
I find the webpage for Safe Anchorage Goat Farm right away. There’s pictures of the animals, the new babies, the mamas in their milk stands.
There’s a map to their address on Baxter Loop and link that tells the history of the old farmhouse there.
Something in a sidebar catches my eye. It’s called Grandma Lucy’s Prayers for Healing. I click it right away. Another heavenly message?
What I read isn’t really an article. It’s like a scripted prayer. I guess you’re supposed to pray it over the person who’s sick. It’s a little bit rambling, just like Grandma Lucy’s speech in church last week, and it’s got tons of Scripture verses peppered throughout. I’m certain she’s the one who wrote it. I don’t even need her name in the title to tell me that.
I feel funny reading it like this. I’m sure there’s something to be said for praying off a piece of paper, but doesn’t it mean more when you pray it on your own? I mean, it’s the difference between a man getting down on his knee, looking you in the eye, and telling you all the reasons he wants to spend the rest of his life with you and just writing you a letter and reading it to you out loud.
I’d like to believe this prayer will work, but there’s something off about it. I can’t place my finger on what exactly. Maybe because Sandy’s husband was so against those faith healers on TV. Stuff and nonsense, he said. According to his theology, God’s able to do miracles, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got the right to run around shouting that anyone can be cured if they just believe strong enough.
Still, I’m curious enough about Grandma Lucy’s healing prayer that I bookmark the tab to go back to later. I want to let it settle in first. Or maybe that’s just the fear talking. Me not wanting to get my hopes up. Because if I go to battle, if I get on my knees and beg and plead with God to spare my daughter’s life and she doesn’t make it, I may never find the faith to trust him about anything in the future.
But isn’t that the exact opposite of what those faith healers say? They say you’ve got to believe even when it looks the bleakest. I’m sorry. I just don’t have that kind of blind allegiance. Sure, I know God might restore my daughter, but what if he doesn’t? I’m not about to put all my eggs in that one, fragile basket. Maybe if I were more mature. Maybe if I were a saint like Sandy or a prayer warrior like Grandma Lucy, this faith would come easier. But I’m just Tiff, the foster brat from Massachusetts. I’m nothing special. I’m lucky if God hears half of my prayers because most of them are so selfish anyway.