My daughter Emma was born on October 14, 2014, at thirty-one weeks gestation, weighing two pounds and eleven ounces. She was diagnosed in the NICU with hypoplastic left heart syndrome — the left side of her heart had never properly formed. The cardiologist told my husband and me, in a small windowless room at Wilmington Children's Hospital, that without three open-heart surgeries before her fifth birthday she would not survive. With the surgeries, her chances of reaching adulthood were maybe sixty percent.
She had the first surgery at six days old. She had the second at five months. She had the third when she was four years old, in March of 2019. Each time, she was in the operating room for between nine and fourteen hours. Each time, my husband and I sat in the waiting room and did not eat and did not speak.
She turned eleven last fall. She runs cross-country for her middle school. She wants to be a marine biologist when she grows up. She wants to study octopuses specifically. She knows more about cephalopods than anyone I have ever met. She is the funniest person in our house, including the dog. She has scars down the center of her chest that she shows to anyone who asks.
I do not know what to say about America that does not sound naive. I know it is not perfect. I know our healthcare system fails people every single day. I know we were lucky in ways that other families have not been. But I also know this: somewhere in this country, decades before my daughter was born, surgeons figured out how to fix a heart that should not have been fixable. They worked on cadavers. They worked on dogs. They worked on the first children who did not survive. And by the time my daughter needed them, they had become so good at this impossible thing that she is alive today, eleven years old, sleeping upstairs as I write this.
This hex is for the surgeons. For the nurses in the NICU who held my hand when I could not stop shaking. For every researcher and every parent before me whose child made the next child's survival possible. For my daughter, who is alive. For 250 years of a country that taught itself how to do the impossible, again and again and again.