The Surgery
They’ve been at the hospital for a few days, a few hours, an eternity. That morning she woke up with the achy feeling of hospital sleep, her mouth stale and her arms and legs twisted and indented from the hard edges of the halfway bed. Her son slept next to her in a crib that reminded her of something like a small cage. As he slept, a knot of cords fell around his too small, too delicate body, attached to him as if they had grown from his limbs. In the middle of the night, nursed had filed in and out: reading monitors, asking if her son had eaten, asking how he was sleeping, asking if she had changed his diaper. So many questions that she could never seem to find the right answers to, the nurses’ mouths turned down into slashes no matter what she said. It made her feel like she was back in school, her answers forever unsatisfactory.
Now, the surgeon comes in wearing his white coat, the smart peek of a tie underneath, the gleam of his stethoscope swinging like a clock around his neck. All she can think is how cold it must feel against her son’s small chest. He introduces himself and sits across from her to give her a rundown of the surgery. On the back of a sheet of paper, he draws a simple square with four quadrants separated with squiggly lines to represent her son’s heart. He draws arrows to represent the flow of blood, more lines for veins and arteries. All she can think is that it’s too big and her son’s heart is too small. All she can think is of kissing this man, filling him with love for her son that is so visceral in her own body. All she can think is of grabbing him and pressing her hands onto his cheeks and whispering to him about how special this particular boy is. So, she stares as he speaks, his words bouncing off of her and falling into piles at her feet. He pauses and waits for her questions, but her tongue is too loose to form any.
He asks her to sign consent forms, and she does, her name drawn out like endless lines that she wishes would swallow her whole, would swallow the tiny print above warning of death and complications and unidentifiable problems that may arise and liability. The surgeon leaves with a handshake and his hand is so warm in her own that she does not want to let it go. Afterward, it’s just the two of them again, her son’s downy head against her chest. She’s not sure she’s told the surgeon enough; she feels as if there was something she needed to say still sitting at the tip of her tongue, frozen there forever.
In the morning she wraps her son in a fuzzy blue blanket that someone gave her as a gift when he was born. She follows a nurse to the surgery prep area who smells like lemons and hand sanitizer, whose mouth is wide and smiling and whose voice bounces along the halls in front of them. The nurse leads them through an endless maze of elevators and hallways and wide double doors. She wonders if they set it up this way on purpose so that mothers like herself could not grab their little ones and run. They would never find their way out.
The room is wide and open, each small birth separated only by the thinnest blue curtains. The nurse deposits the two of them in one and smiles before she disappears. In the vivid fluorescent lights, her son’s skin looks pale and papery, veins so vivid they look drawn on. When more nurses take him from her, she tries not to cry. She reminds herself not to swallow his body with her tears, not to snatch him back from the hands of a nurse with friendly eyes and a soft voice. She wants very much to be anywhere but here. She watches his small body disappear down a hallway and all she’s left holding is his blanket, still warm from his body.
In the waiting room, everything is too bright, too colorful, too quiet. There’s sunlight streaming in through a bank of windows covering one wall. The room reminds her of a long hallway that’s been lined with plush, reclining chairs so that anyone waiting can lie back in one and pretend to sleep. She has a little buzzer that tells her when she will receive an update. It’s the square black kind that they give you when you’re waiting for a table at a restaurant and she finds herself searching for the smell of pizza or frying grease. She holds the thing so tightly that her knuckles look white. While she waits, she finds a pile of magazines and flips through each of them faster and faster until all the pictures blur together.
Day turns to night and she hasn’t eaten a thing because her stomach feels hard and every thought of food leaves a cardboard taste in her mouth that she can’t get out. They finally tell her that she can see him and a woman with a clipboard hand her a badge to wear around her neck that’s bright red and has the word “Visitor” stamped across it. Her hands shake as she pushes the button for the elevator, everything around her moving so slowly. The whole day like a string of molasses. The elevator car moves upward, and she counts down as the five floors tick across the banner above the door. At the top, she has to wait for someone on the other side to spot her bright red badge and open the double doors. He slips through as soon as the crack seems big enough for her body, the edges of the door scraping against the skin of her arms. She stumbles to her son’s room, her feet suddenly clumsy and slow. She steps in, the whole thing lit up and so hot she can’t tell if she’s sweating or crying. She takes his small hand in hers, the beep-beep of machines surrounding him like a halo.
