Lose Yourself

Believe it or not, but at my worst (or is it my best?) the soundtrack playing through my head is the Eminem song "Lose Yourself." As crazy and probably out of character as it seems for most of you, something about the relentless rhythm and drive of this rap song highlights what this whole ordeal has been like for me. I once read a blog a long while back for another compromised baby with heart issues. I remember then the mom wrote a post about Rachmaninoff, and how for some reason his music was in her head. I remember wondering how she could be thinking about music at a time like that? Well now I know how. Because it invades.
Your brain starts pulling out all kinds of things to help keep you from losing it. It doesn't make it better, it doesn't even inspire you, (I mean really folks, Eminem?) but it affirms something in your emotional makeup. It's like my brain is searching for some kind of back up data that can relate to what I am feeling. Probably some of you have not been exposed to this song, and for good reason! It is intense, ugly and has bad words (gasp!) but it also has truth. This is the line that is running a beaten track through my head: The clock's run out, time's up over, bloah! Snap back to reality, Oops there goes gravity...
Reality, and that feeling of floating, groundless, no gravity, pretty much sums it up. And the driving intensity that just keeps coming without mercy. Yet then the refrain is this: You better lose yourself in the music, the moment. You own it, you better never let it go. You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime yo.
 No joke. This says it all. Everything about our situation with Leo, from the very beginning felt like a test. People tell me how much our blog means to them, how our words are inspiring, how amazed they are at our courage and how it has changed their life. I never know what to say, since for me, I would give anything, cut out my own brain even, for this situation not to exist. Everything is so surreal. But then, I gather myself and go on. It's my one shot for happiness. It's the same idea that I learned when I was riding horses. The idea of total commitment. "Throw your heart over the fence," my riding teacher told me time and again, "and your horse will have no choice but to follow." This Eminem song is about standing on a precipice, you can't go back, and you're too scared to go forward, so there you teeter, paralyzed. My brain replaying the words that were dropped on us, much like the atom bomb: Massive..Profound damage...Abnormal...Death...Death. Yet Leo is alive, perhaps more alive then normal babies, because for them they never had to fight to live. So what choice do I have but throw my heart over and lose myself with him in the moment. The present. I guess in this test there are no winners. But at least, if at the end of the day, I can rock Leo to sleep and listen to his sweet breathing, there are no losers either.