Compressions (a year later and still counting)
A five week old baby girl drowning in the smallest hospital gown they had, swaddled tight and swallowed whole in the pediatric CT machine painted with rainbow schools of fishes and swooping threads of seaweed.
A new mother, standing at her side under the weight of a radiation-proof vest, wondering why her baby’s chest tugged hollow with each rasping breath.
It was supposed to be routine. Diagnostic.
Mother still felt foreign on my tongue, especially after growing up without one to show the way. The word daughter felt even more fantastical.
She was still in the scanner when she stopped breathing.
The Code button was hit, but I heard no alarms. Couldn’t hear the velcro rip of the vest coming off and hitting the tile. My eyes worked, where my hearing retreated—watching as the tech scooped her limp body and ran out the ocean floor blue through the stinging of hallway fluorescents. Drips of red made a path from my baby’s mouth to the emergency bay.
Those CPR classes didn’t cover this. Pushing two fingers into the rubbery back of a glass-eyed doll did not prepare me to stand in this doorway, helpless.
Echoes from the voices in that room, teaming up to save a life.
Each and every compression plays back on a loop like a skipping record scratch.
The counting is still the most haunting.
I
This is not happening.
II
A man with a cracked leather bible and a gold cross on a chain offers a chair, but my legs won’t bend. Why the hell is the chaplain here?
III
He asks me to pray, but my only god is the woman pushing life into my baby’s soft chest. How could a loving god let this happen to a five week old?
IV
My spouse is slumped over with a thousand-mile stare. We’re new to Atlanta. Home feels a thousand miles away.
V
I want my mother.
VI
I wish I had a mother. A face to look up to and cup my cheeks, whispering “Breathe, Mamita. It’ll be alright.”
VII
The words on the clipboard are blurring run-on sentences of informed consent. The line to sign wobbles, the word MOTHER underneath is calling my name.
I can’t sign. My fingers can’t even grip the pen.
VIII
I thought she looked blue and I said nothing.
IX
It was a damn ocean-themed room and the lights were off. Everything was blue!
X
I was always too trusting of medical credentials. I doubted my eyes and cost her brain seconds of oxygen. I’m a terrible mother.
XI
Am I still going to be a mother after this?
XII
Will I only have gotten to have her for five weeks?
XIII
The CT tech holds my arms with a squeeze. She repeats it as many times as I need to hear it.
“It’s not your fault.”
XIV
The army of medics brought her back to me. We can go in and see.
XV
Eyes swollen shut into slits, her sweet cheeks stained with red splotched tape and a tube down her throat. A machine keeping her airway open, her body holding to life when it should be holding my finger.
It was two months intubated and two surgeries cut. Two hospitals across two states, bridged by an air ambulance for a new procedure that got her to breathe without the machines.
A year has passed and you’d never know. No tube in her throat, no round-the-clock care. They weren’t sure she’d talk, but her wonder is loud enough to shake the birds from the trees. Her chubby hands splayed as she toddles to me, calling for Mama, and the title feels right.
She doesn’t have to carry the weight of the memory.
That’s not her job.
It’s mine.
About the Author
Stefanie DeMaria Febus is a Bronx-born writer and mother. Her work explores grief, motherhood, longing, and the complicated tenderness of home. Her poetry has appeared in The Acentos Review. She is currently based in Connecticut, where she is working on her debut novel. Follow her writing on Substack @stefaniedemariafebus or Instagram @stefanie_demaria.
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