November 12, 2007

I woke up from the obnoxious ring tone of my husband’s cell phone at 4 am early Monday morning, November 12^th. I pushed Adam and he grudgingly got out of bed and stumbled to his phone. He was muttering. The phone call only took about a minute. My brain was on this disillusioned high of melatonin in my body. Half awake…half asleep. Adam closed his phone and took in a huge breath.

“Your mom is not doing well and there is an ambulance at the house that will take her to the hospital.”

Without knowing how I got there, I was standing next to my bed looking at the blurred image of my husband.Finding my glasses was not top priority at the time.

“What do you mean, not doing well?”

At this point, I heard the ambulance siren getting farther away. It’s times like these that you regret you and your husband living only 2 minutes from your parents.

“Oh my God! That’s the ambulance taking Mommy away! I can’t do this! That’s my mommy! Where's Rebecca and Michael?”

“At home.”

“Well, we gotta go there!”

We arrived at my parent’s house, reluctantly greeted by my younger brother and sister. It was at this moment I realized Adam and I are in our pajamas still. My hair is in the sloppiest of pony tails. I wiped a crust from my eye and I asked them what happened. Rebecca starts explaining.

“Dad went to check on Mom a little bit ago. She was really gargling in her sleep. Daddy called the ambulance and told Mom she was going to the hospital.”

“What did Mom say?”

“She said, ‘Okay, Sweetie, where are my glasses?’”

I decided that the hospital is where we should all be.We piled into my Hyundai and drove the ten agonizing minutes to the hospital.

Hours go by. As the morning horizon is covered in sunlight, my head begins to feel dizzy. The doctor finally allowed us to see our mother. As we opened the cold curtain I tell myself that Michael and Rebecca needed me to be strong and I walked in.

I couldn’t believe it. There she was, connected to tubes and monitors, and still it didn’t feel like her. At that point, I couldn’t feel my legs and I collapsed into a chair.

They explained that she had gotten pneumonia in her good lung and was going on a breathing machine. They were going to move her up to the ICU. Suddenly, this became our norm in our family.