One Room, One Prayer, Many Hearts |
I still remember the weight of the pen in my hand.
It didn’t feel like signing a consent form. It felt like signing something far more final, far more terrifying—permission for strangers to take our child into an operating room and do whatever they needed to do to keep her alive. Twice it was open-heart surgery. Once it was back surgery. Each time, the words were clinical, but the meaning was anything but.
We went through this three times—when our daughter was just five months old, and then again at ages ten and twelve years old. Each surgery was serious. Each one carried risk. And each time, we handed her over to the doctors and nurses and then walked away, because that’s what parents are asked to do in these moments.
But what stays with me most isn’t saying goodbye and good luck to our daughter before she entered the operating room or even the surgeon’s explanations beforehand.
The children’s hospital waiting room becomes its own kind of world. Time stretches in unnatural ways there—minutes feel like hours, and hours feel like days. You sit … you pace … you try to read … you pray … you try not to imagine........