The NICU paged me during the time when they were to be running an EEG on my baby girl. They needed me back in her room.
I entered the room to loud cries. “Mrs. Lopez, is there any way you can calm her down without nursing her right now while we apply these electrodes to her head?”
“She’s not hungry; she’s angry,” I said. Her “feed me” cry was very different. I leaned over the side of the NICU crib, touched her hand and placed my right cheek on hers, and whispered, “It’s okay, Riál. Mommy’s here.” I left my cheek there and kept whispering to her so she could feel me near. Her crying stopped immediately and she fell asleep, and the hospital got its EEG.
That was one of many bright mommy moments during a dark, uncertain time in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital…that my suffering four-week-old found comfort in my touch and my whisper, and that I knew what she needed at that moment.
About six weeks after she passed into glory, our two-year-old son somehow managed to lean just right (or just wrong, depending how you see it) on our piano bench, which then slid from under him and landed on his big toe, splitting it wide open. It bled so much and we feared it may be broken. At 8:30 on a Tuesday night, we had no choice but to take him to the emergency room.
Once we crossed the threshold of the ER entrance I found sorrow rushing at me. This was where we brought Riál three-and-a-half months earlier, the first day of our eight week journey through Citrobacter Freundii’s effects on our newborn’s brain.
Those walls inside the ER…inside the examination room where we awaited a doctor…oh, it was just too soon to go back there, but I held it together for our son who was in need of a calming presence; I kept reminding myself that this ER visit wasn’t about me confronting the great sadness that started there and ended in Children’s Hospital NICU.
I held Abe on my lap and just hugged him close, speaking words of comfort and praying silently for the strength to keep it together for his sake. The funeral home had just placed the headstone we had ordered for Riál and we saw it for the first time that day — and now, to be at this ER again…
Abe suddenly turned around on my lap to face me, then gently placed his cheek on mine and kept it there — for his comfort, I’m sure, but he couldn’t have known how profoundly beautiful it was, how perfectly this random act ministered to my aching heart. Somehow he was tuned-in to my anguish and returned to me the comfort I gave his sister. This was his divine appointment that day: to pass along a message that my Lord knew would give me what I needed.
I found renewed clarity in my soul as Abe and I awaited the doctor’s report: no broken toe and no stitches necessary (no kidding!). We were so outta there!
© Alexa Lopez, 2009
