Dreamer in the Dark

The lungs peaked out at last week’s ultrasound in St Louis at a LHR of about 2.8; this week they are dropping back towards 2. This is to be expected: the tracheal occlusion has now altogether dissolved, and the fluid that had built up in his lungs holding his liver back is pressed back out. Nevertheless, the growth was real, and even in their more compressed state they are potential. Before there was next to nothing, a sad shred of a right lung unseen by anyone, and a dwarfed left lung, neither enough alone nor together to do anyone much good.

Now there is something to build on. The right lung, even, remains visible on the sonogram.

Bonnie’s amniotic fluid, which had filled to the brink at about 25, the upper range of normal, has dropped down to 21, a great relief to me (and to her!) That false signal that “Hey, I’m done, let me out!” could have tripped her into labor far too early. Now there’s one less thing to make that happen. Every week counts, but I dread the trips to St Louis: one week soon they will not let her come back.

Sparrow is doing well with all this, better than we feared. She is uneasy at the sight of her grandmother, because that means that Mama is going away—how long, an hour? A day? A week? Who knows!—but she understands a little of what is going on. Baby brother has a boo-boo, and the doctors are fixing it. How she will react when the who process becomes more intrusive in her life, I don’t know.

She looks so much like me, but Flynn’s ultrasounds make him look even more like me still. I try to imagine him as a baby, a child, a man.  I can’t quite do it, I can’t quite dream. So much could happen, could go right, could go wrong, could fail. We read stories and some are successful, some have lingering problems, and some are darker and sadder.

It’s like a distant nightmare, and I don’t believe in it yet. It’s as if someone else were telling a story about someone else’s life. But it is me, it is us, it is him. It is a little boy curled up inside his mama, dreaming, kicking, smiling in the dark. I wonder if I will ever look him in the eye and call him my son.

It will be what it is. I don’t question or pray. Right now he is happy in his warm place. Right now he is all right.