Doing Something Right

Last Thursday I had surgery on my back that I had been putting off for years. My third day in the hospital, they sent me down for x-rays to confirm that everything was going ok, because I’d had some discomfort w/ breathing and difficulty breathing when laying on my left side. My 14 year old daughter was the only one at the hospital at that point, and she accompanied me, holding my hand all the way there and back. Shortly after they returned me to my room, a doctor came in, explained that my lung was collapsed and that they would be doing a bedside chest tube insertion. My daughter called the husband to let him know, and I called my parents. None of them were within distance to make it back to the hospital before the procedure. The surgeon walked us through exactly what the process would look like, tied me to my bed so that I wouldn’t grab the tube or fight the surgeon when it got to the worst parts, and started prepping. I told my daughter several times that she could leave the room, that it would probably be for the best, that it wasn’t going to be pretty, and might be scary. The surgeon said the same. She just looked at my face and said “I’m not going anywhere”. If any of you have had the pleasure of having a chest tube inserted while you lay there wide awake, then you know it’s fucking horrible. Like really really bad. At least twice I thought I was going to literally suffocate and die. It had to be the most frightening thing my poor baby girl had ever seen. But she never wavered. Not even for a second. She sat at the head of my bed, holding eye contact, and telling me she loved me, telling me it would be ok. Her eyes welled up with tears, but they never spilled over, and she never looked away. It’s a great comfort knowing that as much as we screwed up when we were drinking, we still managed to raise this incredibly loving, nurturing, beautiful human.