A Desperate Hail Mary

I think I had a nervous breakdown last night, and it was the worst of days since I can recall, and that's saying something. Sami had a very bad day; she was doing well early on and I felt quite positive, thinking she was better than the night before but then she started to stop breathing in regular intervals. Turns out she reacted to the pile up of opiates in her system and it was too much. The general threat of her forgetting to breathe made me hover with the oxygen mask, staring at the monitor so hard I don't think I blinked for an hour. The doctors came, the room was full of people, and in the end they had to give her a bunch of drugs to reverse the effects of her morphine and valium - which in turn reversed her pain relief as well. When she came out of the stupor, she cried and cried and cried, saying "do something, mom" and I could do nothing. As a mother, doing nothing is never an option - if mom can't fix it, no one can. She begged me to take her home, when I told her it was okay she would retort, "no, it's not" and I couldn't take it. After the shift change at about 10, they gave her some benadryl and tylenol to help her sleep and it did for a while. As soon as she slept I left the room and cried uncontrollably for a while on a bench outside the Starbucks booth down the hall. Jamison came and the rest is a haze; I woke up in a fold out bed in the waiting room when my phone buzzed that Sam was awake and asking for me about 1 am. I went to her, talked her back to sleep and returned to the bed because I was so exhausted. The nurse assured me she'd call if she needed anything and for me to sleep. That was 2 am and I didn't wake up again until 8:30, where I was disoriented and alarmed that I had slept so long, fearing I had slept through phone calls, and I rushed back to ICU to discover that Sami had slept soundly, was resting peacefully and that the nurse didn't disturb me because I needed sleep and Sami was fine. I love that the night nurse is also a mother - it's been quite comforting to have someone watching over my child who would know exactly when I needed and wanted to be called in and when I could sleep. She turned me right around and sent me for coffee and food and said to wait until someone called that Sami was awake; I am so relieved that she is resting that the last thing I want to do is wake her. I'm sitting at a public computer now, eating donuts from a vending machine and drinking machine coffee (the cafeteria is apparently not accommodating with regard to breakfast on weekend, those fuckers). I feel like I've been hit by a train, but I'm hoping that we've turned a corner...