Well the good and strong feelings have mostly continued. They have buoyed me up through what could have been some "triggering" things that I have watched or heard. Overall I am feeling really good.
I did have one downpour yesterday for about 15 minutes. Just a few minutes before I was supposed to leave for the school to volunteer I got a phone call. It was a man from the organ donation coordination place. He was calling to let us know that both of Camille's heart valves have been used and at least one of them was used in a child.
His call unsettled me. I have always been very pro organ donation. I am an organ donor on my driver's license. I believe it in it. When Camille was in the hospital I really hoped and prayed that, if she had to die, she would at least be able to donate her organs. Unfortunately, her organs began to deteriorate and become unusable.
I was very sad about not being able to donate her heart to another child. The night she died we went home to our own house. I had not been sleeping for about 3 days. I took a sleeping pill that night and finally got some much needed rest. I was awoken at 5 am by a phone call. I am not sure you can understand just how "out of it" I was when I answered this phone call.
It was the organ donation people asking if I was willing to donate Camille's heart for her heart valves. She had only been dead about 12 hours. I was so upset at them for waking me up like that. I told them that I couldn't really think about that right now and that they would need to call back at a decent hour. Then I hung up.
Jon had his head about him more and through lots of tears we reasoned that we may as well do what we could. He called them back and authorized the donation.
It has been over a year now since that day. And now there are two little parts of my baby girl out there in the world somewhere helping someone else live. Two other families get to have their loved one with them longer. I never could have imagined the strange mix of emotions this fact raises in my soul. I am grateful and happy and at the same time I am a little jealous and mad and sad.
I am still strongly in favor of organ donation. I would have made the donation again if I had to choose now. But I guess I just know it from a different perspective now. I have a more balanced view. I know the emotions attached to each little tiny part of a tiny little person you have loved and grown in your belly and fed at your breast and cared for. I helped create those heart valves through my morning sickness and sleepless nights. And I meant to be creating them for my little Camille to use, not some other nameless faceless person in the universe.
But now she no longer needs them. And someone else does. So now my pains and sacrifice are blessing some other family somewhere and I am journeying through grief. I am happy she was able to bless other's lives. I am so grateful her gifts were used and that two families have had their prayers answered. It is a blessing. Just a really hard blessing to take in. And so I had a 15 minute downpour of confused emotions. Then I went to the school and made photocopies. And suddenly the world seemed normal again.
