Help!

At three o’clock this morning our phone rang. Half asleep I answered it and a voice at the other end said

”Hello is this Abbe’s father? I’m calling from the pediatric intensive care unit at Queen Silvias Children’s Hospital”. My God! Why do they have to have such a long name, I thought. Get to the point. I was thrown, in a matter of seconds, from having been sound asleep in my bed, to a pulse of a 180 beats per minute. I was petrified. ”Speaking”, I said, ”what’s wrong, has anything happened?” This is when he realised what effect his phone call had had and he said, ”Oh, no, I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to tell you that Abbe’s been moved to the ward now, I didn’t want you coming here tomorrow wondering where he’d gone.”

I don’t know. It’s a first for me. Having an infant in an intensive care unit having undergone serious heart surgery. A nightly phone call from the ICU is not something that I’m used to. Maybe I should’ve just put the phone down, been happy with the good news and gone back to sleep?

Maybe, but it scared the hell out of me.