Today is Last Thursday.

Today is a very important day.

Today is the day after I took a day off from the hospital, because I cracked in front of Dr. Gordon. Today is the day my brother came back from L.A., with his wife and his baby.

Today is the day that his creatinine level slammed through the roof again, after it had shown so much improvement the day before. Today is the day his heart rate was holding steady at 125, and that they made him start wearing an oxygen mask, because his blood oxygen level was so low.

I got to the hospital first on Last Thursday. There were new machines in Second Hospital Room. There was the machine where I could watch his heart rate, and the machine that measured the blood oxygen. If the blood oxygen level went below a certain number, the machine would beep and all the nurses were supposed to come in and yell at him to breathe.

But I was there, so that was my job.

About every three minutes, the machine would beep, and it was my job to yell at my daddy to breathe.

There is a little girl sitting next to her sick daddy, and she’s shaking his arm and grabbing his hand and yelling at him, “Breathe, Daddy, breathe, take a deep breath, Daddy, breathe. Daddy! Breathe!”

You’re heart has not broken, not once, and you have not died, not once, until you have pounded on your daddy and yelled at him to breathe.

The little girl wouldn’t stop looking at the machine. She watched the digital numbers flick back and forth, and she would start pounding and yelling when they got too low. He was doing that thing where he was having a hard time waking up, even if you yelled at him. A couple of times, she called the nurses into the room when the machine was beeping. “Make him breathe,” she would say.

They finally took him off the blood oxygen machine. It’s sleep apnea, they said. It’s really common in people who snore, and it’s not a big deal. Fucking Christ. My dad has snored his entire life. Why the hell did we have to go through that useless exercise?

Then the little girl sat and held her daddy’s hand and read trashy magazines, and she watched the heart moniter. 125…132…127…135…pause…125. The little girl tried to send mental telepathy from her own heart to her daddy’s heart, so it would slow down. “Plug into my heart,” she would think. “Plug into my heart, it’s working just fine, and it’s young, so it can handle the two of us.”

She tried to talk to him, to read him the headlines, or make some jokes, but she couldn’t. He was asleep, and she was staring at him, and the heart monitor, and she was really angry. She was starting to act like he wasn’t in the room. He was so far away, so disconnected, and she was pissed.

127…138…pause…144…128…pause..135…

The little girl’s heart paused each time her daddy’s did. Daddy, quit it. Quit pausing your heart. Breathe, daddy, breathe.

There is so much more that happened on Last Thursday. This story only takes us up to about 9 a.m. There is much more that happened. Last Thursday was a very important day.

But this story seemed like it needed it’s own space, to tell the story of a little girl begging her daddy to breathe.