Taking My Life Back Page 15

  After that, the more time we spent together, the more all the little pieces just kept falling into place. Later, when I got to know Chris’s dad better, I saw how that man’s strong emotional support of his son and his gentle, manly personality had combined to form Chris into a secure and well-loved son, and his mother had instilled a decency and respect in him that went to his core. In the years since I’d known him as a college student, he had grown into a stable and mature man.

  Happily, Chris decided that he was moving to Houston. When his company opened a position for him in Houston—simply because he said he needed to be down here—we decided this was God’s plan all along. Chris took every opportunity to show that his passion was not fleeting, and he made special effort to build a solid rapport with Noah.

  As for my little boy, Noah took to Chris with a bond that was beautiful to see.

  Now this new normal was more like it, when it comes to new normals. It was a lot more like it.

  What a gift to be able to experience moments so sweet along with my little boy. Sometimes it makes me cry with gratitude. There is a minor miracle in being present in the world, together. You know that first warm day of spring, when you step outdoors and take in that first big breath of fresh air? That sense of gladness?

  Noah and I kept right on discovering deeper ties to Chris, who wholeheartedly embraced both of us. Chris agreed with me about the importance of our spiritual lives, that it wasn’t enough to go to church on Sunday and then spend the week caught up in the passions and distractions of the world. Can I tell you how good it felt to already know his family background and see his faith lived out throughout his life? In that home, religion is a connection to God, not a rack of judgment. Their commitment to following Jesus Christ mattered so much to me.

  Chris and I both endeavored to find a model for our lives in the teachings of Jesus, understanding that we would fail, and fail often, but also knowing we would be far better for doing it.

  He told me I was his “one that got away” and he wasn’t going to let that happen again. For the actual proposal, Chris and Noah and I were all at his older sister Kristie’s house in Cincinnati. His parents were also there, along with Kristie’s husband, Jeremy, and their two kids.

  I was starting to worry that Chris might eventually regret leaving his job and his birth family to move to Texas to be with me. This came out of those moments that replayed in my head of my biological dad saying I would never be good enough for anyone. But when I brought it up, Chris just looked at me, smiled, and shook his head like I was talking nonsense.

  That evening I was watching TV with his parents when he called for me to come upstairs. When I got there, I saw him down on one knee, holding out the most beautiful ring. He said that he had wanted to plan something more elaborate, but after hearing the worry in my voice, he knew now was the perfect time.

  That’s one of the reasons I love Chris so much. He takes time to know and understand my heart. The moment was absolutely perfect, and the whole time he was down on one knee, his little niece Kortland (who was three at the time) was jumping all over us. All she knew was that something exciting was happening and she wanted to be smack in the middle of it. The whole thing was crazy and chaotic and that made it all the more special.

  Afterward, Chris and I celebrated with his family. His sister did my hair and makeup and took engagement pictures, right then and there. It was intimate and wonderful and perfect. As for the wedding, I had never wanted a fancy ceremony. I was never one of those girls who had her wedding day planned out by the time she was ten.

  So when Chris and I were making wedding plans, we decided what we really wanted was just the two of us. We went on a trip to Montego Bay, Jamaica, and got married there, four months after that first dinner. It was everything I could have wanted and more. Simple but elegant. There was a gazebo right on the water where the service was performed. The resort decorated it with beautiful tropical flowers from the island, and the ladies at the spa put some flowers in my hair and did my makeup.

  When I walked out onto the beach and made my way down the pier to the floating gazebo, everything in my life suddenly made sense. This was the person I had first come to know and to love at the age of eighteen, and the one I know God intended for me.

  We had a preacher from the island and two witnesses from the resort for the ceremony. Then we had dinner under the gazebo out in the middle of the ocean at sunset. After that, since my leg was really beginning to hurt, we had our first dance in the hotel room. Chris took off my prosthesis and picked me up and I danced on one leg. It was the best night of my life.

  Back in Houston, we began our married lives. Both of us went back to work with the goal of getting a home that had enough space to grow our family but that was all on a single floor. I can maneuver stairs well enough with Felicia, but I can’t wear her full time. It’s much easier to roll around in a chair at home, which works until you hit a stairway. So flat is good.

  Chris accompanied me on my speaking trips whenever he could get away. Not only was the aid and support appreciated but his presence always bolstered my morale. I felt then as I feel now: safe in his company.

  That’s what I would call a silver lining. You know the feeling. I wish everyone who reads this a generous helping of silver linings too.

  Chris and I were together for a speaking event at a Presbyterian church that was far enough away to involve a plane ride, and we both had a deeply moving and delightful encounter with Julie, who was a runner and had been at the Boston Marathon with her husband on the day of the bombing. Julie volunteered to drive us to and from the airport, and it was so important to her to do this for us that she also brought her 2013 marathon medal and presented it to me. I was overwhelmed by her kindness.

  Julie is a generation older than I am, and she and her husband had been married for decades. Julie was inspiring to us as a younger couple when she spoke of the living relationship she and her husband sustained. Even after so many years, they both still loved to put on music and dance in the kitchen.

