A few long days ago we discovered a squishy lump on Maisy’s head.  It was gigantic, the size of an orange if you cut it unevenly in half and stuck the smaller half on her head.  It made my insides squirm.  Waking up at 5:30 in the morning with a bumped-up and worrisome baby when a doctor’s office doesn’t open until 8:00 am makes for a long morning.  Calling said doctor and scheduling an appointment for 3:00 pm, their earliest available, makes for a long afternoon.  Going to the doctor and hearing the words, “you will need to take your daughter to the ER for a CAT scan” and time moves into slow motion.

The drive to the ER felt like an eternity – I suppose it doesn’t help that 1 hour of down time now-a-days feels like an eternity due do my clingy anti-sleep baby, with or without a looming doom hanging over my head.  My heart was wallowing in the pit of my stomach and my throat was caught on a lump. We didn’t speak, I barely breathed.  My mind was numb – when I tried to think of worst-case or best-case scenarios I came back blank.

When we did finally get to the ER I was struck by how kind and gentle everyone was.  Much different than your average “customer service.”  Then it occurred to me that these people deal with life threatening scenarios on a daily basis and are likely trained in being the world’s most sweet, caring, sensitive, and gentle people on the planet.  It was very soothing and reassuring.

They were incredibly efficient. Maisy took it all like a champ, until she was strapped into a straightjacket and unable to see mommy, let alone be held by me, to go through her CAT scan.  They had to run her through twice because she was so consumed by rib-racking and chin jerking sobbing the whole time.  The minute I picked her back up the waterworks turned off promptly and we walked back to our room.  Then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Mom and Dad Calhoun brought dinner.  And we waited.  The next 2 hours felt like 5 days.  In fact, as Josh and I attempted to pass the time with brainless babble about life we kept finding that various events we chatted about weren’t a few days away but that the event in question had actually only been just that afternoon.

Finally the doctor came back and told us all was well. Maisy’s brain what fluid free, there were no fractures on her skull, and the mass we felt on the outside was something akin to an oversized blood blister and it would reabsorb into the body, no treatment of any sort necessary – just the result of a fairly hard bang to the head earlier in the week.

We walked out of the hospital at the same time a friend walked out with her newborn baby girl.  God is full of blessings and happy endings!