Appreciating Every Moment

When I was in high school, I went through a rough stretch in which I remember my mother once saying that for me, good luck was simply the absence of bad things happening. Things have changed a bit since then and now I’m one of the luckiest men in the world. I have a wonderful wife and a beautiful, healthy baby girl. Norah Grace had a tough start, an account of which I opened this blog with. I thought I knew how lucky I was but, just in case I had any doubts, two months after my daughter’s birth the universe felt the need to remind me.

I remember the exact day I brought a cold home. Two boys had been acting up at school and I, the most convenient yes-man, ended up with both of them in my office while their classes sat through an assembly. One boy was being a pain, doing everything he could to get a laugh from the other and a rise out of me. The other boy, however, mostly just sat in his chair. The one exception, though, was when he got up to get a tissue. He got up a lot. By the time they left, my tissue box was empty and his sneezes contaminated the air with germs.

Had I known then what I do now, I would have spent the night at a hotel, washing my entire body with antibacterial soap and tossing my clothes in the trash. Instead, I brought his cold home.

It started with small sneezes and coughs, things that could have been mistaken for allergies. We brought Norah Grace to the doctor anyway, who said she had a cold. He told us to give her cough medicine. The next day, things were worse. We could hear some fluid in her lungs, now, and brought her to a second doctor who also told us she just had a cold and gave us a different cough medicine. Luckily, our city keeps an updated calendar online of all the pediatricians and when they take turns being open on the weekends. It is an amazing service. That night, I propped up Norah’s bed with books so she could sleep at an angle, which made it easier for her to breathe. She coughed less. I spent a long time holding her in the bathroom, a hot shower filling the room with steam. She breathed easier.

The next morning, a Sunday, I held Norah Grace in the bathroom once more and her coughing eased but I heard wheezing coming from her lungs. I left the bathroom and spoke to Amy about going to the doctor once more. In the middle of our conversation, Norah began to cough and ended up vomiting the entire contents of her stomach in one solid stream, like nothing we had ever seen happen. We dropped everything, cleaned the mess (I changed my clothes) and left for the doctor.

We didn’t wait long for the doctor, a woman who spoke very little English, to see us. She listened to Norah Grace’s lungs as best she could, for Norah was screaming and squirming. She told us our baby could have pneumonia and needed to go straight to the hospital, where she would probably spend a few days in intensive care. She asked us if we had a car and we told her no, so she called an ambulance. We waited what seemed like an eternity. I held Norah Grace in my arms and paced. She looked at me, screaming like she never had before, with eyes that said “When I cry you fix what’s wrong. Why won’t you help me?” She cried her first tears in that office and I cried with her.

The ambulance took an eternity to reach us and yet another to get to the hospital. There was no way to strap a baby in, so I held her the entire time while Amy took public transportation to meet us there. Norah fell asleep against my chest and I leaned in close every few minutes to make sure she was still breathing.

At the hospital, the doctor told me she didn’t need to go to intensive care, that she didn’t have pneumonia. She was diagnosed with acute bronchitis and shortness of breath and was taken to the pediatric wing, where she was put on oxygen and given an IV through her scalp. For days, she would not take a bottle, nor could she keep it down when she did finally drink. She stayed like this for days, struggling to breathe, arching her back in the attempt to get enough air into her little lungs. She was lethargic and our bubbly little girl went days without smiling. I slept in her hospital room nearly every night for a week, rocking her to sleep each evening and singing to her when she cried. I left the hospital every day with tears in my eyes, hoping with all my heart for her to get better. 

She had a virus, so there was nothing to do but treat the symptoms and hope for the best. Norah was given breathing treatments every four hours round the clock. She had cough medicine regularly and a physical therapist came by every day to loosen up the mucous in her lungs and help her breathe easier. Norah enjoyed the daily massage and the therapist told her she was sunshine on a cloudy day.

We had some scares, like when her temperature got high enough for the doctor to rush into the room in the middle of the night (the only night Amy slept there--she was sick all week, too) or when her oxygen absorption level dropped low enough to have us all worried.  Slowly but surely, her strength returned. Her coughing lessened and her breathing became smoother. Her energy came back and she smiled again.

With Norah being sick, plus having…interesting…roommates (that’s a whole other story), the week took a long time to pass. We had help, however, in the form of wonderful friends who filled our refrigerator and counter space with food ready to be warmed up and walked our dogs when we couldn’t.

Norah Grace was finally deemed healthy enough to head home the same morning her grandparents arrived in Leipzig. Meeting their first grandchild in the hospital two and a half months after her birth was not how we had planned it. But at least they got to meet her, especially now that she was on the up-and-up.

She came home that morning with an inhaler to continue her breathing treatments and an antibiotic to fight an infection she picked up. In time, I took away the books that had propped up her bed. She had a snotty nose for months but that, too, came to pass.

Last night Norah Grace and I spent an hour in the park, nearly all the way to her bed time. We played on a blanket together and she alternated between watching her border collie run around the field and pulling up grass by the roots, getting dirt under her fingernails. She laughed every time her puppy dog sprinted past after a stick. I treasure every one of those moments and hope she never stops enjoying spending time with her dad.

I love how excited she gets when she sees me and the funny faces she makes to make me laugh. I love how much she laughs when I tickle her and how excited she gets when she sees me, even if it’s only been after her hour-long nap. I love how much she smiles and how determined she is to be best friends with the dogs. She never ceases to astound me with something new, whether it’s figuring out how to go forwards with her walker or learning to stand holding on to something without any support from us. I am amazed every day by this little girl.

Most of all, I love that her lungs are strong, that she’s a happy, healthy baby girl.