I’ve been told I put too much stock in dreams. And perhaps I do. For a reason. A few nights ago I dreamt that a family gathering had been canceled because someone was in the hospital. It seemed a very strange dream and it bothered me. Made me feel as if the earth was unsteady under my feet.

I felt something akin to impending doom, but I tried to shake it off. It was silly; it was just a dream.

And then, out of the blue, a family gathering scheduled for next month was canceled. The reason given was time constraints and travel expenses, but when that happened it made chills run up and down my spine.

For you see, my granddaughter was being seen in the ER at that very moment. A follow-up from the previous afternoon’s visit to her pediatrician. Her cough was not improving and my daughter took her to be seen again.

When that trip-cancellation call came in, I knew she wasn’t going to be sent home with the regular medication regimen. She was admitted to the hospital with a respiratory virus known as RSV. It was so sudden and so overwhelming that her little lungs couldn’t handle it and there was talk of putting her in the ICU.

I knew what that talk meant. A vision of her surrounded by machinery and a myriad of lines tormented me. Immediately, I attempted to strike a bargain. Give me the biggest, baddest flare. Give me the pain and the suffering.  Let her get better. She’s so little. But a speck in that huge hospital bed. Let me lie there instead.

I sat at her side and prayed as she struggled to breathe through her constant chest-wracking cough. Watched helplessly while an aggressive treatment was implemented. Medicine to be breathed in, medicine pushed through her IV and medicine given through a needle into her little body.

Thoughts of all the people I knew who also knew her passed through my mind like a repeating slide show, and I mentally willed them all to think good thoughts for her. I silently read the faces of all who entered to attend to her. My daughter, her mother, accepted all she heard at face value. But, I heard the real story and it terrified me.

And then, after hours and hours of aggressive treatment, the doctor listened to her lungs for the umpteenth time and then smiled. She gave a thumbs up as she replaced the stethoscope around her neck. No ICU, she said.

No ICU.

Tomorrow my baby is due to come home. This evening she sat on my lap for hours, her monitor wires and IV lines tangled around us like so much spaghetti. She was tired of being in the bed and wanted to gaze out the window.

“I want to see the moon,” she said.