Day 103 Night Terror

I faced my worst nightmare last night.

It came in the form of a beautiful baby girl with more tubes inserted into her tiny body than any one human being should ever have to learn to function with. Her skin had turned dusky, patches of her body turned blue from bleeding from the inside, dried blood staining the outside. She was cold from what I could feel beyond the neon-blue nitrile gloves I had to wear, but it was to be expected.

She’d been dead for the past two hours.

It was a horrible thought and an even more terrifying experience for deeper reasons that I just don’t have the heart or courage to delve into here. At one point, I rested a hand on top of her belly and could have sworn on both of my grandfathers’ graves that I felt her breathing, only to realize later that it was only the quickened, thundering pulse of my own palm and a fervent hope that made me momentarily delusional. I tried not to look at her grandfather at her bedside; my preceptor insisted that it was rare that family wanted to stay throughout the post-mortem process. I thought of the family outside in the hallway, clustered yet scattered, who I couldn’t bear to face because how do you say, “I’m sorry for your loss” when you can’t begin to understand it? I remembered the glimpse of the child’s parents on the floor by the unit’s entrance, who couldn’t bear to see their child, seeing the shoulders shake and just tried to imagine what it was they lost.

A child, a life; a week-old life, snatched away literally overnight with no warning whatsoever. Like an accident but ten times worse because her skull isn’t fused yet and part of her umbilical cord is still on her belly; her unmoving, frighteningly still belly, bloated from the air they tried to shove into her little body when she couldn’t do it by herself anymore.

The only thing more terrifying than seeing her was having to pretend that it didn’t kill me. I’m new, and they’re willing to give me leeway and probably expect me to break down at something like this. But they have no idea how much this cuts me.

To bring a life into the world, loving it before it even learns to breath, and having to watch it suffer and shudder and shrivel up in pain knowing that it’s all your fault hits me harder than any fall from a skateboard or rooftop. It’s the recesses of that dark alleyway in my mind, a place not even the Monster dares to tread.

I don’t like being here. I don’t like thinking these thoughts. It’s a place that breaks my heart into a hundred thousand pieces that I can’t begin to grasp and attempt to rebuild. I can’t stay here; I’m not ready to be alone in this place just when I’m trying to be strong enough to face it.

I tell myself to breath, attend a cycling class and kick up the resistance as high as I can, because even if my legs burn and my vision gets blurry, I just might stress my body enough to forget the nurse’s words to the grandfather as he laid a final hand over the shroud that encased his 8-day old granddaughter in an attempt to reaffirm him to have a memorial for her because,

“She was here.”

Like a dream, she was there. Like a nightmare, she won’t leave me even after I’ve left her.