Home Again, Home Again ... Jiggety, Jig

I came home after 8 days at Emma's side, cleaned the house, spent some time with the other children, and left again for three days. Life has been a blur of long drives, hospital visits, stops at the chapel to pray a bit, and cleaning. Is Emma better? Slowly, she seems to be making a recovery. There are still signs of the illness that ravaged her body - her abdomen is still quite distended, she is still on antibiotics, and they are still performing tests at regular intervals to detect any sign of a relapse on her part. But the good news is she is off the oscillator, and they are weaning her off the drugs that kept her heavily sedated so that she would not fight the oscillator.


Witnessing your baby's recovery from sedation is not a pretty sight. She would tear at the endotracheal tube, kick her legs, and scrunch up her face in anger. But it is far less frightening than the screams of the babies in the NICU who are coming off the in utero "high" induced by their mothers' drug use. That is a horrid shrieking that has no end, a cry that you are sure must stop at some point, must definitely be punctuated - eventually - with a gasp for air ... and yet isn't. Oh, the sounds of the NICU can be haunting. And the sights can be even worse.

But there is something about knowing how much fight there can be in such a little body - the sense of spirit or soul that must be in there to show such spunk, such character. I pray each and every day that Emma will join our family, in our home, that we may be blessed to see her grow, to truly meet the soul that lies within this tiny package, the one that has endured through unimaginable trials at such a young age. But I know I will never forget the Emma who existed to me solely through a protective plastic enclosure, the Emma I could only touch through tiny portals, whose fingers would curl securely around my finger - the Emma I could not offer comfort to in the traditional manner a mother would, by holding and rocking, but who would acknowledge the comfort of my stroking her tiny, fragile head by calming herself as shown by the machines monitoring her heart rate and respiration. That Emma has changed my being - my soul - forever.