We found ourselves in the Family Waiting Room of Emmanuel Hospital again today. This time the stakes were higher, the surgery more involved, and the door to the Physician Consult Room more shadowed and ominous than before.
The wait was longer. Instead of thirty minutes like the last procedure, we had to wait a full three hours for news from the nurses and doctors. The first update was uplifting. A middle aged nurse with sandy brown hair appeared and said, "Everything's going fine. They're almost done. Dr. Lashley will be out in a bit and he'll call you into that room over there."
That room. The last time I was here, I hated that room and all of its terrible potential. Now I found myself longing for it, desiring it, wanting to be enfolded in the comfort it would provide once the doctor appeared. The clock had been performing a meticulous do si do around the the dial. I streamed X-men cartoons in an attempt at distraction. I read Brady Udall's book. I listened to the iPod. I talked to Tracy. I people watched. Nothing helped. The slow burn of time unfold at a pace measured by tectonic movements, but the doctor finally appeared.
He waved us over with a quick gesture. I'd never been so happy. Here I was bounding across the waiting room to the Physician Consult Room with abandon. Talk to me! Tell me something! When Tracy and I were both secure in the room and the door was hitched closed, the doctor gave us his news. The operation was a success. He had no reason to believe there would be any complications, but it was still surgery and we needed to be cautious.
There was an extended conversation about the 1% probability of scarring, of tube blockage, of infection, of...the list went on. I wondered which statistician had been hired to figure out such things. My mind was racing. I was picking up snippets of this and that. We talked about after care, about when we could take her home, and the whole time my heart was aching with the desire to see her, to hold her hand, to touch the soft flesh at the back of her hand with the smooth oval of my thumb, to caress her, to coo, to whisper encouragement to her groggy anesthetized self.
Tracy was tearful. It wasn't sadness, I don't think, but relief. The doctor left us alone in the room again, just like last time, and our bodies found each other in the middle of the room. I encircled her shoulders with my arms, pulled her to me and held her. I felt her head tip into my chest, her hands reach up to my shoulder blades, and the quivering of her breath. It was like broken ceramic being fitted back together with glue. The pieces met up almost perfectly. There were imperfections in the fit, but the whole was reassembled for the most part. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in months.
In some ways, it was like a rebirth, a movement from the darkness of a womb of anxiety and concern into a lighter place, a passage through a tunnel to come blinking out the other side into daylight. There were still anxieties and concerns, real ones, we would be tested against in the coming days, but the main event had passed. It was like the turning point in a great war. There were smaller skirmishes ahead, but the main battle had been fought and won. It felt like momentum, like racing downhill with no hands on the handlebars, eyes closed. It was a thrill, an adrenaline rush, but full of danger and fraught with peril.
So, we stood hugging in the Physician Consult Room for a while. I was grateful for this small cell of a room. It afforded us a moment to breathe, to relax, to embrace, to come together as a couple, and not only as distraught parents. The relief in these moments is tangible and this cinder block haven afforded us the shelter, the reservoir with which to find purchase on solid ground after being awash in our own tumultuous sea. It was in this baneful room that I discovered I would be here again. But now, having survived the ordeal, I was grateful for the current of life that pulled us here.
After breathing the scent of Tracy's shampoo for a couple of moments, we picked up our bags and resumed our wait with the rest of the waiting room families. But it was different, more relaxed. I picked up Brady Udall's "The Lonely Polygamist" and my eyes skipped down the page in a movement that felt something like dancing.
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