If I Could Only Rewind Time

If I could only rewind time. How many have said that before? Well, that's the story of my life. I guess that is what helps us learn. It makes us wiser and stronger. There are so many times in my life I wish I could rewind and do over. You know, like those books you can read a hundred times and choose a different ending each time you read it. But I have just learned from my mistakes and moved on with my life.
It's kind of strange how life is just set up like that. You can't choose anything about the begining, middle, or end, yet with every choice you make there is some consequence. I chose to marry young and start a family. All the dreams of every little girl. A beautiful wedding, followed by an everlasting love with a ton of perfect little "me's" running around. Staying home and raising them in a cute little white home with a fence and a yard you can see for miles. It is weird as you grow up, you learn that they are all definitely dreams. You wake up one day realizing how miserable you are. Fighting for what you once thought was love but has now turned into an unsaveable relationship of trying to appear to be happy.
So I chose to divorce young. Here I was at nineteen years old with the reputation of divorce and a one year old requiring my attention. All my dreams up in smoke. I was struggling to go to school, work, and raise a not so perfect little "me", alone.
For the next year I devoted all my time into working as many jobs as the twentyfour-hour day would allow and tried fitting some kind of education in there so I could get one really good paying career to support my son. Depriving my poor child of any attention he needed from me. Another bad choice on my part, but honestly, I thought I was doing good by making sure he could eat everyday and have the toys he wanted. Maybe some "in style" clothes. I just didn't have my priorities straight. I didn't put love and attention before eating and a nice warm bed to sleep in. You can see how the importance of each are hard to weigh out.
Thankfully, I had my family around to point out my mistakes. So I started to slow down. As I slowed down, I met Mr. Wonderful. A great guy who didn't mind my divorce and he was great with my son. Just as all those dreams of having a family flooded through me again, I grew up a little more. Realizing it is life not a dream. As Mr. Wonderful swept me off my feet, he left nothing behind to catch me when I fell. Turns out Mr. Wonderful was not so wonderful at all. Maybe not so shocking to you, but I was shocked as hell to learn that Mr. Wonderful was a perfected liar in disguise. He had wiped out my bankaccount and destroyed any chances of everything I had worked so hard for, before I could even blink my eyes. All for an addiction I never even knew he had. In one night I was stripped of everything I had accomplished. Once again I was struggling for my son and I to survive.
Picking up right back at the begining, I moved on with my life and tried again. Now at twenty years old, late in the year, my parents are building their dream home and reluctantly arranging it to accomodate my son and me. I did not start off this time as strongly as I did the first, overwhelming myself with work and school. My whole family moved in with my grandma, with a set move out date. We waited for this dream home to be built. I slowly move into another relationship. This time with no dreams in mind. I had lost all hope on a perfect little family with a perfect little home. Only to find out I was pregnant once again. Once again the relationship turned sour. This time, though, I didn't get married. I was not about to relive my first marriage and be divorced twice by the age of twentyone. So we broke it off and went our seperate ways.
I came home that night to a bunch of solem faces. Just as I thought things couldn't get any worse, my mom breaks the news. My dad had lost his job and could only find work four hours away.They had to sell their dream home before it was even finished being built. Knowing my custody arrangement with my exhusband, I hurriedly got on the phone with him to convince him to let our son and me go with my parents. You see, I had to have his permission to live outside of fifty miles of him. As he laughed at me with an anguishing "no", I hung up the phone. What was I going to do now?
I drag myself into work at a convenient store, chewing over where my son and I would live. I went ahead and picked up a second job at a nursing home. Back to being on my feet, working sixteen hour days, seven days a week. Wondering where I can fit school into my life. Only this time I was four months pregnant with my second child.
Finally, one night a little bit of light sheds over my life. An old friend comes in to the convenient store while I was working and as we update each other on how our lives were going, he offers for my son and me to come stay with him and his dad. I accepted knowing that I had no other options.
I moved my things in, which had widdled down to a bedroom set and a few boxes from my divorce, and tried to keep my son and myself out of their way. Shortly after we had moved in, I had worked myself into labor. Only being five and a half months along. My family had already moved by this time. So I sat in the hospital alone, praying that I didn't lose my unborn child. After that, I was put on strict bed rest only being allowed to stand for ten minutes at a time to go to the bathroom and back to bed. I lost both my jobs, needless to say, and to top it all off I had found out that my unborn child's father had been arrested for murder. It only took a week and the so called friends of mine started calling me lazy. They said that they had dated women with children, nine months pregnant, with a job and could still do the cooking and the cleaning. They started screaming at me about how they couldn't stand my son. He was "into everything" and "uncontrollable". At three years old, what do you expect? Especially when I wasn't permitted to chase after him and they were no help. So they had enough and put us out. Keeping all of our belongings. I was really in a mess now.
