He Takes My Heart With Him

The Outcome

The surgeon stood, in light blue scrubs, in the middle of the hallway. He had his mask in his hand and his surgical cap still on his head. We walked up to him and he smiled and held out his hand. "Surgery went great," he said, and led us into a tiny room off the hallway.

I don't think we sat down. We stood and waited for him to tell us that Jack was okay.

"Surgery went fine," he repeated. He told us that they had removed the mass on our son's back and it was being sent to the pathology lab to be biopsied. "We did run into a small problem," he said. "We found a small path, running from his spine to the mass." I think he called it a sinus tract. He told us he had left the operating table to call the University Hospital's neurosurgeon to find out how to proceed. This surgeon was a general surgeon; only a neurosurgeon operates on the spine or brain. He explained that the neurosurgeon had said to tie off the path and to keep Jack flat on his back for 24 to 48 hours. That was to prevent spinal fluid from leaking out before the cut healed.

We tried to process all this information, but we were focused only on one thing. Just say that Jack is okay. Those specific words. That phrase. Jack is okay.

He reached out to shake our hands again, getting ready to leave. He told us that Jack was in recovery and we couldn't see him there. We had to go to the NICU and wait for him to be brought back. It would probably be about an hour.

"He's okay?" I asked. Unable to bear it any longer. And he looked at me and smiled. "Yes, he's okay," he said.

I felt my body begin to let go. My shoulders had been hunched and high by my head, which I hadn't realized. I felt them fall. I had been leaning forward and I felt myself sink back to an upright position. My muscles had been tensed for so long that I hadn't noticed. Probably since the day I received the test results that told us our baby had something wrong. Not until the muscles began to loosen and I began to repeat and savor those words in my head. "He's okay. Jack's okay. He's okay. Oh, God, thank You. Thank You. Oh, God, he's okay." I sank into my husband's arms and sobbed. Our little boy was okay.