Tuni will need to have her heart repaired. She has a congenital heart condition, a variation of a Tetrology of Fallot. Every medical student learns about it, almost like a rite of passage. In those days there was only palliative care, surgical procedures to extend life. Now there is surgery to FIX it! In time Tuni will have this surgery. The doctors here prefer to wait until the children are a year old when the survival rate is higher. If she develops symptoms, like cyanosis, or her development doesn’t progress, then we will have to do it sooner. For now we just feed her up, keep her happy, and watch.
We have been scouring the few papers that came with her. I was trying to find out why she was originally admitted to the hospital last April. I would like to know her weight at the time, and what symptoms presented. But in looking into the papers, the story we had been told didn’t seem to make sense. If she was brought in by her family then why was she “unknown baby” from the beginning? She would have been admitted under a name. Then we found in the police papers that THEY had been the ones to try to contact the family, including by email. Or, maybe those are just the standard words used for a baby found somewhere. I saw this in adoption papers all the time, words about an unmarried young woman abandoning her child… The words were exactly the same in each file. But for the adoptee the words were specific and personal. Those words became part of their narratives.
If you read my last post, and comments on fb, we tend to create narratives, weaving together a few facts with many speculations. Was the family poor? Did they know she had Down’s? Were they all agreed or was the mother mourning? In fact, we have no idea whatsoever. Maybe we will find out one day.
Earlier this evening I was talking to Tuni, tickling her, making funny faces… She is so responsive, so happy for smiles. Anyway, I told her I thought she must have a really interesting book to write — about her life… about being here and there, about hospitals, and police, and she just giggled and giggled as if she understood every word.
My heart runneth over.
Tuni, Archi, and Me
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