Lily has a heart.
That's what Dr. Reyes tells us at seven-fifteen AM, after two and a half hours of waiting in a NICU hallway on chairs that were designed by someone who has never spent two and a half hours waiting for news about their daughter.
She says it exactly like that. Lily has a heart, and it's working.
What she means is that the oxygen inconsistency was real. A small structural variation in the upper chamber. The kind of thing that in another decade, in another hospital, in another set of circumstances might have gone unnoticed until it became something serious. But they caught it at four-thirty AM in a Missoula NICU and the pediatric cardiologist who arrived at six AM — called in from home, still in what appeared to be her off-duty clothes under her white coat — looked at the scans and said the word that matters most in those situations.
Manageable.
