I awoke at 3am today, and could not go back to sleep. It's been pretty consistent since Kerian died that I awaken too early, or in the middle of the night. I just can't get a good night's sleep. I have tried exercising long and hard in the early mornings, eating light meals at night, and several other "tricks" that just don't work to help me sleep because what's really going on is that my body remembers. It remembers being awake to nurse him. And so I stayed in bed this morning because it was cold, and I just sat there remembering him, missing him, and it dawned on me--he would have been three months old today, November 10, 2011.
Shortly after I had that thought, his big brother, my now three-year-old son came into my bedroom, after a nightmare, and climbed into bed with us. Finally, with him there snuggled up against me and snoring, I was able to sleep.
When I awoke to my husband's alarm a couple of hours later, I was ready to get up and face the day. It's grocery day, so I decided to clean out my purse and look for the coupons I've stuffed in there carelessly over the last few months (because seriously, I have more cr@p in there than Mary Poppins has in her carpet bag). As I was doing so, in the pocket where I keep my cell phone, I found a tiny, wadded up scrap of paper. I opened it, thinking it was an important note that I surely kept. Instead, what I found was the scrap of a grocery list I had used in haste to write down the name and phone number of the cardiologist who agreed to see us the day we learned of Kerian's heart condition. I got choked up, and showed it to my husband and said, "I can't bring myself to throw it away."
He said, "It's okay to throw it away honey."
Somehow I needed his permission--though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he was there with me. We were there together that day at the perinatologist's office, for my 20 week ultrasound. I'll never forget the way the ultrasound technician hesitated. The exam was taking a long time, a very long time, and she was very quiet. I knew something was wrong. I think we both knew, my husband and I. Then she simply said, "I am finished here. I'm going to go get the doctor, since he always checks these things."
It took several minutes, a long time to wait when we suspected something awful was about to be announced. Finally he entered the room. He went through his usual greeting, and sat down at the ultrasound machine. He was quiet while he did the exam. Finally, he turned to us and said, "We've found something wrong with the baby's heart. It appears as if his heart and his stomach are on the wrong side of his body cavity. They're flip-flopped."
I couldn't breathe. I had to sit up, and take deep breaths and let that sink in. My husband held my hand, and gripped my fingers. The doctor continued, "I'm going to contact a pediatric cardiologist, she's top in her field, and see if we can get you in there tomorrow."
She wasn't available when he called, so we waited in the waiting room with the other perinatal patients. It's a tricky place, a perinatologist's office. If a pregnant woman is in a perinatologist's office, it's because she has a higher chance of losing her baby. Originally I was sent there because I was 41 years old and having a baby. It was strange, but I felt somehow lucky to be there at 20 weeks, to have them catch this problem early. So we would know.
When the doctor finally called us back into his office he said, "They're going to call you and give you an appointment time. I gave them your cell phone number." So my husband and I left in our separate cars. And since it's a strict rule that we share that we do not use the cell phone while we're driving, when the phone rang on my way home that day, I pulled over immediately, and answered the phone. It was the pediatric cardiologist's office, with my appointment, scheduled for the next day. I kept it in my bag even after the appointment, and must have squished it down, all wadded up, every time I shoved my cell phone back in that pocket of my purse.
So that is how, on the three month anniversary of my beloved Kerian's birth, that I came to find that little scrap of paper in my bag, and to have my tears, never far behind me, come up freely when I opened the tattered scrap and read it.
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