Moments That Scar

The first thing I notice is the weight of my body. I felt pinned down on the bed. My limbs were no longer a part of me, no longer under my control. The weight of the room was even more stifling. I looked to my left and I see the concerned, sad eyes of my brother, Andy. He looked older than when I last saw him but in my mind, he will always be the boy who carried me up the tallest hill in our childhood home after I twisted my ankle so badly that I couldn’t walk myself, even though I was the same size as him at that time he didn’t let that stop him from helping me when I needed him. I wanted to hug him and tell him it was going to be okay. He was dressed in a protective gown, mask, and hair covering, to protect me. This left only his eyes visible, but that was all I need to see to know that the situation was serious. His eyes displayed all his sad thoughts plainly to me and they told me that I was in trouble, that whatever was happening was leaving him heavy. As I tried to look to my right to see the person standing there, I am hit with a wave of pain so strong I could not breathe and the more I tried to breathe the more I felt like I was choking, and then I realized I was. There was a tube in my throat blocking my airways and with every attempted breath I gulped the tube and squeezed it with my throat repetitively sending continued waves of pain as I tried with effort to do the one thing this whole situation was all meant for, I wanted to breathe.

The person to my right I now realize is my father. He held something out to me, a whiteboard. He must have noticed that I was struggling to breathe and thought that I needed to say something. I did, I had so much I needed to say! My father seemed to be waiting anxiously for me to use the whiteboard, but I struggled to make sense of what was happening.

I tried to remember the moment right before this one. The moment that leads me to this point in time and then it suddenly came back to me. I just had a double lung transplant. I am here to get new lungs. I was dying before this moment and these lungs were supposed to save me. Now the tube in my throat makes more sense but I was wondering why they hadn’t taken it out yet since I was awake and out of surgery. Why was I still choking, I should be breathing freely, better. I should be healed. The more I woke up the more it hurt and the pain began to spread from my throat to my chest.

I heard someone say, “try not to panic, the tube is breathing for you. You’re at 100% oxygen.”

Yeah right! I thought. I was underwater, only instead of water, it was liquid filling my lung, my new lungs, and the more they filled the more painful it felt. The pain became so overwhelming and at the same time that I notice there were several people in the room who all seemed busy. This room was built to have a lot of equipment and a lot of people but even so, it seemed like the room was bursting with activity, noise, and concern. The room was dim, and my eyes were blurry, but I could see the monitor that showed my vitals. I saw the IV sticking out of my arm. I saw my mother sitting in the chair off to the side. It was dim and dark in the room so I couldn’t really make her out, but she seemed frozen. I guess she didn’t want me to see her worry so she tried to mask it in the dim lights and chaos of the room, but I could feel it radiating from where she sat in the room. She seemed to be aging by the minute and the urge to tell her its okay came back up and my throat started squeezing the tube in my throat again.

Now I am frustrated. No one was telling me what was going on, no one would tell me why there were so many people in the room or why they had not taken that tube out of my throat yet.

And the pain kept hitting me, wrapping its greedy, toxic arms around my ribs and closing in on me. Unrelentingly pulling my attention from the pain in my throat to the constricting vice around my ribs and back to the fact that I felt as if I was drowning while everyone watched.

I took the whiteboard and wrote two very insignificant words that I hoped would encompass the entirety of what I was feeling, “It hurts!”

My father looked at me like I was a child again and I had scraped my knee and said softly, like he was holding back his own pain, “I know” he said. And he held my hand. He was dressed in the same getup as Andy and I suddenly felt as if I was in a bubble. The concerning eyes of my brother and father burned into me and battled with the pain for my attention until it was too much to look at either of them for a minute so I glance around the room carefully, trying not to wake the demon in my throat that was breathing for me while it seemed to be killing me at the same time. My eyes land on a vase of flowers. It was strange to me because I knew that flowers were not allowed in the intensive care unit. All at once, it dawns on me that my sister Melissa sent them to me. I could feel her in the room now. I wondered if she would take up residence with mom in the corner, to cry, or stand by my bed to gaze on helplessly as they watch me struggle to breathe.

