Surgery update

Merv, the hospital chaplain, came by at 11AM and led us in a little prayerful blessing to prepare Nanette for surgery today. JoAnn and I hovered over our little girl for a while after that. Nanette wrapped her fingers around Jo's right pinky while JoAnn rested her left hand like a feather on Nan's curly blond hair. I stood across from JoAnn and held my palm over Nanette's chest. Ever since that first full night, the Wednesday before last, when I just sat there in her presence, I've felt a distinct energy come from her. A healing energy. My intention today was to send her some healing.

I sent her a little message, just in my own mind to hers.

"I'll take your place if you want me to," I thought. "You can slip inside my head, and I'll slip into yours. You can sit here and wait. And then, when your body is repaired, we'll switch back."

I got a response. Maybe it was just my imagination, but it was a response nonetheless. It felt like it came from Nanette, strange as that sounds.

"No dad," she said. "You have your journey, and I have mine."

I felt her wisdom, and I remembered at the OMSI display that one of the wall plaques said that when a female fetus is about 28 weeks old, still in the womb, she has every ovum cell already formed in her body - over a million of them. Only about 400,000 survive till puberty, and maybe 500 or so actually turn into viable ovum. And, of course, only a few become children. When I read that the other day, it struck me that these cells might carry ancient wisdom, passed down from grandmother to mother. When JoAnn was born, Nanette already existed within her, waiting to be completed. The thought kind of freaked me out and I couldn't really get my arms around it, but it still haunts me.

Anyway, I told Nanette that I loved her, and she said "I love you too, dad," and then I had to pull my hand away. I wanted to tell JoAnn, but I couldn't say the words. They stopped up in my throat. I can only write them. Don't ever ask me to tell this part of the story, because I can't. It sounds nutty, but it felt real, and it felt spiritual and that's all that matters to me.

The nurse told us that the prior surgery was over, and that Nanette would probably go down at about 11:30, so we waited.



We're used to waiting. The anesthesiologist, Dr. Finley, showed up at about 1:30PM. Her slender fingers danced over all the pic lines and heparin locks as she made a final check of Nanette's connections. At 1:45PM the nurses pulled the power plugs out of the walls and Ladybug One wheeled off to surgery.

Waiting is what we do here. The sun came out and we waited outside. A nurse came by and gave us a quick update - Nanette's doing well, they've pushed her bowels back into her belly and they've started sewing up the hole. No patch needed.

Cousin Lamar and his wife Tracey, down in Medford, have a friend who's a nurse in the surgery suite, and she ran up and gave us an update too. Dr. Finley seems happy with the way Nanette is handling the surgery. All is going well.

The sun went behind the buildings and a cloud cover moved in, so we waited inside. I took a walk down the hall and got a mocha. The wall of windows outside the NICU bear the names of babies born at Emanuel, etched into the glass, along with some poems and quotes, like "in the moment that a baby is born, the world changes just a little bit." The opposite wall sports poster-sized pictures of grown up NICU graduates with little insets of them at birth, like Mike, 35 weeks, 2520 grams. He was the first ECMO baby, fifteen years ago. My kids glommed onto that one, and Carter kept insisting that every dark-haired teenage guy he saw was Mike. Walking up and down the hall fills me with hope and courage.

At about 4:15 we got a message that Nanette would be back up in ten minutes, but, as you may have guessed by now, hospital time is different than the time we use to plan our TV schedules and business meetings. We understand that, but still, we sat there staring at the empty bay where Ladybug One belonged, our eyes jumping every time someone walked by. Four-thirty turned to four-forty-five. Still no Nanette. At just about five, the air changed and I could feel my heart leap. Maybe it was the quiet squeak of the wheels, or the patter of a dozen feet, or just the way everyone out in the main part of Level 3 stopped to look, but somehow we knew she was back.

Ladybug One returned dragging a whole new array of tubes and contraptions.

Dr. Krishnaswami showed us pictures of Nanette's bowels and spleen before the procedure and then the empty left chest cavity with the sutured diaphragm after. The anesthesiologist, Dr. Finley, got her tucked in with her new meds and the nurses fussed with her respirator and IV lines for an hour and a half. For a 9 day old infant with a severe congenital challenge who just underwent major surgery, she's doing well.

We stayed till the seven o'clock shift change. Angie took off from Florida to be here with us, but she's right in the middle of her exams for her master's degree in nursing, so she's going to sit up with Nanette tonight and I guess they'll work together on finals. I'll get JoAnn tucked in for a good night's rest. God knows, she needs it. The next three or four days will be watching and waiting. Watching for breathing problems. Watching for problems with the bowels and spleen. Watching, watching watching.

And waiting.