  She floored me with that. Really, can any marriage fail if the couple still dances in the kitchen no matter how long they’ve been married? I felt like I’d just climbed a mountain to enter a cave and receive a great truth from the monk who lived there. This athletic, big-hearted woman distilled a wealth of marriage advice and counseling down to a single thought: Can you dance in the kitchen together, week after week, year after year?

  Noncoordinated people can relax; it doesn’t matter whether you literally dance, of course, as long as there is something special for the two of you to do. Your kind of kitchen and your kind of floor, week after week, down through the years together.

  We should all be so lucky. If we are not, then we should be so determined and do it anyway. Life goes by so quickly, whether we make brave choices or not. We get a few blinks of an eye and a half-dozen twirls in the sun.

  Each tiny piece of shrapnel that is still embedded in me also left a slicing track through my flesh, leading up to its current resting place. In most cases, the blood vessels rerouted and the muscle tissue regrew. But damage to my internal organs was more of a problem. Before I left the hospital for the first time, my doctors had cautioned me, saying it was unlikely I would ever be able to conceive a child again. If I did become pregnant, they had no confidence that I would be able to carry the child to term.

  That news was a tsunami. It was so overpowering in its scope that I didn’t deal with it at all at the time. I was still bed-bound and rolling around with my leg elevated above my heart, feeling grateful for five minutes of Dangle Time. Childbirth is a nice dream for a healthy woman to have.

  When I first got that news, I still had far to go before I could be called healthy, but I was hungry to bring a healthy woman back to this life of mine. So thoughts of childbirth got shelved. They joined those other concerns that nothing could be done about until I got on my feet, off the patient list, and back among the living.

  Time went by.
I got better. I learned how to use a prosthetic leg. I got strong enough inside to confront the bomber in court and at his sentencing. I fell in love and got married. I was healthy enough for us to make a home together.

  And in that new home, Chris and I agreed that having a family together was so important to our picture of the future that we would adopt children if we couldn’t have our own. We both realized that the only way to test the doctors’ theory was to see if I could get pregnant at all. We understood the medical explanations behind their skepticism of my chances of bearing a child. And we had no argument to offer.

  What we had was this: we were married and we loved each other so much that there was no way we could avoid seeing if, between my medical condition and the will of God, Chris and I would be allowed to bring a new life into the world.

  −18−

  Ryleigh Michelle and Noah Michael

  Frankly, I had little hope of conceiving another child. It wasn’t that the doctors crushed my hopes with their opinion as much as they confirmed what I already suspected. I didn’t need to see the scans to know my body was still laced with shrapnel. I could visualize the slicing trails that all those pieces had made when they cut through me. How every piece managed to miss my vital organs is beyond me. The parts of me that took the worst impacts were parts I can survive without.

  Nevertheless, while the shrapnel left enough of me to stitch back together, I could feel the odds against conceiving and they were embedded in my flesh. Even if my reproductive organs were undamaged, my immune system was already under constant strain from fighting the inflammation and infection from the embedded particles. The additional burden of pregnancy could prove to be too much, perhaps for both of us.

  Chris and I talked it over and discussed all the possible outcomes, risks, and rewards if we could maneuver our way through this and make the right choices. And no matter how many times we went over it, we arrived at the same conclusion: We want a family. We want a family bigger than the three of us. All three of us have so much love to give to a fourth.

  We both strongly feel that it’s part of our purpose in this life to build our own family on the principles our parents instilled in us. We both also want to make a solid contribution to the extended families we now share. That was how we got to the decision that if pregnancy wasn’t in our cards, then adoption was the way to do it. We agreed that bringing up a young person by surrounding them with love and treating them with respect, while teaching them a solid moral center and holding to those expectations, was far more important than questioning the child’s biology.

  We agreed that while we wouldn’t enlist the help of a fertility doctor, we weren’t going to use birth control either. Instead we would go forward as a married couple who wanted a child and leave the rest up to God. Chris knew I harbored a secret fear that the bomb had taken my reproductive life away from me, but we both chose to ignore it. I think my fear was a strange sort of protective device, to ease the shock if my body failed me.

  I didn’t see clearly enough to ask myself why I still accepted a prognosis that had been made back when I was in the hospital, long before I had rebuilt my body in the gym and regained a lot of my strength.

  I didn’t feel frail anymore. The intense workout program had done its job on my overall musculature as well as my endurance level. But in spite of that, there had been so many major challenges in such a short time that I found myself braced for another calamity I would need to engage and overcome.

  One symptom of PTSD that I didn’t recognize at first was a faint sense of lingering dread. Do you know it? It hovers in the background and sounds a subtle but persistent warning, conveying the feeling that unless you’re braced for the worst, you are going to take the blow unprepared.

  I assume this was probably why, a few weeks into our new marriage, in spite of my joy over having this relationship to carry into the future, I found myself walking around with a light heart over our daily life but still feeling physically tired and vaguely ill. I didn’t think much of it and sputtered along for another two months before I became frustrated enough to mention my symptoms to Chris.

