a blog by Traci Shahan, RN, WHNP-BC, Doctor of Nursing, Albrecht Women’s Care Denver IVF, March 12, 2012
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
― Anne Lamott
Locate me in a preoperative holding area, perched on the edge of a plastic chair, a thin volume of poetry by Cornelius Eady in my hands. I’m not looking at it but into the flushed face of one of my twin daughters, Hannah. She is adorned in blue surgical bonnet, hospital-issue gown, an IV snaking into the top of her right hand where a kindly nurse has taped the needle just so. A flimsy curtain hangs from the ceiling, ostensibly to offer privacy, but of course we can hear every utterance, toilet flush and beep, click and conversation. This will be the second knee surgery in 10 weeks, the first of which was an unexpected grisly open surgery that has required her to hobble around on crutches for almost three months. She is trying to exude equanimity. I see through this gossamer of bravado. We have been through a lot, she and I, since I first glimpsed her under the lens of the embryologist’s microscope where three bug-eyed embryos squatted, perfectly dividing orbs of the promise of life.
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