Re-posted from March 6, 2014
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am.”
Sylvia Plath
There’s a stillness that descends on the hospital late at night, softening the harshness of bright lights and the sterility of hard floors. Sounds are muted and voices hushed. Sydney is the only patient in the sleep lab tonight located at the end of a long, empty corridor. It’s dark in her room but for a night light and the glowing dots of the medical devices hooked up to her. I shift uncomfortably in the reclining chair next to her bed and wonder how I’ll make it until morning when it occurs to me that my father-in-law spent more nights this way than I can count during the fourteen months of my mother-in-law’s battle with cancer. It also occurs to me that the last time I sat in the dark next to a hospital bed was with him, the night before she died.
But here and now, Sydney is well. We’re here only one night for a sleep study. Multi-colored wires trailing from the electrodes glued to her head are gathered in a rainbow ponytail and plugged into a large unit sitting next to her pillow. A smaller unit is strapped to her chest emitting various cords that coil and disappear under the blankets, connected to her legs and other body parts. The tubing for the cannula in her nose and a sensor that protrudes over her mouth like a tiny microphone tucks behind her ears and tightens under her chin. More sensors are taped to her face at her cheeks, temples and chin. It’s an alarming sight if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
Our companion from birth to death, breath is constant–until it is not
My girl knows the drill, though, having undergone sleep studies in the past, the last when she was seven. She put up very little resistance then. Now, as a fourteen-year-old, she may have protested a little more, but overall, she succumbed to the awkward and uncomfortable preparation for the test without complaint, this ever-accommodating child of mine. While I can’t imagine being able to drift off while rigged up like this, Sydney is sleeping the peaceful sleep of the innocent as cameras and monitors record her CO2 and oxygen levels, her heart rhythm and other vitals, as well as her gross motor movements. She’s my good sleeper, always going down easy and sleeping through the night.
Her first sleep study was when she was just a week old. Sydney came exactly on her due date and though we had no suspicions of Down syndrome, her birth wasn’t without incident. Labor came hard and fast, but since she was my third, I stubbornly paced at home awhile and insisted on taking a bath and shaving my legs before I let Steven convince me to make the 30-minute drive to the hospital. I guess I pushed it too far because once there, frenetic activity ensued and nothing much went according to the beautiful birth plan I’d created, including the epidural I requested. In between painful contractions I noticed a conversation between nurse and doctor and sensed some concern. When a neonatologist showed up, I knew something wasn’t right. In my delirium I heard talk of meconium. Before I could make sense of it, she was here and I caught a brief glimpse as the doctor handed her to a nurse who whisked her quickly away to a warmer. She seemed blue and for a few terrifying moments it was silent. There were no cries from my newborn, no talking from the medical personnel huddled around my daughter, and no words from my husband.
Every moment, every breath is a gift
“Was she blue? She looked blue to me. Didn’t she look blue to you? Is she breathing?!” I fired my questions at him, one after the next.
Face hidden behind the surgical mask, Steven’s eyes conveyed thinly veiled panic as they widened and followed our baby across the room.
I later learned she was under fetal stress, meconium was present and they didn’t want her to breathe before her lungs were suctioned to be sure she wouldn’t aspirate. It seemed interminable, but after a few moments, she took her first breath and pinked up. Relief flooded my body as I reached for my baby with a primal instinct. A kind neonatal nurse, whom I will never forget, brought Sydney to me. Leann told me gently she had to take my newborn to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
“We’re not what you expect,” she’d said, patiently easing my baby from my reluctant grasp.
Sydney spent 14 days in the NICU and about halfway through Steven noticed she would stop breathing intermittently. He watched her intently for hours as she lay in her isolette connected to a pulse ox, heart monitor, central line, oxygen, IVs and various tubes and wires. He saw her little chest rise and fall, then pause. Nothing. Stillness. Several seconds would pass before she took another breath. Because of her daddy’s vigilance, Sydney was found to have sleep apnea and went home on a monitor.
Purified and nourished in every moment, we take in what we need and release what we do not
In newborns sleep apnea is an underdeveloped neurological issue in which the brain fails to signal the body to breathe. The monitor is a safeguard, set to alarm when no breathing is registered for an interval of 20 seconds. Adhesive electrodes stuck to the bare skin of Sydney’s chest were attached to lead wires that plugged into a bulky metal box. Not to be disconnected except during bathing, we lugged that thing everywhere for nine months.
Inconvenient? Sure. But the reassurance was worth it. I had always checked my babies’ breathing when they slept, feeling for the whispers of air moving in and out of their tiny nostrils. Sometimes they were so still I’d wonder, “Are they alive?” then frantically nudge them, relieved only when they moved grudgingly in response. With Sydney, the monitor was my 24/7 electronic sentry, always on duty.
Once her central nervous system regulating her breathing, she came off the monitor. Since then, we watch for obstructive sleep apnea—not uncommon with Down syndrome—where a variety of factors contribute to air flow blockage. Like tonsils. Sydney’s are enormous and though not chronically infected, they nearly close off her throat when she sleeps. Recently, snoring, gagging, and even lapses in her breathing warrant another sleep study.
“Why do I have to stay at the hospital, Mom?” she asked me earlier today as we packed her pillow and blanket along with her iPad.
“The doctor wants to watch you sleep. So we can see you breathing.”
Here I find everything I need
Now, I look at my slumbering little teenage daughter across the darkened room. When she fills her lungs, I can see her breathing. When she snores, I can hear her breathing. But I can’t actually see her breath, the air that moves in and out of her body. How fragile this invisible, delicate stream, and yet, how powerful. The physical exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide is miraculous in and of itself. We are purified and nourished in every moment, taking in what we need, releasing what we do not. But more than the mere breath itself, there’s a universal energy that flows like a river through the landscape of the body and through all creation, connecting us with everything that breathes, the very force that animates the inanimate.
In all wisdom traditions of the world, the breath is sacred. In Sanskrit, prana, the original life source. In Native American culture, the Divine Breath, the spirit of the divine in all living things. In Christianity, God’s breath of life, breathed into man’s nostrils by the Creator Himself. In Buddhism and Taoism, Mindful Breath, the path to enlightenment. In Hebrew, the Nephesh or soul, an animated, breathing, conscious and living being. In Sufism, the source which keeps body and mind alive, and body and mind connected.
Our constant companion from birth to death, breath is there . . . until it is not.
I witnessed Sydney take her first breath and come fully into this world as a living being. I also witnessed my mother-in-law take her last breath and quietly ease out of the physical world. The thought fills me with a rush of profound awe and deep gratitude. Life is incredibly valuable. A gift in every moment. Every breath.
“Just breathe, Lisa,” I think, closing my eyes and turning my focus inward.
{Inhale}
{Exhale}
{Inhale}
{Exhale}
My mind quiets and I am bathed in stillness. It is here, within my breath I come to commune with the sacred. I connect to Source. It is here I find everything I need.