On Monday, February 8, our 3 year old daughter, Georgia, had been playing merrily alone with her dolls and her stuffed animals in the living room while her older siblings were going about their nightly tasks. It was a fine evening. Noah was with me (Pete) in the shop, building a wooden bridge for a school project, and Sophia was completing some homework in the kitchen. We had all been enjoying a lovely family weekend and were preparing for the children’s grandfather to depart for the airport following his 4-day visit from Edmonton. As Grandpa and Kandy were talking in the kitchen, relishing the final minutes of his stay, a scream summoned their attention from the living room. “My headband slap me–it slap me!” shrieked Georgia. Kandy rushed in to hold Georgia, who was panicked and was in obvious pain. Kandy’s requests to see Georgia’s eye were furiously refused. “It slap me! No momma!” Georgia clenched her eyes closed in defense against any further intrusion. Grandpa and Kandy assumed the best: Georgia had bumped her eye while playing and was simply startled. As Georgia’s panic escalated, however, Kandy became increasingly concerned.

I was guiding Noah’s hand on the radial arm saw when I faintly heard Kandy’s call from beyond my earmuffs. I took off my hearing protection and turned around to see Kandy in the doorway to the garage; she was holding Georgia in her arms. She spoke emphatically: “Something has happened, Pete. I need you now. Please come.” As Noah and I dusted ourselves off and hurried into the front entryway, Kandy explained: “Something’s happened to her eye. She won’t open it. She’s bleeding from her eye.” She was indeed bleeding, and she was clearly terrified. I received Georgia from Kandy and gently asked her if she would open her eyes as I held her toward me. She clutched me tightly with determined arms while she buried her head into my chest and exclaimed in her familiar 3 year old vernacular, “No Daddy, My can’t open them. It slap me!” I took her outside onto the front porch. It was dark by now, and I had hoped that I could calm her in the night air. Georgia drew in each breath with a hitch and a sputter in between her sobs. I desperately wanted to see her eye and was finally able to convince her to open both while we sat on the steps and looked for the imaginary kitty that I had just seen at my feet. “There she goes again, Georgia!” I said with feigned surprise. She opened her eyes with a start and turned away from my chest to find the illusory animal, “Where Daddy?!” As I quickly maneuvered my head back and forth to try to track with her movements, I caught a glimpse of her eye. In this moment I had that unwanted experience that occurs when the force and pace of reality overwhelms one’s capacity for holding it; when what so plainly and unapologetically appeared to you simply can’t have been what you saw. “No…no, no” I stammered to myself, shaking my head in refusal to my senses. “Look at me again, Georgia?” I pled. This time she looked directly at me. Her squint could not hide the vertical laceration that ran through the center of her pupil and across the full height of her eye. She was bleeding out of the white of her eye–her sclera–near her upper lid and there was an inflamed ridge along the length of the laceration. And then began the split–the one that occurs when the defiant Protector in you begins to bully that panicked, helpless child in you into lonely, isolated silence: “You stay in there and don’t say a word.” I brought our daughter back inside the house to a wife whose face begged consolation of me. “Is it bad?” Kandy asked. “We need to go to the hospital” I replied.

We all–my father, Kandy and me–exchanged furtive glances that betrayed our deeper worries amid all the attempts at comforting each other with staple parental banter. “She’s 3…she’s probably only frightened herself…she must only be bleeding from her eyelid… They’ll probably just send her home with an eye patch if you take her in” and on and on. Dad offered his most ardent encouragement to us, and, despite his sorrow and palpable concern, had to leave to catch his flight. It was now time to confront the most staggering of my worries–a concern that Kandy was in the moment, denied, due to the purity and innocence of her hope and love for Georgia. It remained inconceivable to her. We were able to distract Georgia with a children’s show on the tablet. As she looked on and held her blanket, I moved toward her, covered her left eye with my hand and asked her what she could see as her right eye remained open. With an innocence that was at once heartbreaking and relieving, Georgia soberly stated “Nuphin’–it’s closed, Daddy’” Now the prayers abounding within me emerged as whispered, hurried imperatives–as though we were running and reaching after a treasure was racing ahead and away, out of our midst. Whispering under my breath, “You must, You must! Please, please, please.” “Okay Georgia, tell Daddy what you see. Can you see anything?” “Nope” she stated in her fatigue–almost dismissively–as she looked on in confusion, trying to compute why she could’t see the cartoon through her open eye. “What colour is it, baby?” I tried again. She was laying on our bed. Noah and Sophia had also gathered to try and encourage her to communicate to us. “It’s black, Daddy” she said resolutely, so clearly free of any worry regarding the real weight of her response. Finally, Kandy and I agreed that we should call a dear friend who is an ophthalmologist. After some discussion, we texted him a photo of Georgia’s eye. He called us back immediately. “As quickly as you can, you should get to emergency. I have called Abbotsford and requested that their ophthalmologist on call come to meet you.” He reiterated again, in case his urgency had been lost on us, “She needs to go as quickly as possible, okay? Right away.” With that, we prepared a bag, Kandy and I embraced each other, and I left her to enter the truck with Georgia and continue our evening odyssey.

