Entry One

In my family, many are born with what is considered “the sight” – the ability to see two coexisting worlds: the living and the dead. There are requirements to be gifted with “the sight.” First off, you must be a part of the family. A better way to put it is you need to be born into the clan. The second requirement is less of a requirement and more of a most likely observation. Most who are gifted are women. It’s a rare occasion for a man to have any such gift at all. The last requirement is the most important one, as without this step, it is impossible to gain the gift. This step will happen whether you want it to or not. Before the age of five, you will have a near-death experience. My grandmother was electrocuted while messing with an outlet, my mother’s throat closed after a reaction to peanuts, and I had to have my heart taken out and fixed at two weeks old. Now I sit here hoping the child I have by next year is a boy.

You probably have many questions, and as much as I’d love to answer them, I can only give you so much. A slow drip feed into your cup from what is a vast ocean. There are rules I must follow, and choosing not to follow them can lead to consequences. I suppose the easiest way to tell this story is to start from the beginning of mine. 

You couldn’t pick two people who are more polar opposites than my parents. My father is a Midwesterner who lived in a small town occupied by many family members in a house with dirt floors. My mother is from upstate New York and traveled more during her childhood than most people do in a lifetime. My father entered the Coast Guard, and my mother pursued dancing at the New York City Ballet. Someday, they’d meet at a horse barn in Florida. What brought them together? My father’s horse eating my mother’s Taco Bell. After a whirlwind romance they’d marry and start planning for my arrival. I’ve always wondered if my mother knew the trials I’d face once she learned she was having a baby girl.

I was born on the thirty-first of March. My mother refused to have a baby on April Fool’s Day. Everything up until the moment I entered the world was what a normal pregnancy should be. Someone hadn’t done their job because nothing could be further from the truth. My skin was a tint of purple, and though I tried, I could not cry. Did you know they do an Apgar test right after a baby is born? Nurses do the test a minute after birth and again at five. They test heartbeat, oxygen levels, breathing, skin color, and a few other things. The test uses a rating scale from one to ten. Ten means all normal results; anything lower than a seven is considered abnormal. My mom is a nurse and was stressed as she saw them repeat the test for the third time. They repeated my one-minute test twice as my rating was a zero each time. 

It’s always fascinated me how millions of cells create a human, each with a designated job and together forming a complex organism. All it takes is one cell not to do its job correctly to cause a ripple effect. For me, that was a congenital heart defect. TGA or Transposition of the Great Arteries to be exact. The easiest way to explain this is to give you a little biology lesson. Your heart is composed of four chambers. Two are for receiving oxygen-deprived blood, and the other two are for pumping oxygenated blood. You also have four valves preventing blood from leaking out of the chambers. My heart had all the correct chambers but were in the wrong places. Meaning my heart was pushing oxygen-deprived blood into my body, and instead of keeping me alive, it was slowly killing me.  Without life-saving surgery I’d maybe live six months. My parents had two choices: The Mustard Procedure that maybe gave me a few years or a new experimental surgery. They chose the experimental one. I and ten other kids would receive this surgery. Each of us would be placed on machines to do the work our hearts do as for six hours a surgeon would reconnect the arteries to where they should go. My heart was the size of a walnut with arteries only a few millimeters wide. Parts of my heart weren’t salvageable, specifically my aortic valve. They replaced it with a pig valve, sewed me back up, and hoped for the best.

I dream a lot and have my whole life. There’s one dream that always feels like something more, like Deja vu. I’m always in a bright place. Not so much in the sense that I can’t keep my eyes open, but more of the absence of shadows. I don’t feel my heart beating—the need to swallow or breathe. A blanket of calmness and weightlessness surrounds me I’ve never experienced before. I wonder if this is what I felt during my surgery as it always feels so surreal.

When I was around three, we moved to the Midwest to be closer to family. As my mom was unpacking, a picture caught my eye, and I pointed to it smiling. My mom asked if I knew who the person in the photo was. 

“That’s my papa. He held my hand during my surgery.”

I was in fact right about who the person in the photo was. My grandfather died when my dad was in his twenties. About ten years before I was born.