Free A Life Everlasting by Sarah Gray

The nurses gave me the red grocery bag filled with test tubes.
    â€œWere you able to get the cord blood?” I asked. I had been afraid that in the drama something had gone wrong, or the nurses had forgotten to take the blood, or done it wrong, or something. Festival of miseries don’t forget.
    â€œYes, no problem,” a nurse said.
    Yes ! I was numb, floppy, and completely helpless, but when I realized that blood had been drawn, I felt like a Stone. Cold. Champion. I was wheeled out of the operating room feeling immense relief now that I had possession of these possibly valuable test tubes that represented all the hours of research and interviews and blood tests Ross and I had gone through.
    I was rolled into a small recovery area that was curtained off for privacy. Ross came in, holding a bundle.
    â€œWho is that?” I still felt foggy, like in a dream.
    â€œThomas,” he said.
    â€œHe’s alive?” I was delighted that our little guy had rallied and we would have a little more time with him.
    â€œYeah.” Ross handed one of our sons to me. “We’ve been getting to know each other a bit.” Ross had been able to spend some one-on-one time holding Thomas up in the nursery before he brought him down to see me in Recovery.
    Thomas’s little pink face nuzzled into my hair. He made little baby sounds. He wrapped all five of his tiny fingers around one of mine. I was delighted when he successfully breast-fed right there in the recovery room.
    The nurses had put a soft blue hat on Thomas, but it kept falling off. I wondered if the hat would hurt his wound and decided to just leave it off. His appearance didn’t bother me. I wished he was healthy, but he wasn’t. After gaining forty pounds,going through surgery, and losing all that blood, I wasn’t looking my best, either. Who was I to judge?
    My family and the NILMDTS photographers showed up and started taking pictures in the tiny, crowded room. My brother Mark is a professional photographer, so there was a lot of posing and clicking. One of the things I thought was, Everyone can see my naked boob . But I didn’t know how much time I had left with Thomas, and I was still on drugs, so I didn’t really care. My family all seemed so serious, like they were holding back tears. Callum was still in the NICU, which was off-limits for the photographer, so Jay wasn’t able to take any photos of the two boys together.
    After a little while a nurse asked everyone to leave, and Ross and I were transferred to a private hospital room. Mark joined us there and took the test tubes of cord blood for Duke. He labeled them “Baby A” and “Baby B,” packed them up, and dropped the package in the FedEx bin in the lobby of the hospital.
    At some point a nurse came in and took Thomas’s handprints and footprints. I was glad she did it so quickly; I figured we didn’t have much time left with him.
    I wondered how Callum was doing. Ross called the NICU, and I heard him say, “Yes, I am Callum’s . . . father,” a shrug and smile on his face as he tried on this new title for the first time.
    When he hung up the phone, Ross said, “They’re running some tests. He’s doing okay. We can go down there and visit later.”
    In the meantime we watched Thomas, waiting for signs that he might die at any moment. But he didn’t act as if he was dying at all; he seemed like a normal baby. He clutched our fingers, he breast-fed, he drank formula from a bottle, he went to sleep in the crook of Ross’s arm, he peed, he pooped.
    My boy crawled up on his elbows and put his head in the curve of my neck.
    Meanwhile, I struggled to learn how to use a mechanical breast pump, which is as uncomfortable as it sounds. Colostrum is the thick, high-fat, high-nutrient, high-antibody breast-milk equivalent of butter that comes out when a baby is first born. It’s a good first meal for a baby and has