...I pictured myself boarding the plane (click here) with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t.
How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie.
I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.”
Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses, and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.
Yet we had a long, fraught night ahead, wondering how we would possibly cope. I called my mother in tears and told her the news.
There was a long pause. “Oh, honey.”
I sobbed.
She waited until I’d caught my breath. “It would be O.K. if you came home without her.”
“Why are you saying that?”
“I just wanted to absolve you. What do you want to do?”
“I want to take my baby and get out of here,” I said.
“Good,” my mother said. “Then that’s what you should do.”
In the morning, bleary-eyed and aching, we decided we would be happy with our decision. And we did feel happy. We told ourselves that excellent medical care might mitigate some of her worst afflictions. It was the best we could hope for.
But within two days of returning to San Diego — before we had even been able to take her to the pediatrician — things took yet another alarming turn.
While eating dinner in her highchair, Natalie had a seizure — her head fell forward then snapped back, her eyes rolled and her legs and arms shot out ramrod straight. I pulled her from the highchair, handed her to Matt and called 911.
When the paramedics arrived, Natalie was alert and stable, but then she suffered a second seizure in the emergency room. We told the doctors what we had learned in China, and they ordered a CT scan of her brain.
Hours later, one of the emergency room doctors pulled up a chair and said gravely, “You must know something is wrong with her brain, right?”
We stared at her. Something was wrong with her brain, too, in addition to everything else?
“Well,” she told us, “Natalie’s brain is atrophic.”...
