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Those who know me or us know that Cyrus is fine. It was scary in the beginning--very scary. A week or nine days after the birth of these twins the doctors told us they would be taking him down to get a CT of his brain. His birth was very traumatic and his blood pressure was low for a while. Very low. The kind of low that makes doctors worry about the hit his brain took.

In those days he didn't move. He was hooked up to so many machines, his head turned to the left all day, every day. No one held my boy for the first week or more of his life. I hate that so much. My arms ached to hold him but more than that I just wanted, needed, for him to be held. Loved. By someone, anyone, it didn't have to be me. What did it feel like to be born and then put into a box and left there?

The day before the scan our favorite doctor talked to us on rounds. "Have you discussed what the results of this scan might mean?" she asked gravely.

No.

We decided not to discuss it. I think we decided that together, my husband and I. I should ask him to see how he remembers it.

The doctors were very serious that day. They didn't like that he wasn't moving, wasn't showing signs of life. I felt him in there, in his body. Felt his life when I touched him. But then I'd worry that maybe I just wanted him so badly that I was fooling myself.

I called my mom early the day of the scan and asked her to bring Bill, her sweetheart, to see us. Bill is an artist--a sculptor and a painter and a calligrapher. He is a gentleman and a gentle man. When I was sick with liver failure he would lay his hands on me, on my feet or my head, and reiki me. He sent healing energy into my sick body. Later, after I was better, he wrote me a beautiful letter about what a powerful experience it was for him to be alongside me throughout that experience because even when I was so sick, not moving or opening my eyes or talking, he felt me in there. My strong self, inside my sick body.

He and my mom came, early in the morning, Bill dressed up in a navy, wool blazer and carrying a brown paper-wrapped frame of his work. He had somewhere to be for work soon but he came anyway and put his big hands on my little boy. I wanted his healing energy but more than that I wanted someone other than me to touch him and know whether he was in there or not. I didn't ask him what he felt and he didn't tell me.

Later that morning they took Cyrus down, a team of people walking beside his little covered bed. Tubes and machines everywhere. My baby would be taken out of his incubator and put into the scanner, not even needing any sedation because he was so still. We waited upstairs for him.

For some reason I think we waited a day for the results, though that doesn't make much sense. It wouldn't take that long. I'm probably confused but what I know is that I spent a lonely, terrified night laying awake in my hospital bed, no longer a patient myself, praying and praying that these people wouldn't tell us that our son was not able to breathe on his own and would need to be disconnected from the ventilator. Was it the night before the CT? Or the night after? I don't know. I wasn't alone--my husband was asleep on his cot next to me. I didn't wake him--I didn't want company or conversation. I cried and cried as terror and grief seeped out of me.

I also wasn't alone because I had put an update on Facebook earlier in the day, asking for prayers and energy for our little lion. Why was he a lion? I think because my friend had given us two stuffed animals after our babies were born--a lion and a crocodile. For some reason they'd become stand-ins for the babies for me. I held that soft, stuffed lion, wrapped in sharp hospital sheets, and read through people's well wishes. Over and over again. A friend from another life, someone I met through an old love, wrote "Laser beams of positivity" and that was the image I held in my head. My son surrounded by love, by light, by laser beams. Please be ok, please be ok, please be ok.

The CT scan showed some bleeding in his brain. Grade I intracranial hemorrhage as well as some other little bleeds. They couldn't tell us what that might mean for him in the future.

My husband had his hard day and night after those results. I was so relieved it was like my whole body had been drained of feeling and was left as a numb vibration. Anything would be ok, could be dealt with, now that I knew he would live.

He started getting better that day.