Choose Life 

When I called the doctor to get a prescription for antibiotics because she wasn’t breathing well, and he said to come in, I went. When he told us that her lungs sounded as dead as a piece of meat, and we had to go straight to the hospital, I listened.

But somehow, the gravity of the situation was still lost on me, and when the doctor said they were taking her up to the PICU for closer observation, I still didn’t realize how bad the situation was.

When the head of the unit called me in a while later and told me things didn’t look good, I was alone. My relative complacency meant I hadn’t realized we needed both parents on site, ASAP. So when the doctor continued talking, and told me they were most likely going to need to intubate and she wasn’t sure it was worth going that far to save her life, I was thrown.

She went on to direly predict that they’d never be able to extubate, that we’d leave with a child who’d need to live in an institution on a ventilator, and that the life expectancy for a one-year-old who weighed five kilograms would only be another year or two.