Chasing Abby(4)

She’s standing two hundred feet away from me and, even from this distance, I can see her cheeks are a vibrant red and her mouth is hanging open with exhaustion. But she’s one of the team’s best defenders, so Coach Fred thinks I’m overreacting. She couldn’t play so well if there was anything wrong with her, right?
Wrong. Abby may look like a normal, slightly smaller-than-average thirteen-year-old girl, but she is far from normal, as much as she hates being reminded of that. Right now, her heart is being crushed under the task of trying to keep her body cool and pump oxygen into her lungs. She’s going to pass out if I don’t get her off that field.
Coach Fred turns to me, his already wrinkled lips pursed in severe disapproval, a look that probably worked on recruits when he was in the military, but it doesn’t intimidate me one bit. “There is one minute and forty seconds left in the game.”
“I don’t care. Call a timeout.”
“Mrs. Jensen, I am going to have to ask you to please let me do my job. These kids have been working too long for this.”
“Lynette, come on.” Brian clasps his large hand around the crook of my elbow. “It’s almost over.”
“Are you kidding me?” I wrench my arm free and shoot him a scathing glare.
The referee’s whistle blows and we all turn toward the field. Abby is holding up her arm, the way they’re taught to do if they’re injured. I manage to take three steps onto the field before she collapses on the grass.
I race toward her, but Brian and the referee beat me there. Brian immediately pours cool water on her face and chest as I dial 911. We’ve never had to deal with this particular scenario before, but we’ve had to call an ambulance enough times to have the routine down. Brian roars at the crowd forming around us to disperse.
“She needs air! Move back!”
I fall to my knees next to her, spouting off the location and the facts to the 911 operator. “Eastgate Park, the east side entrance on Wingate Drive. Thirteen-year-old female with severe heatstroke.”
“No, not heatstroke!” Brian bellows. “Cardiac arrest! She’s in cardiac arrest!”

Chapter 3 - Brian
AS I STAND NEXT TO Abby’s hospital bed, all I can think is, if I knew thirteen years ago what I know now, I’d have done everything differently with her birth parents. I was thirty-three years old when Chris and Claire Knight came to us asking to change the closed adoption into an open adoption. I wasn’t young, but I was foolish. Foolish to think Abby would never need them. Foolish to think we would never need them.
Lynette stands next to me, gently stroking the back of Abby’s hand with her thumb, the way she has every day for the past seventeen days since Abby collapsed during that soccer game. It wasn’t the first time my little girl had passed out from overexertion. Abigail was born with an AV (atrioventricular) canal defect: a gaping hole in her heart.
After the surgery she underwent at the age of five months, her recovery seemed to be going well. Then, we noticed four-year-old Abby struggling to breathe while chasing Harley, our Jack Russell terrier, around the yard. Sure enough, we took her to the doctor and they discovered one of the valves in her heart had begun to weaken and her body wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Abby had one more surgery to reshape the leaflet, during which she was technically dead for three minutes and twenty-four seconds. We vowed to do everything we could to prevent her from ever needing surgery again.
Unfortunately, this means Abby has been forced to take various medications for years. We knew this came with a risk of injury to her liver and kidneys. We didn’t know—we couldn’t know—when she switched medications four weeks ago that she’s genetically predisposed to liver toxicity due to the way her body synthesized the new drug. This time, it wasn’t the stress on her heart that made her collapse. Cardiac arrest was secondary to the most pressing issue: liver failure.