Saving Henry Read Free Page A

didn’t have a referral source for pediatric heart surgeons. Everyone we knew had healthy babies.
    Dr. Hougen was barely out the door before Allen was right beside me. “Laurie, he’s going to be OK,” Allen said as he turned on the video camera to show me, once again, images of Henry taken in the nursery one hour earlier. “Just look at our little guy. He’s so beautiful. He isn’t going to turn blue. And you heard Dr. Hougen. They can fix his heart. You can’t get much better than a ninety-nine-percent success rate. He’s going to be OK.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI just do,” he said confidently. This was the first test of a soon-to-be-well-honed coping mechanism that was partly male and mostly Allen: an ability to fast-forward past the terrible what-ifs and land squarely on top of the best-case scenario. He’s going to be OK. As our family and friends streamed slowly back into our room, a look of concern on their faces, I decided that I was going to believe Allen and those five little words. I was going to believe in them with everything I had.
    My mom and dad stood at my shoulder, my mom’s hand on my hair. I looked up into their loving, worried faces.
    â€œWhat happened?” my mom asked.
    I practiced: “He’s going to be OK.”
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    O f course, I’d be lying if I said that my confidence lasted very long. That afternoon, my brain shuffled through everything I did while pregnant, searching for a reason this was happening; for the possibility that this was all somehow my fault. I ate well. I took all my vitamins. I got enough, but not too much, exercise. I avoided caffeine, alcohol, and secondhand smoke. I had done everything right. It just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t lie there anymore, driving myself crazy with these thoughts, missing out on the first hours of my son’s life: A boy I’d never met, and whom I now missed so much it hurt. I had been instructed to stay in bed, given the stitches newly placed to hold my abdomen together, but I willed my body to sit up. I called the nurse, who joined Allen in slowly placing me in a wheelchair. A few minutes later, and sixteen hours after Henry was born, I got to hold my boy.
    In a darkened room, well past midnight, in the neonatal nursery, Henry wrapped his tiny fingers around mine and latched his lips onto my breast. My milk began to flow through his body, and I felt a love that I never knew existed. It was quiet and peaceful and safe. There were no unfamiliar people, whispering unfamiliar words. Just a new mom, a new dad, and a beautiful newborn baby. I felt Allen’s arm around my shoulders and my son’s body in my arms; warm, lovely, and safe as I rocked him to sleep.
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    T wo days later, Allen pulled our Isuzu up to the hospital entrance, where I was waiting in a wheelchair holding Henry. Allen tenderly put Henry into his new car seat and helped me into the seat in the back, next to Henry. The sun’s warm rays filtered into our car, andthe natural light was uplifting. Allen drove below the speed limit, perhaps for the first time in his life, with his left hand on the wheel and his right reaching into the backseat, clutching mine. Ten minutes later, we were in the home we had bought especially for this occasion, just one month earlier.
    I had barely slept since Henry’s birth. I was up all night feeding him, holding him, and obsessively watching for any signs that he was turning blue. That first week, we spent a lot of time in waiting rooms and hospitals as we visited our growing list of doctors: Henry’s pediatrician, his cardiologist, a geneticist. Each day, we learned a little more about his condition and fell a lot more in love with him. During one visit, Dr. Kenneth Rosenbaum, the head of genetics at Children’s National Medical Center, explained to us that multiple birth defects—like Henry’s relatively low birth weight, extra