Powerless

After an agonizingly long checkout at the scrap booking store where the cashier interrogated me on the use of my purchase (what are you making? a memory box for my daughter. oh fun! i bet she will love it! oh but it looks like some of this stuff is for you... well its all technically for me... how old is your daughter? she WAS nine months old. oh, well she is going to love it. She's dead. silence......), I headed home. Only to be cut off by an ambulance and fire chief truck going full speed lights and sirens. I ended up having to follow them practically the whole way home. Ever since that morning I had to carry Ellie out to the waiting ambulance in just her diaper, covered in puke, the sight of police, ambulance and fire sirens, makes me anxious. 

It all comes back. I can see the police officer walking through the door while I am bouncing Ellie to keep her conscious. The blank stare on her face. When she would open her eyes, they didn't seem to focus on anything, it was like she looked right through us. I think about those moments now, and I pray that she wasn't suffering. It kills me to think that she was in pain. I see her pale, cold little body all alone on the big white stretcher while I sat next to her on the bench holding the big oxygen mask to her face and the paramedic started hooking up machines.  I remember the driver asking the medic in the back with me, "Code 2?"... "Better go Code 3," he replied. I remember the paramedic trying, unsuccessfully to get an IV started in her dehydrated, collapsed veins while we all bounced around in the back. He told me, if she got any worse he would have to put one in the bone of her leg. 

I remember Ellie looking at me with big scared eyes a couple times. Looking right at me. She had to be frightened. I remember not being able to help her. I just wanted to hold her and make everything better. I feel like I failed her that day. I know I had no choice, I had to hand her over. I have never felt so powerless in my life. As a nurse, I've been in emergency situations, but when it's your child, your baby, that came from you, it's different. I wanted to do something- there's no way they would let me. Plus, it was my job to be her mom, not her nurse. But to sit there and watch it all unfold, practically in the slow motion, was gut-wrenching. It's like that nightmare you have every once in awhile. You are being chased or attacked and you open your mouth to scream for help and nothing comes out. 

Today, it's been hard to get the bad thoughts out. Especially after the lights and sirens... so I wanted to see our Ellie. Our healthy, happy, smiley, silly Ellie. This video is from the one and only Girls Night Out Elle had with my Mom, Grandma and I. It was way past her bedtime but she was happy. She loved it. On the way home she was so tired, she got a case of the giggles- I guess not giggles, belly laughs. It was hilarious. I would give anything to go back to that...