Suddenly, my nurse, Amanda was by my side. she looked at me in a way that was reassuring but cautious too. She seemed steadier probably because she had seen one too many scenes like the one playing out here in this room more than once, so she knew how to protect her heart. Nonetheless, she was a constant for me and anchored me to the moment for a short time. Seeing her brought back everything that had happened over the last several months and what I was trying to survive right now.

The nurses and doctors at the hospital ad been like family and close friends over these last months as I was practically a permanent resident at the hospital. This hospital was my first home in Texas, I wasn’t able to spend enough time in my actual home to outweigh the time spent here. I knew everyone’s name and they knew me, this made living here more bearable and comforting but the realization that this was my first home would make me homesick later, I’m sure, as I try to transition out of here.

“Don’t worry, mama” Amanda said, “I’m going to be here the whole time. I’m here for you” she said with confidence and enough sympathy that it made me start to cry.

Crying was a mistake that I realized instantly but too late as my lungs went into hyperdrive and my throat fought ferociously against the tube, trying to pull down the needed oxygen and salvation at the same time. My lungs began to burn and drown further as I suddenly realized why there was so many doctor and nurses in the room. They began to unattach my monitors, cords, and IV from its fix station and move them to mobile units. All the while telling me “it's going to be okay.” But no one had told me what was happening yet.

Finally, I see the face of a person in scrubs, which I automatically recognize as one of my doctors. He seems confident but rattled as he tells me that my lungs are bleeding and that they are taking me back to surgery to try and stop the bleeding. I ache to ask him a thousand questions. It's agonizing to have my voice taken from me and replaced with a feeble whiteboard that I am supposed to fill with my questions, thoughts, and sounds to declare to the room that I am hurting and confused. That all I want is for the pain to stop. For the weight of my limbs, my history, and everything I have been through to get here to end.

This agony follows me as they begin to wheel me out of the patient room and into the hall. I want my father and brother to stay with me, for both of them to keep holding my hand and help hold me in place so I don’t float away with the overwhelming uneasiness of it all, but all I feel is their hands squeeze mine as they let go of me. If they say anything to me as I am wheeled away, I cannot hear it over the pounding in my head and the noise as my monitors beep angrily at being disconnected.

I see Amanda by my side, who has taken up the role of quickly squeezing my hand and speak reassuring statements like, “it's okay” or “I’m here for you” but when she says to “just breathe” it hits me that I may never get to. The blinding ceiling lights give way to the operating room lights, big and glaring, so bright that everything looks white and my eyes can’t find a focus point. I’m placed next to the operating table and the team of doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologist all together lift me from my bed to the table.

I’ve stopped feeling the pain.

Everything slows down so quickly that I realized they have already started to send the anesthesia to my body even before they can tell me to start counting back from ten.

This moment that in reality probably lasted less than a minute seems to hang in the balance of everything going on and everything around me blurs into a slow-motion movie.

I am gripped by a realization that both calms me and scares the hell out of me. I may never see my children again. My son Nathaniel is only ten years old and my sweet daughter Alana is barley four. They are so young. My children were the guiding light for getting through this, I needed to be healed, to be healthy so that I could be there for them. Be the best mom that I could be and watch my children grow up, to be there for the soccer games, the ballet recitals, Christmas mornings, summer campfires, and everything that makes up childhood. I was doing all of this for them. I picture their tender smiles and wish to death I could hold them, to tell them everything that I believe they need to know because if this is my last moment that I have on this earth I need to make sure they know that I tried, That I will never leave them and that I’m sorry for the absence that is about to happen.

I realized with quiet resignation that I will never get this moment and that I have to accept what will happen without and hope for peace. That if this is indeed the end, that there is nothing that I can do to change it. As I close my eyes and send a quiet prayer into the world that they will know everything that I didn’t get a chance to teach them, that they will feel my love even when I’m gone, and mostly, that hope I will live. That if I do live, I will no longer wait to do the things I regret not doing right now.

Realizing now that my entire life I have been awaiting the inevitability of this moment and it haunts me. As my vision blurs more and more around the edges, I await the next moment when the anesthesia takes over as everything fades and suddenly, I do not feel the pain anymore, I am drifting under a blanket of white where the next moment waits for me.