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Courage Smells Like a Hospital
We walk into Children's Hospital holding hands. You are terrified. You have already endured numerous operations, but at age eight, this is the first one you have faced with some idea of what is happening.
You are trembling.
Minutes seem like hours. They test your oxygen level, take your blood pressure, ask a million questions. I have kept as much of this as possible from you, but you sense my distress. I have told you that you will have an operation. I will not lie to you, but you intuit that I haven't given you the entire story.
You cling to me.
The smell is all pervasive. It is an antiseptic smell, an indefinable "no smell": cleaning fluids, anesthesia, rubbing alcohol, all mixed into one. It almost hurts to breathe it in, like too clean air invading my lungs, leaving them empty. I know you will remember it. In future, something will trigger the memory of it, and you will relive the terror of today.
They take us to pre-op. Here the smell is more definable: sharp, astringent -- like sandpaper as it rakes past my nostrils.
You look at me and your eyes well with unshed tears. You know that this is one of the "biggies." They will take a large portion of bone from your tiny hip and replace the missing bone in you upper gum line: the alveolar ridge. You sense that it will hurt.
You are afraid.
The smell is starting to make me ill. Or is it fear? Once again I will be turning you, my baby, my little love, over to strangers.
They will cut.
The anesthesiologist arrives and takes your hand. You look at me with glistening, tear filled eyes, and smile. Your back straightens. Your chin lifts and just as those big, double doors swing shut, you raise your hand and sign, "I love you."
Excerpt from "The Adoption of Christopher" coming soon to Saga Books
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LOL I guess. Problem is, I can't find the errors. Oh, well.
Thank you. I'm almost done with the book, then on to the cookbook. |
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Debra,
This book will be a big success I have no doubt. I understand the journey's through hospitals and operations. Have been there with my own son. Thank you for sharing.
Don't worry about the punctuation too much, isn't someone else supposed to take care of that? lol. |
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Good grief! Me and punctuation!
Thank you, dear! |
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Debra, The Adoption of Christopher will, obviously, be a wondrous manual of the trials and terrors of motherhood, as well as a chronicle of the love and laughter shared between mother and child, adopted or birthed. I applaud you and Christopher for sharing your journey.
Check the puctuation on this, some are amiss. |
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"Son of My Soul -- The Adoption of Christopher"
Son of My Soul – The Adoption of Christopher is the story of a woman’s journey through loneliness, poverty, neglect, and her triumph over a turbulent past. Thinking of her childhood as “boot camp,” and applies the lessons she learned as an example of how not to mother her child.
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