Back into the fire.

I'm tethered to the phone like my babies are tethered to machines. Big heavy monitors that loom over their small bodies and tell you their fate. Will they live or die? How are they now? How about now? How about now??

The beep beep beep of their breathing masks. The push and pull of the bag that sucked life into your child while he lay blue and lifeless on the table. The ER doctor, young and terrified, demanding experts from the NICU, who spoke the language of these creatures. The same doctor who hugs me and almost cries when he's finally stable, and she knew she'd saved his life. I don't even know her name, and she saved my baby's life. 

"You were so calm" they told me, when it was over and Gus was being moved to the NICU. 

This has happened before, I told them. And happened and happened. But usually with the other twin. Their mouths opened. 

This is the life of a parent with immune compromised children. I've met so many at the Ronald McDonald House, and I'm one of the lucky ones. My children will grow up, and their immune systems will catch up. One day they hopefully won't be coding on a table because of a virus. A lot of parents don't have that luxury. 

But for now, this is my reality. Hospital life still feels more normal than home life to begin with, so another long hospital stay is just part of life, at this point. How long will it last? Anyone's guess. A week? A month? Two or three more days? Everything changes so fast. If I've learned one thing, it's this: life can change in an instant. 

Life can be taking your infant to the doctor and sent home with advice to watch for a fever, and you take your infant out of his car seat when you get home to nurse him and discover he's unconscious and turning blue. 

You race madly to the emergency room and told next time to just call 911, which only occurred to me as I clawed my way through traffic. 

But the doctor had just seen him. She said he was okay...

Suddenly, nothing is OK. Nothing is OK. And then the other baby gets sick. And nothing is OK. And he gets admitted, too. But he's in far better shape than his twin. For now. What will it be tomorrow? 

The NICU calls while I'm in my boarding room, pumping breast milk for the babies. My heart was already in my throat when the phone rang, because it could only mean trouble. 

"It's Gus," says the nurse, "I can't get him to settle. I think he just wants his mom."

I raced into the NICU to hear my baby screaming, an almost welcome sound after his ghostly silence. He's thrashing around in his isolette like a fish out of water, his back arched and his face red. I tore him out of bed so quick, it yanked his c-pap right off his face. He stopped crying and looked at me, stunned. I rocked him for hours, until we both fell asleep. As horrible as it was, it was kind of a big moment for Gus and I. It was the first time he needed me, his mother. Not a pair of gloved hands and a bottle, but me. 

 

Hello, goodbye.

The night Lazlo came home, I went to bed with a feeling of completeness in my chest. Finally, finally, we're all together again. All of us. 

We meant to celebrate, but Story fell asleep on our way to dinner, so we settled for drive thru Taco Bell.  The kids and I had spent the ENTIRE day watching movies in the tiny room of the Stanford Guest House, the hotel that the Ronald McDonald House sends you to when someone in your family is sick, to keep you from contaminating the whole house. A little bit ago, someone brought the noro virus to the Ronald McDonald House, and it sent loads of immune compromised kids to the ER. My friend and her step daughter almost lost their dream Make A Wish vacation to Disney Land because of that virus. So here we are, the day we bring our last baby home from the hospital, only home is a hotel. But my days of hotels and Ronald McDonald House and Make A Wish and Stanford Hospital and sick kids are over. A new chapter is beginning, now. Now, I go home to Santa Cruz to pack because we're being evicted and we're off to start over somewhere else.

................

"Can I sit here?"

I look up from my booth in the community dining hall of the Ronald McDonald House to see a woman I recognize, but don't know. It's kind of an unspoken rule here that, unless you're already friends, you leave each other the F alone in the dining hall, because everyone is stressed and frazzled and just trying to scarf down their food before they rush off to do whatever sick kid thing they have to do. But I invite the woman to sit down. I've seen her around. She compliments me on my baby, tucked asleep in his wrap, against my chest. 

"This is Gus," I say, "His twin brother is still in the hospital."

"I have one of those, too." She replies, and suddenly I see why she's here, at the Ronald McDonald House, and sitting with me. She launches into her story about her baby, born prematurely with a terrible illness, surviving against all odds. As incredible as these babies are, all their stories basically have the same plot here. Because if they aren't here with the same plot line, it means they're dead. 

It was fifteen minutes of conversation later that I realized I knew this woman's incredible life story, but I didn't even know her name, and she didn't know mine. That's also par for the course around here. Stories and explanations first, names later. It feels so good to commiserate with someone who is going through it, themselves, that names don't even matter. My name could be Bozo the Clown or Freddie the Ax Murderer, and it wouldn't matter. We're all the same in that place, that strange space of time suspended in stress and hope and fear and gratitude.

I went back to Santa Cruz with that woman's story tucked away in my heart, and I think of her and her family and her incredible baby often. I probably always will. I will never forget the stories I've heard and the families I've met during my months at the Ronald McDonald House. They will stay with me forever, reminding me what I have to be grateful for.