Dad's Story

I’m hoping that James will help me fill in what he went through that night, in his own words, but for now I’ll retell what he has told me as best I remember it. (I clearly don't do it justice - I'll make him tell it to me again soon so I can tell  it right.)

After James and his dad left to go up to the hospital, I think they decided to stop and get something to eat since James hadn’t eaten for 24 hours or so.  They grabbed something from the drive through and were headed to the hospital.  It was now about 10:30 or so at night and the two hospitals were about an hour drive apart.  They were still about 15 minutes away when they got a phone call from the hospital, asking them if they were almost there.  James says he drove like a maniac, running through every red light on Foothill Avenue, because he was worried that his baby was dying. I don’t know the details well enough, but I know that Enzo was in the NICU at Primary’s and the doctors were doing many tests to see what was wrong.   

If you know James at all, you know that he is not an emotional person.  Up until Enzo was born, I could count on one hand the number of times James had gotten tears in his eyes - and that was what he called crying.  But if you look in that last picture, you can see that it all changed the minute our baby was born.  James cried more that night, and in the following couple of days, than he had probably cried in his whole 20-something other years of his life combined.  He cried more than I did, and I was supposed to be some emotional postpartum wreck or something. But I love this picture, because you can see how much he loves his baby - and how much he worried about him that very long night. 

James and Alan waited in a waiting room until 1 or 2:00 when they were finally shown to a small room and told to get some sleep and that someone would come tell them when they knew something.  I don’t think they’d hardly fallen asleep when they were woken up and told that Enzo had a heart defect and would need emergency open-heart surgery in order to survive.  They got shown to a different waiting room, where a Nurse Practitioner came and updated them on the progress of the surgery every hour or so.

After Enzo was out of surgery, James and his dad got to go in and see him.  I guess the surgeon had come and talked to them after the surgery was over, around 11:00 or so.  They were then told that they would get to see him in 20 minutes or so.  20 minutes came and went, and James checked if they were ready yet – they were told to wait another 20 minutes.  Another 20 minutes came and went – they checked again, told to wait again.  Another 20 minutes went by and they were finally able to go in and see him.