Five days a week I ran.
Every Saturday I ran more and longer with friends.
Five days before race day, at 11.6 months
Her temperature 102 and inching up.
Her body hot against mine.
Just breathe, I whisper in her ear.
It’s an ear infection
The doctor says.
Give her penicillin, he says.
It does not work.
The fever does not drop.
Her breathing laborious, not unlike mine on most of my runs.
Just breathe, I whisper in her ear.
We take her back.
“Go straight to the ER,” the doctor says.
I can’t breathe.
Not again, I think.
The same words from the same doctor to us about our son,
one short-long year earlier.
He, not able to move or walk, barely breathing too.
He takes full breaths now. He is fine on this day, but we are not.
I am not. She is not.
Just breathe, I whisper in her ear.
IV’s full of antibiotics pumping through
Four days before race day
the ER can’t figure it out.
The infectious disease team can’t either.
The spinal tap came back clear.
X-ray, clear. Cat scan just as clear.
Her father strumming and singing by her bedside, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
My eyes are blue, hers are green.
Just breathe, I whisper in her ear.
Three days to race day, the doctors suggest a second spinal tap.
The penicillin tainted the results.
I am horrified. I can’t breathe.
But wait, they say, how about an ultrasound?
Yes, I say, how about that?
It worked.
I can breathe again.
It is like chicken fat, they say.
A large mass on her lung, the very lung
that should allow her to run
13.1 or 26.2 one day.
The surgeon prepares. I do too.
Just breathe, I whisper in her ear.
She is under the knife, I run to get good coffee, not at the hospital.
One of her doctors is there too.
She knows medicine
and good coffee.
“We were worried it was a brain infection,” she says.
I freeze and want to run and not stop but
it’s not race day.
I am holding hot coffee in my hand.
I am not breathing.
Just breathe, I want someone to whisper in my ear.
It is race day.
She is out of surgery.
Her chest tube sucking fluid
out of her lung.
She can breathe again.
I can too.
I do not run
but sit with her in the hospital bed,
watching the runners race from high above on the 7th floor,
watching my friends, with signs and t-shirts that say, “Running for Mary.”
They don’t realize they are running for me too.
Just breathe, they whisper in our ears.
I did not run 13.1 miles or 26.2.
I ran zero.
I have not run three miles since. My daughter is now
13 years 11 months.
Just breathe,
I want to whisper in her ear.
Just breathe.
She does not remember. She does not know.
But I do.
