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I was putting away some laundry the other day, which had been piled up in a basket for quite some time, when I found that one of Cora's onesies was ripped in half. Immediately, I was pissed off that our damn dryer was eating clothes again. I marched off to present the evidence to Husband that we need a new dryer (the thing rips up my clothes all the time, tearing off snaps and buttons). He inspected it and pointed out that the dryer wasn't the culprit: that was the onesie Cora was wearing the night she went to the ER. They had cut it off of her in order to treat her.

It's easy to forget just how sick Cora was a couple weeks ago. She's only been back home for two weeks. She's healthy, she's thriving, she's eating like a little piglet. She's staring at me right now, in fact, 6:30 in the morning, wide awake and expecting me to entertain her by continuing to hit the music button on her baby papasan. Looking at her, you'd never know she'd spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and had major surgery. In fact, the only evidence of it is the thoracotomy scar across her chest.

Most of the time, we're too busy to reflect on that. Cora keeps us busy, school keeps us busy, friends and family, trying to take a few moments for ourselves, and trying to get enough sleep to function. But sometimes there's just some little reminder of what we actually went through, what Cora endured, not an objective statement of what occurred, but a reminder of the place and time that makes it all come rushing back, and makes me a little sick to my stomach.

Normally, I'm a pretty cold-hearted bitch (just ask Husband, he's the big softy, not me). Things don't usually get to me. But now I have this sore spot. In Medical Liability this week, we were on the duty to treat cases, the main one being a case where an infant is refused medical treatment by an emergency room and the infant dies. I wasn't so much upset by the fact that someone else's baby had died forty or fifty years ago, but the words "infant" and "emergency room" were enough to bring back memories of the night Cora almost died, and then again barely a day later when she had emergency surgery in the middle of the night. I don't want to forget those feelings, lest I ever take for granted the health of my daughter, of my family, and the time I have with them, but I also don't want to feel crippled by fear of losing them. Finding a balance, I think, is probably something that only comes with time. For now, I'm just taking it one day of a time, enjoying every moment, and finding a way to move forward.

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