there is this moment—an agonizing 30 seconds, at the bare minimum—during which something inside me simultaneously speeds up and sinks. it is my fight-or-flight response, but my helplessness is overwhelming. the wave of panic leaves me lightheaded, frantically and pointlessly rifling through baby clothes hangers because i vaguely recall it is an unseasonable 40 degrees outside, and she will need a coat as we take her to the hospital.

in a stroke of bad timing, my poor mother calls as i’m on the phone with the after-hours nurse from children’s medical center and my idiotic thumb fumbles, accidentally answering so that all she hears is my voice rising to a frantic pitch, saying oh my god her feet and hands are turning blue before the line goes dead.

i toss baby outwear at ian, barely noticing what i’m doing as i grasp desperately for reassurance from a stranger on the phone. do we call for an ambulance? will she be okay? do we have time? she is measured and calm but when she says you need to go now it is the weight of the last syllable i hear and then there is a rushing in my ears, an ocean of panic howling this isn’t supposed to happen. i’m not supposed to lose my baby.

it is this refrain that loops in my futile brain over and over again, as i blindly yank a dress out of my closet and cast around for the right answer to give a curious 3 year old. ian is swiftly out the door with juna in his arms, and for a full minute i stand in my bedroom at an absolute loss. the sight of my baby, sleepy-eyed and swollen-faced, lying limply in her father’s arms. the tightening in ian’s voice as he says look at her feet. i know i have to get it together as james chirps, i want to go with abaa, i know there is a checklist of things i must do but somehow i am holding a furry leopard print coat in my hands and for a moment i think corey bought this for juna and she’ll never get to wear it.

there is a lot in my life i am not proud of. everything i wore from 2002 - 2013. every livejournal post i’ve ever authored. the moral calculus behind my entire career. but the weakness i feel so keenly now is how all the mental and emotional structures i built into my mind absolutely collapsed when my baby experienced anaphylaxis. the reality that all my whack brain could muster was a phone call to my sister & brother-in-law to come over immediately and stay with james, followed by a panicked drive to children’s. the fact that it took a single fucking egg for me to think i’m never going to hear her call me mama. the unbearable, inexorable guilt of giving her that egg in the first place. the self-absorbed audacity of even registering that once again, i am in a plano hospital emergency department for the third time. the baby i could’ve had. the baby i had. the baby i might never have in my arms again.

for the first time in months, coronavirus diminishes to a mere afterthought as i rush through the emergency room doors and submit to a perfunctory screening about my travel history and/or potential symptoms. all the fears i had about potential exposure vanish in the exhale of relief i feel to see her still awake and smiling, even through a puffy, hives-splotched face.

we spend the remainder of our saturday in room 12, while she snoozes and smiles her way through a cocktail of epinephrine, dexamethasone, famotidine. and when the razor edge of fear finally wears off my synapses, my miserable brain thinks i should’ve written more about her. just in case.

all these blog entries dedicated to snacks i ate during pregnancy or how we fumbled our way through japan and i never even documented these things about juna.

how she slept so much during the first month of her life i wondered if i’d ever see the color of her eyes. how she smiled so much earlier than i expected, looking for all the world like an incredibly pleased turtle. how she was slower to laugh uproariously than james but so enamored and interested in people, so adept at mirroring facial expressions that her pediatrician remarked about her blossoming social skills. how she loves being sneaked up on for a forehead kiss. how much she adores her brother, even though their chief interaction is a roleplaying game he devised called “superbaby vs bad guy kid,” consisting mostly of him pretending to fart on her head (kids; gross). and how she loves her father even more than that.

and i think maybe the thing about having a second kid is that the sheer novelty of a new personality falls prey to the logistics of keeping two children alive, especially during a global pandemic. but even as we are discharged so many hours later with a prescription for epipen, this thought stays with me. that i should write more about juna, that i should take more photos, that i should do everything in my power to capture the essence of her life. because even though these days are unbelievably long, the years will always remain short. and in the space between a phone call and a heartbeat, they can feel so much shorter.