yesterday: day nine

Despondent, though no longer terrified: that’s how I feel, now, during and after Calvin has a seizure. I used to regularly fear for his life. I used to always cry. Tonight my face is drawn and sullen as my boy sleeps under a net upstairs, as my husband wears the baby monitor around his head like a bandanna, as the nurse meticulously completes her notes describing the seizure, its duration, the blueness of Calvin’s lips and fingers, the severity of his tremors. I hear water boiling. Michael is making a souffle, cracking eggs and scrambling them like Humpty Dumpty after his fall, like Calvin’s brain in seizure. I’m in the dark, writing again about a seizure that steals my soul, wrecks my hope, renders my child limp and lifeless even as we have to—within minutes after his seizure ends—spoon nine anticonvulsant pills with yogurt into his dutiful mouth and hope that he can swallow.