“No. No, we’re going to make it, okay? He’ll be okay.”
They brought our baby over to us. He was curled on his side, gasping shallow little goldfish gulps of air. Because there were no lids to blink, his eyes looked startled and dry. I caught hold of his tiny hand, saying over and over, “Mama loves you. Mama’s here. I love you so much, Amiir. Mama loves you.”
When they came to take him, my husband said, “I’m going with him.”
“Yes. Yes. Go.”
He left. The plastic surgeon came. Someone told me I might need a transfusion. I didn’t want to be away from my son a moment longer than necessary.
“Please,” I said, “unless I’m gonna die die, don’t let them do it.”
There was talk about my mother giving blood, but I didn’t want her to, because I knew she was about to have surgery herself in a matter of days.
I kept pleading, “I need to be with my son. Please, let me go to my son.”
Angela was there with her positive energy. “You’ll see him soon. First, we need to get you stabilized.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes. Mayte, I’m giving you something for the pain. You’re going to get a little sleepy.”
When I closed my eyes, I could feel the plastic surgeon dragging meticulous sutures through the skin on my belly. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the hospital room, and my husband was there, still in his scrubs. He looked so tired, so beaten down, but to me, he’d never been more beautiful. He was Amiir’s father, a protective Papa Bear thinking only of his son. From the first moment of our son’s life to the last, my husband thought nothing of himself. His vanity, his ego, his needs—all that had been stripped away. All that remained was a solid core of unconditional love.
My throat was dry. All I could say was, “Amiir.”
“He’s in surgery again.” He described the procedures one after another. They’d sewn his eyes shut. Intubation. Ventilation. Feeding tube. Colostomy. Exploratory… something. It was impossible to take it all in. “They want you to pump milk so they can feed him.”
“I want to come and nurse him.”
“I don’t want you to see him like this. I don’t want you to see him till they get him stabilized so he can come home with us.” He waited while I pumped and then took the bags of milk. “I’m going back. I’ll stay with him.”
I hit the button for the painkiller drip and closed my eyes again. When I woke up, Daddy was there. He said, “He’s beautiful. Don’t worry.”
Two days later, my husband briefly went home to take a shower. While he was gone, I had someone wheel me down to see my son. I could see that Amiir was crying, but there was no noise, because they were feeding him my breast milk through a tube in his nose and there was another tube down his throat for ventilation. I stood up from the wheelchair and pulled my IV with me over to the incubator. When I reached inside and took his hand, he immediately became calm, and I suddenly felt calm myself. I’d cherished this child when he was inside me, and then he had been ripped away. Pain. Craziness. But now we were breathing the same air again, touching each other.
“I need to hold him,” I said. “Can I hold him without hurting him?”
They took me to a chair. There were so many needles and wires and tubes attached to every part of his body, it took two nurses to lift him into my arms.
“I’m here, Bebo. Mama loves you. I’m your mama.”
His skin was indescribably soft. The joints of his fingers were fused, so he couldn’t grab my finger, but he found a way to fold his little hand around the side of mine, hanging on for dear life. My husband came. I worried that he’d be angry, but he wasn’t. He sat on the floor with his body against my knee, humming and whispering to Amiir, and we stayed that way for hours. I was in pain and fighting to stay awake, but I didn’t want to leave. Finally, the nurses gently insisted. They took the baby, and I let my husband wheel me to my room and help me into bed. Then he went back to be with Amiir. There were more surgeries. He didn’t want our son to be alone through any of it.
Every day something new went wrong or collapsed or presented itself, some new problem was discovered, some existing problem got worse. We spent all the hours we could in our little family corner in the NICU, humming and telling stories, and taking in the softness of his skin and hair, the soft smell of his warm little body, the beauty of his spirit, the shape of his lower lip that was just like Jan’s lower lip.
After six days, he was struggling to breathe, and I said to the doctor, “He’s not leaving here, is he?”
He avoided answering my question. Instead, he talked about more invasive measures, including a tracheotomy.
“No. No, you’re not doing that to him,” I said. “He is suffering.”