He Takes My Heart With Him

Surgery

There are no rules that tell you what to do when your newborn has surgery. No etiquette guidebook that explains how to fill your time.

The nurses told us where the OR waiting room was and that our name would be called when surgery was over. The surgeon would come and tell us how everything went. They said we probably had a minimum of an hour and a half, possibly more.

So, we wandered, blankly, down the hall to the OR waiting room and stood outside it. There were benches outside it, too. I asked my husband if he thought we should go in. He said we could do whatever I wanted. Going into the room seemed too concrete for me at that moment, so we sat on the benches outside and watched the people around us. I wondered if anyone else had a baby in the OR. I wondered if anyone else's surgery seemed as serious as Jack's. I wondered why this was happening to us.

After a while, we went into the waiting room and I tried to leaf through a magazine. My brother came. He showed up, tall and unexpected, to sit with us and be there for Jack.

We sat together and then they called our name. My husband and I got up and looked at my brother. It gave us a minute to get ourselves ready and then we walked out the door.