From this point, what felt like doses of violence, came in waves to steal and to hurt and shake. After making our way through the intake and dispelling the concerns about this being a case for Children’s Services, the doses kept coming. “We’re going to do our best to save her eye…”

Again, my inner Protector steadied himself as all the other parts quivered, “My daughter may lose her eye. Okay. Okay. Done.”

“She has a ruptured globe. She needs surgery immediately. We have to get her to Children’s–would you like an ambulatory transfer or would you prefer to drive?”

I drove.

On the way, I called Kandy. “What did you learn?” she asked, her agony leaking through her attempts at engaging me calmly. We both wanted so fervently to mitigate the other’s pain and worry.

“Kandy, you’re going to have to steady yourself to hear what I have to tell you.”

“Okay, Pete.”

“She needs surgery at Children’s. She has a ruptured globe and they are concerned that she may lose her eye.”

“What!? Okay… Okay, she may lose her eye… What?! What?!”

And now Kandy’s groaning sobs came surging, “Oh Pete…I’m so sad for her. I’m so sad. My baby. My baby” Over and over, Kandy said the words as she ripped open in an outpouring of soul and heart and body for our child. Her baby’s unblemished body was broken and now she was breaking in turn. In this moment, there is too much to remain connected to, certainly too much to bear. And so you begin to narrow your purview further and further inward, onto a singular point of focus.

“Kandy, I’m so sorry. I’m very sorry. I’m so sorry this happened. I love you. We are going to learn how to do this, and right now our child needs us. You say whatever you need to. You cry as much as you need to. I’m here. I just can’t break with you yet.” Kandy girded herself for her husband, knowing he needed the bulk of his faculties for what was to come. “I have to be strong for her, Kandy.”

“Thank you, Pete. Thank you for being there with our girl. I love you. Call me as you learn more.”

Kandy hung up the phone and called her brother in Alabama to wail. When she was done with Ben, she called her father in law, who had just landed in Edmonton, to share the news with him and wail some more.

I continued down the darkest, loneliest Number 1 highway I had ever driven, as quickly and as I safely could toward Oak Street. Frightened. Praying. Praying and singing. Singing broken, semi-coherent vestiges of whichever hymns were able to weave their way through my jangled brain. “Please help her. Please help us. Please help me.” She had fallen asleep in her seat from exhaustion–a moment of reprieve for her. And, desperately, like a shamed child who doesn’t yet understand his Father’s love, my insides were exposed to me as the layers of artifice were ripped away–I was emaciated: “I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Please don’t let my transgressions get in the way of Your care for her!” Where’s my eloquent theology, where are all my professional platitudes and my gathered resolve when tragedy comes to test my mettle? I’ll tell you: they are found clanging and plunking against themselves behind me on the highway, with all their discordant hollow notes, like a heap of cans tethered to the back of a wedding wagon. There I was, exposed and impoverished, just hoping that all that I thought I had experienced with God, all that I was sure I knew about His love, was true. Outwardly, stoic, resolute, determined. Inwardly, a frightened, feeble, scrawny soul.

Helpless.

Once we got to Children’s, Georgia’s familiar graciousness with her examiners was beginning to give way to her exhaustion and her fear. With three medical personnel present with us in the assessment room, Georgia sat on my lap, kneading at her favorite stuffed unicorn with her pudgy fingers. Such kneading is a remnant of her infancy; a soothing instinct that we in our family have grown to love about her–if Georgia was massaging at your neck or your arm while you held her, you knew she felt comforted. Now her tiny hands futilely scoured the environment for some means of bringing her bewilderment to a close. A medical resident who was going about what needed to be done, reached toward Georgia’s blind eye, pulled her bottom lid down to wipe an antibiotic strip into the crease of her eyeball, and and dragged the implement across her throbbing tissues. Georgia, astonished by both the sensation and the abruptness with which it occurred, cracked. She had not seen the resident’s hand approach her, given that it came to her from her right side, and couldn’t catch what was happening until she felt the sting. Lurching back, she cried different tears now, tears that were a potent combination of pain and of terror. That was it. She was overwhelmed and she began breaking wide open. Stuttering and shaking, “We go home, Daddy! It burns me–we go see Momma now. We go see Momma now.” A skilled and gracious staff introduced her i.v. while she receded more into her dissociated state. I ached for her as I held her and watched her hurry further and further inward.

