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anemia, which could be determined at the end of the first trimester.
    Henry’s open-heart surgery was scheduled for April 2, 1996, with Dr. Richard Jonas at Boston Children’s Hospital. The days leading up to the trip, I packed Henry’s stuff, asked our neighbors Rich and Jill Lane to pick up our mail and keep an eye on the house, called Erica and Becca to tell them I’d miss that month’s Ladies of the Pines meeting, and desperately hoped for the best. A few days after we arrived, my parents, Allen’s parents, and Abby joined us in Boston, where we had been meeting with doctors and preparing for the surgery. We had been told that we wouldn’t be allowed to spendthe night at the hospital, so we checked into the Best Western Hotel immediately adjacent to it. The day before Henry’s surgery, I took the advice of another mother, a friend’s cousin whose son had endured the same procedure at the same hospital. She had encouraged us to visit the pediatric cardiac intensive care prior to his surgery, thinking that we needed to know what, exactly, we were in for.
    Walking in there for the first time was as scary as hell. There were no private rooms, just curtains separating kids—about ten of them—all in perilous situations and fighting for their lives. The nursing station was central so that the staff could be at a child’s bedside in a moment. Dazed, weary parents talked in hushed tones, and the kids were in drug-induced comas, resting while their hearts healed. It was an eerie quiet, interrupted only by the frightening, panicked clamor of pumps, machines, alarms.
    On the morning of his surgery, we brought Henry to the hospital before the sun rose and sat with him until the anesthesiologists approached. They tickled him. They smiled at him. And then before we knew it, they were gone. With Henry.
    We sat in the waiting room, waiting. Surrounded by untouched food, unopened magazines and books, our parents and my sister, we just sat. There was nothing to talk about other than the obvious, and we saw no point talking about that. So we sat in silence, and we waited.
    With each major step, a nurse came to inform us of Henry’s progress. He’s under anesthesia. He’s on oxygen. I was so scared, I honestly didn’t know if I would get through it. When the nurse came to tell us he was on the heart-lung machine, all I heard was: His heart isn’t beating . Their hands are in there. They’re touching his heart . But then she returned, a few hours after it had begun, to tell us that he was off the heart-lung machine; that his heart was working again. He was being brought to the recovery room. He is alive! I don’t know if those words actually passed my lips, but the way Iremember it, I yelled it more loudly and joyfully than anything I had ever shouted before.
    Even if I had spent months in that pediatric intensive care unit trying to get comfortable with the images and the reality of what Henry would have to endure, nothing would have prepared me for what I saw when Henry first came out of surgery. It was terrifying. His whole body was swollen and his skin looked like it was made of plastic. White surgical tape held his oxygen mask in place. Dozens of tubes ran into and out of his body. The bandages covering his chest were soaked in blood. It was, as of that day, the most horrifying image I’d ever seen.
    I leaned over his tiny body. “Please get through this,” I whispered to him. “I know it’s only been five months, but I can’t remember my life before you.”
    Henry spent the next few days in his hospital bed, between two curtains that we could close for some privacy. He wore nothing but a diaper and lay completely motionless in a drug-induced paralysis. We could not hold him or hug him. We could merely stand there and stare and hope he’d wake up. There were lots of monitors beeping and flashing, recording his oxygen level and heart