The Night Before....

One of the interesting things about Facebook is the feature that brings up memories every year. One of today's was this:

"They called us a 12:22 AM. Babygirl's a match, but they don't know yet if we need to come. I told them to call us if they want us to come. That call would have come in by 3 at the latest. It's not our turn this time. Thank you all for your prayers!"

I posted this at 5:57 AM, February 1sr, 2012 after what I'm guessing was a pretty sleepless night, what with one thing and another.  Looking back, I know I packed bags for Babygirl and I in case we really did have to leave for the hospital.  She would have been on the dialysis machine, always a death sentence to sleep anyway.  I would have been crawling out of bed that Wednesday morning, struggling to face another day after yet another disappointment.

Not our kidney.  Not yet.  How much longer is the kid going to be on this ride?  How many more nights of agony on dialysis?

It turns out:  Two more.   We had one night to recover, and then we were on the road for real.  

There is a clear demarcation between Before and After.  For Babygirl, I think the line is between  February third and fourth: Between dialysis and donor kidney. Or maybe it was August 22, 2011:  Before dialysis vs after dialysis.

For me, the line remains April 28, 2011.  That was the day I blithely took my healthy-seeming child to her camp physical.  On the other side of the line was the 29th, when the call came telling me just how wrong I was about her health, the day when everything I thought was true, wasn't.

Thinking of that moment can still rip my heart, stop my breath, and make me weak. When people talk about going back to some other time in their lives, like high school or their 20's, I think to myself, "I'd give anything to go back to when she was 9."  The problem is, of course, that there would have been nothing to do that would have changed things. But like all of that kind of thinking, perhaps if I'd known what was coming I would have taken the time to enjoy the freedom more.

DeeDee