It was now 1am. We had been admitted and were provided Georgia’s new room. I was informed that we would be escorted downstairs at 7am for her surgery. All through the night Georgia’s sleep was sporadic. Every 20-30 minutes she would cry out and roll as she flinched, moving to cover the right side of her face with her arms. I was worried that she would pull her i.v. out. I sat at her bedside, whispering as closely to her ear as I could while stroking her shoulder and her legs and feet “I’m here Georgia; we’re here together. Daddy loves you. Daddy loves you.” In between these moments, when she did sleep, her breaths were mostly hurried. It appeared that her dreams were not bringing any relief. I lay on the cot beside her bed during the refrains and engaged in more scrambled petition. After hours of her scenario not having changed, my prayers became a kind of angry, frenetic, verbal protest. Anger at evil, at brokeness, at the upside-down-ness of the moment; at the upside-down-ness of everything. I was bewildered. “I don’t have any more words, God–you must help her! I don’t know what to do.” As I lay on the cot with my hands on my forehead, my expressions were reduced to a name: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” the plea kept rolling out of me. In that moment, at approximately 4:00am, I was startled to hear Georgia begin to quietly chuckle in her sleep. This was not a frenzied, my-big-brother-is-chasing-me kind of laugh. Instead, it was one of gentle amusement; the kind of chuckle that occurs when you happen upon a dear friend, or you’re gazing upon the youthful frolic of juvenile animals at play. She was comforted. Her body had lost its tension, her breaths were deep and steady and she had relaxed into the contours of her mattress. She slept uninterrupted until her surgeon came to greet her at 7:00am.

The kind surgeon and I attempted to awaken Georgia, who finally came-to with an undulating barrage of “No, no!” no’s. She just wanted to be left alone. He needed to assess her eye and begged her to let him have a look. She was escalating quickly, so I suggested that perhaps he could have a look at some of the close-up photos that I was able to capture of her eye the previous evening. Thankfully, these sufficed him. He explained that he wouldn’t quite know what he was up against until he’d had an opportunity to view her eye on the operating table. He hoped to be able to remove her lens and replace it with an artificial one once he’d repaired her lacerated cornea and sclera. With that, I signed the parental surgical consent form, we exchanged a hopeful handshake, and he left to go and prepare for surgery.

Moments later, Georgia and I headed down in the direction of the operating room with our nurse and one of the surgical personnel. Georgia, naive to what was about to occur, engaged our guides in a robust explanation of her storied relationship with the unicorn that she still clutched. “He’s quertoise–that’s my favorite codor.” While we walked, I shared with Georgia that we were about to meet some new friends who were going to help her eye. As we passed through the last set of doors into the OR–into those gleaming, buzzing, sterile mechanical surrounds–Georgia quit talking and balled herself up into my arms. She was frightened by what she saw. More different. More big. More bright. More people. More scary. All of the gentle strangers in their glistening moon suits and their sing-song voices cordially invited her to lay down on the operating table facing upwards. Georgia told them they were all nuts and that that would not be happening…

“No! MY. NOT!”

After multiple failed attempts at placing her on the table–she wrapped her arms tightly around my neck and screamed each time–the wise anesthesiologist agreed to allow her to be put to sleep in my arms. She drifted off and away mid-protest, uttering one last refusal-become-snore. I laid her on the table, kissed her on the forehead, and told her I loved her. I walked out of the operating room into the waiting area, as so many parents have before me, with weight on my chest and my stomach in my shoes. My head was humming. I had now been up for 26 hours and would be for several more. I called Kandy to let her know that Georgia was safely in the care of people who have made it their life’s work to help children like our daughter.

Two hours later, I was greeted by Georgia’s surgeon, who invited me into a private area to review how the procedure had gone. Fully aware of the gravity of such moments for any parent, he tactfully walked me through what had occurred. “It went well” he said, “I wasn’t able to remove her lens as hoped. She has quite a severe laceration and all of the contents of that eye are now determinedly trying to come out the top of that wound. I’ve sewn approximately 25 sutures along her wound. I inserted a tiny air bubble in behind her cornea and we’ll hope that the inner structures respond well to this, taking shape as time moves on. We’re in a bit of a bind here: on the one hand, I don’t want to touch her eye again for some time–I just want to let it settle down in there as her laceration is sewn up so beautifully. On the other hand, we are in a bit of a race–the longer that eye isn’t seeing, the more likely it becomes that it will forget how to see. I want to keep a close watch on her as the days move ahead. We’ll need for you to be at the clinic here in Vancouver quite a lot.” During my time with the surgeon, Kandy had arrived at the hospital and was directed to the second floor, where Georgia had been wheeled in her bed, still asleep. I entered Georgia’s room to find Kandy at her bedside holding her hand. It was a relief to see her. There in her room, we sat and waited for our daughter to awaken. Her life had changed. We had entered a distinctively new chapter as a family.