Free Before I Go by Colleen Oakley Page A

soap-opera-story-line-babies-switched-in-the-hospital-at-birth unbelievable.
    My brain pauses, considering this.
    Babies are actually switched in the hospital at birth sometimes. In fact, doctors make mistakes all the time. A few months ago, I read a story in the Athens Banner Herald about an Atlanta man suing Fulton Memorial for amputating the wrong foot. His right foot was supposed to get whacked off due to a bacterial infection, but nurses accidentally prepped the left one instead. When the surgeon entered the operating room, he didn’t double-check the chart; just went right ahead with the procedure.
    I sit up.
    If something that big can happen, then surely a few test results can easily get mixed up. Right? Right? Right.
    That must be it. Dr. Saunders showed me the wrong PET scan. And MRI. And one of his other patients laid her head on her pillow tonight thinking she just has a small tumor in her breast that will be taken care of with a simple lumpectomy.
    Something loosens in my chest and I breathe a deep sigh of relief. I should wake up Jack and tell him.
    I make an effort to stand up, but the burden of what I’ve just discovered pushes me back down. My hands start shaking and the throbbing in my head revs up in earnest. Sweat pushes its way out of my pores. I’m overcome with sadness for the poor woman who’s blissfully asleep, unaware of this life-altering mistake.
    I’ll call Dr. Saunders in the morning. He’ll fumble for words. “I have no idea how that happened, Daisy.” This time his apology will turn up at the end with a happy exclamation, instead of a somber period. “I’m so, so sorry!” And then he, too, will get quiet, as he realizeswhat this means for a patient I’ve never met but am now intertwined with in a horrific twist. And we’ll both be thinking the same thing: though the news is wonderful for me, somewhere out there is a woman who is on the shit-end of Newton’s law. For every action, there’s an equal, opposite reaction.
    I’m going to live.
    Which means she’s going to die.

    JACK IS A sound sleeper. I often tease him that if our house were lifted off the ground in a Wizard of Oz –esque tornado, he would snore right through it. But tonight as soon as I tap his arm, his eyes pop open.
    “Daisy,” he says.
    His skin is warm from sleep, and I leave my hand on his shoulder as I whisper, “What if it’s a mistake?” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I realize how childishly desperate it sounds. And the conviction I felt on the floor of the kitchen leaves me as quickly as the wind leaves a boxer who’s been punched in the gut.
    Jack struggles to sit up, and when his back is firmly against our white paneled headboard that I found at a yard sale shortly after we moved in, he reaches for me. “Come here,” he says. I snuggle into his armpit for the second time that night. And because I tell Jack almost everything, I tell him my theory.
    The amputated foot.
    Switched-at-birth babies.
    The other woman, sleeping peacefully.
    When I’m done, Jack holds me tighter. “Maybe,” he whispers into my hair, but not because he thinks it could be true. He says it because what else is there to say?
    And I realize that even though I didn’t believe it—not really—Idesperately wanted Jack to. I wanted him to jump up and clap his hands together and confirm that Yes! Of course! This is all just one terrible mistake. Not one that we’ll laugh at ten years down the road. God, no. But one that we’d think of when terrible shit happens to us, like getting laid off, or both of our cars breaking down in the same week or our basement flooding (again), and he’d look at me and say, “It could be worse. Remember that time we thought you were dying ?”
    I mask my disappointment and force a chuckle. “It was worth a try.”
    And then, even though Jack and I have never been big cuddlers at night, I don’t move from his embrace—even when my arm starts to fall asleep; even when a slick of sweat