  He was protective and urged me to go see my doctor. While he hadn’t been around during my postmarathon hospitalizations and the early recovery period, he knew enough about my medical condition to be convinced that any unusual symptoms needed to be checked out.

  So: doctor’s office visit, blood tests, a little waiting time . . . and the doctor came back with the verdict. “You don’t feel ill because you’re sick; you feel ill because you’re pregnant.”

  You were ahead of me on that, right?

  Yep. It’s normal to feel queasy for the first trimester. And not only did I know that but these were also the same symptoms I’d experienced when I was pregnant with Noah. Proving the power of a good mental block, I went so far down the road of thinking that we could be wasting our time hoping to conceive a child that I didn’t see my symptoms for what they were.

  So mystery number one was solved: in spite of everything, I could still become pregnant. While that was great to know, the deeper question came next: Could this blasted and stitched body of mine carry this child long enough to give birth?

  We went about life and this new pregnancy in a state of optimism, with no way to know if our child could make it through the goal posts with us but ready to seize any opportunity to help the baby do just that.

  The first months of the pregnancy went by without any setbacks. I felt strong enough to carry my baby, and preliminary tests were all good. Eventually we saw the sonogram image of a girl. And at that moment, the daughter I had dreamed of pairing with big brother Noah officially entered our lives.

  We started looking at girl names right away, and our favorite was Ryleigh. At first we didn’t have a middle name for her. Then Chris called me one day from work to say he wanted her middle name to be Michelle, the same as mine. He made it clear this was really important to him, and I loved it. Noah’s middle name, Michael, is the masculine version of Michelle, so now both my children would have my name in theirs and also have Chris’s last name, Varney.

  This was no longer idle speculation. Ryleigh Michelle was on her way. We were ecstatic, and Noah was delighted to know he would be a big brother at last. When we first announced it to him, he told us that he had been waiting for a sibling his whole life!

  One ordinary Friday, with the due date still several months away, I developed sharp back pain. It started out kind of like a pulled muscle, that sort of thing. It was no big deal. But as the day wore on, the pain got worse.

  I soon learned why my doctors had been so negative about my chances of carrying a child full-term. We went to the hospital when it became obvious that this wasn’t going away, and when we arrived I was already beginning to dilate. This child was coming, and it was far too soon for a safe birth.

  They gave me injections that were supposed to stop the labor. That worked temporarily, but then they discovered I was bleeding internally. Weakness soon came over me and I felt like I was fading out. My blood pressure, already low, began to fall to redline levels. My lungs were filling up with fluid from all the medicine they were having to pump into me to get Ryleigh’s body as ready as possible to be born so soon.

  My condition quickly degenerated to the point that there was concern for my life. I was put on oxygen, and they gave me one blood transfusion, then another. And soon after, we found out that I was suffering from a placenta abruption.

  Everything just developed with such terrible speed, as if some giant jack-in-the-box had sprung open. Chris remained by my side as my advocate, and my dear mom and dad had to pace the floor once again and hope they wouldn’t get a call saying that Ryleigh and I had lost the battle.

  In spite of the blood transfusions, it was a struggle to replace everything I was losing internally. We were so worried that it would be too late for our little Ryleigh by the time they finally stopped the bleeding, but miraculously she never went into distress throughout any of
it. My body was the only one that was suffering.

  They needed to give me a forty-eight-hour treatment of steroid shots, but the longer they kept her inside of me, the sicker I became. By Monday morning they had no choice but to go ahead and finish inducing labor. In spite of their earlier attempt to shut down the labor process, this baby was about to come, ready or not.

  It became clear that I was going to have this baby the old-fashioned way, regardless of all the high-tech devices around me. There were several times throughout that weekend when doctors felt they might have to do an emergency C-section, but fortunately, when it came time, they said I could try pushing first. After all my blood loss, it was safer to do it that way than to risk more loss of blood with a C-section.

  She was out in sixteen and a half minutes. The birth itself went well enough, and Ryleigh showed up as a living but astoundingly small version of a human being. She was fully formed but terribly underdeveloped, meaning she had the usual preemie problem of lungs that were not ready to support the breathing process. She had to have a breathing tube, feeding tubes, and two IV lines in her navel for additional injections.

  Still, she was here. Whether our daughter’s time in this life was to be long or painfully brief, we vowed to surround her with love during her stay. Little Ryleigh was so very tiny and fragile that even being held in my arms would be too much stimulation. She was still a creature of the womb, and her body wanted to be back there now, even though my body could no longer carry her.

  And so there she was, so unequipped for life in this world of cold air and hard surfaces. At first we were allowed to lightly touch her, perhaps gently place our hand on her forehead, but the doctors quickly put a stop to all stimulation when her blood indicators began to drop. Her systems were underdeveloped. Any touch or stimulation, no matter how well-intended, took away energy she needed in her battle for life.