My son and I lived out of my car while I franticly looked for a place. The state couldn't help me, the hospitals couldn't help, everything had one and two year waiting lists. I couldn't even get into a home for the needy. Saving us just in time before the worst of the summer heat, another friend of mine took us in. Meanwhile I started having more complications with my pregnancy. I was in and out of the hospital four days a week, six hours a day, doing studies and tests, ultrasounds and amnios. The doctors could not figure out what was wrong. Six specialists working on me and they were all stumped.
I finally had a healthy baby girl. She was only a four pound baby at full term, but the doctors could not find anything wrong with her. My friend encouraged me not to go back to work right away. She said that she would take care of us while I got back in school and tried to get things back in order. But, as good as things got, they quickly got worse.
I woke up six weeks later to find a yellow baby girl. I took her in for some testing and they told me she had severe liver damage, not like the normal jaundice newborns got. Dropping out of school once again, we spent day in and day out at the hospital. They tested and did surgeries and tortured my poor baby.
They came to the conclusion of a very rare genetic disease called alpha-one-antitrypsin. This causes both liver and lung damage. There is no cure and the only treatment is liver and lung transplants. Her liver seemed to fail more quickly than her lungs, so we hurried to treat that first.
I had to leave my friends house, moving into my car with my children once again. With her disease, she had no immune system calling for her to be in complete isolation from the public. Which would have meant that my friend could not leave to go to work and then re-enter the house without a complete screening. Still nothing was available for us through the hospital or government help and a shelter was out of the question also because of her disease. So we bounced between my car and long haspital stays.
As a black cloud formed over me, my world spiraled into a black tunnel as the doctors explained the waiting process of finding a liver donor. By six months old and eightynine donor applicants later, my daughter finally had a match. My mother.
My mom had agreed to donate a portion of her liver to my daughter. I can not even begin to explain the emotions that exploded through me. All those feelings of fear had doubled. The lives of the two most important people in my life were being juggled by the hands of chance.
The transplant proceeds. I waited anxiously for twelve hours to find out the outcome of both my daughter and my mother. Finally the time arrived and the doctor came in to announce the surgery went more smoothly than any liver transplant he had ever performed had gone. Relief flooded over me as I rushed in to see my daughter. As I crawled over the thousands of tubes and machines, disappointment ran through me. She was still sedated and I could not hold her yet. I just leaned over her and said a prayer. I told her that she was the bravest little girl I ever knew and the strongest too. Momma's little angel.
I rushed over to see my mom. Often referred to as a "busy bee", it was heartbreaking to see her. She looked like death laying in her bed. Even though she was coherent, she could not speak or move because the pain was so unreal. I told my mom how muched I loved her and that there was no one more special than her. No one can give a greater gift than life. I went back to my daughter and gave her the most gentle kiss on her head, then went to the waiting area to get some rest. The day was almost over.
The nurses came to wake me just two hours later. They were checking some neurological things on my daughter and said it would cause her to wake a little. They wanted me to encourage her to open her eyes and move her hands and they thought she might respond more if she heard my voice. So I went. I watched my baby girl open her big, beautiful, pale blue eyes and squeeze my finger. It lasted a whole two seconds, but everything seemed to be going great. It was one-thirty a.m. I went back to the waiting room for some more rest. Little did I know the worst wasn't over yet.
Two a.m. all my daughter's doctors were staring down at me. They wanted to talk to me. They pulled me in to a conference room, as I try to force myself out of the groggy state of just falling asleep. They tell me something had went wrong and they needed to take out the liver. They didn't exactly know what happened, but they needed to take her in to surgery again right away. The liver wasn't working and none of them knew why.I again wait anxiously until seven a.m. They had removed the liver and nation wide we waited for another.
By ten o'clock that night we franticly accepted more donor applicants. No one would do. By evleven-thirty p.m. the doctors pulled me into the conference room one last time. They told me that she wasn't dead yet, but there was nothing else they could do and no more time for waiting. They encouraged me strongly to go say my goodbyes. I went in and as they unhooked her from the thousands of tubes and machines, I took her in my arms and cried. My daughter had turned seven months old that day. I held her until two a.m. She had taken her last breath at one-thirtytwo a.m.Seven months and one and a half hours old, I lost my baby girl. Two months before my twentysecond birthday and ten days after my son's fourth birthday.
It is funny how life throws chances at people. Some people win and some people lose. Some people live out every dream they ever had and others struggle saying, "If I could only rewind time." Here I sit at twentytwo years old wishing I could rewind time. Debating wether the choices I had made in my life had made me wiser and stronger or crazy and bitter. I still have a four year old son to raise. So I must move on with my life. Continue to struggle. And shower him with more love and attention then he could ever imagine. My priorities are finally straight. My choices are better. Maybe some people just need to learn things more harshly than others. I definitely don't have any dreams left. I am way more realistic about life. But I live day by day continuing on thinking, " if I could only rewind time."

Written by:
Jen 9-3-04