Tomorrow, we go home.
That sentence feels almost surreal after the last week. A week of monitors and wires, of folding hospital blankets into makeshift pillows, of learning how to read expressions behind masks. A week of waiting rooms, alarms that made my heart skip, and tiny victories that meant everything.
And now we get to leave.
I was holding that sentence at arm’s length, afraid the doctors might come in and say we couldn’t go home after all. It felt too fragile to trust, like it might vanish if I believed in it too soon.
She made it.
The hospital has been a kind of suspended reality. Time moves differently here. Days blur together. You forget to eat and you sleep in short bursts.
And then someone says, “She’s ready to go home,” and the weight of it hits.
Not just that she’s well enough to leave but that we get to start the part we thought we’d already started: life together. Under one roof. Without check-ins every hour or strangers gently waking you to test vitals. Just us. Just the quiet, the …normal?
We’ll be scared sometimes. We’ll watch her a little too closely. We’ll over-pack the nappy bag and forget half of what we meant to bring. But we’ll be home.
And home, now, isn’t just a place. It’s her. It’s every breath she takes while she sleeps. It’s every moment we get to hold her without wondering what’s coming next.
We’re not the same people who walked into that hospital. We’re slower now. Softer. Sharper in some ways. More aware of how little control we have and how much love we do.
Tomorrow, we go home. We carry her out into the world, hearts stitched up in more ways than one.