Landlouping

Tap… tap… tap…

I looked down at the premature orphan in my arms, surprised to feel his delicate, bluish fingers tapping against my skin.

Tap… tap… tap...

‘How funny!’ I thought, “This kid can really keep a beat!”

I smiled happily and turned my gaze out the window of the Sfanta Maria Children’s hospital, a communist-era relic in Iasi, Romania. The ICU was little more than a stern, concrete hallway lined with cribs. Little gaseous puffs funneled out of glass bottles, filled with liquid oxygen, while computers and monitors were conspicuously absent.

The environment was jarring, but I was beaming.

I had been saving to travel to Romania for five years, and at long last, THIS is where I was suppose to be. I was a bright-eyed 20-year-old, with my favorite orphan cradled in arms, certain that I was about to change the world.

Tap… tap… tap...

My gaze shifted back down to my orphan. Strangely, his toes had begun to tap as well, pulsating to the rhythm of a heartbeat.

Tap… tap… tap…

I stared at him, quizzically. Somehow, this behavior no longer seemed normal.

Tap... tap… tap…

Alarmed, I then noticed his eyes had began to bulge to the same beat. Visceral dread billowed up inside me and I looked around frantically, scanning the hall for the closest nurse.

Suddenly, the tapping shifted to full body convulsions. My little orphan’s eyes rolled back in his head and his limbs spasmed violently. Panic gripped me as I realized he was having a seizure.

I lunged down the hall, calling out, "Am nevoie de ajutor!" [I need help!].

But, as I ran forward, I sensed his frail body go comatose and I slowed, feeling my own body go limp.

I looked up at the nurse, terrified, then down at the tiny, lifeless body in my arms.

In a single movement, she swooped him up and away — emotionless — while I braced myself against a wall to keep my shaking legs from buckling.

Soon she came back and ushered me into a small room. I crumpled in a chair and cried and cried. In that moment, I was a vicarious mother. A mother, that, like many before her, was experiencing a depth of love and loss she never knew existed.

After an hour or so, it began to rain. It seemed Mother Nature was now crying with me.

I closed my eyes, burying my head back in my arms. Silently, I listened to the sound of raindrops against the glass.

Tap… tap… tap…