Page 39 - WTP Vol. V #1

of our necks. Sometimes, when I dare to peer back in time, and if I recognize that I am feeling weak, I try to concentrate all my strength on not remembering. But somehow, by some power of medicine or some grace or some stroke of luck, the shadows departed her body and her infec- tion healed. Her weeping skin transformed into a molting sheath—little yellow flakes, each a bit of evidence that things were looking up.
by scar tissue. In some ways I am better—the shame of my childhood incontinence resolved by a gifted surgeon and family friend when I was in eighth grade. But the shortcomings of my body still offer their sufferings.
“Ghosts were there in her skin, taun ng us by reveal- ing all that was wrong with her
body; we could see everything, but we could do nothing.”
For the first time, when she was about a month old, I was permitted to hold her hot little molting body against my chest. Two nurses were neces- sary to tuck her into my un-buttoned Oxford shirt with all her cords and her vent, to position her head comfortably. They said that my heart- beat would calm her. I didn’t think that was pos- sible since my heartbeat was audible, filling my own ears with the sound of a galloping herd.
My last surgery was to remove my fallopian tubes—those first cuts and those mistaken cuts and all the cuts that followed them culminating in that operating room, on that table, robbing my ability to naturally become pregnant, perhaps even leading to the premature rupture of mem- branes around our baby boy, perhaps shaping the story of our daughter’s scars.
But for those first few minutes, and then, weeks later, for all day marathon “Kangaroo care” ses- sions, we began to know each other. I learned her pizza-dough smell. I felt how her body relaxed when I played music for her, especially Helen Jane Long on the piano. Her vitals responded to my proximity. We began to feel more like a unit, like a mother and her baby even. Finally, finally, there was something I could do for her.
The scalpel extends far beyond the skin that it first cuts, layering tissue over tissue, story over story.
My mother’s heart surely broke for me, just as mine broke for my own daughter, each of the nine times we learned I would need abdominal surgery.
Near the end of our 128-day NICU stay, my hus- band and I asked for a consult with the pediatric dermatologist. As if turning our thoughts to sur- face concerns like scar tissue and how she might cope with the damaged skin that covers her chest once she entered adolescence could divert our thoughts from what if, once we get her home, her oxygen machine stopped working or she stopped breathing or her heart stopped beating.
Scar tissue. We so often think of it as what is vis- ible. But in my case, that is less than half the story. Turn my body inside out and what you’d see would make the deep, directional scars on the surface of my belly seem trivial. Inside, dark caverns of adhesions have led to obstructions, more surgeries, more adhesions. My organs
Whatever the reasons, we wanted advice on how we might ameliorate the damage to her chest or what options might be available to her someday30
are no longer movable, no longer distinct enti- ties, but great masses battened one to the next