Little Matches by Maryanne O'Hara

Author:Maryanne O'Hara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers

“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet—never—in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of me.

—EMILY DICKINSON

* * *

We buzz into the ICU and put on gowns, gloves, masks. There is a crowd around the bed in the first bay to the right. She is in the same bay where we waited through the dry run just ten days ago.

The crowd parts and I see her, lying rigidly, neck arranged on two flat pillows. Her eyes latch onto the sight of me.

I expected her to be unconscious. Unconsciousness is easier to witness, easier to bear. Inserted into her neck is a garden-hose-size cannula, red with blood.

Inside, I am fainting with fright. My hands grip the bedrails. I lean over them the way I leaned over her crib, and kiss her forehead through my paper mask. “We’ve been right here, buddy. We love you. We love you so much. It’s going to be okay.”

“I remember everything.” She speaks quietly but fiercely. “They told me I wouldn’t remember but I remember everything.”

I try to assess the ECMO setup without revealing my horror. Another cannula has been inserted into her groin. The cannulas circulate her blood and connect to a piece of monitoring equipment at the foot of the bed. She is nearly immobile, able only to move her arms.

Her nurse is making adjustments, and when he steps outside the bay, she says, “He’s not nice. Trust me. Trust me.

“You guys need to watch everything, question everything. Everything.

“Promise me you won’t leave me. Promise.”

Then she points one finger at a woman who is standing to one side quietly observing, clearly monitoring everything that is going on in the bay. “You’re good,” she says.

The woman introduces herself as Penny Sappington, the medical director of the CTICU. She tells us that she had been part of the team that performed the ECMO procedure up in the MICU, and as she talks I see that Penny is the best kind of doctor: smart and steady, someone you can trust to speak with clarity, empathy, and honesty.

With ECMO, various factors—oxygenation, flow rates, coagulation—must be constantly monitored and fine-tuned. Even so, it’s not possible to duplicate the miracle that is the human body’s maintenance of health, especially when one major organ has failed and another, in this case, the heart, has been harmed by the other’s failure.

During the procedure Caitlin’s heart went into SVT three times. She had to be shocked five times. “Her heart is very very sick,” Penny says. But she adds that pressure on the heart will reverse with transplant.

Penny casts an appraising, admiring look Caitlin’s way and tells me, as she often will in the coming days, “As soon as I saw her, I said to myself, there’s something about that girl.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.