Through the Longest Night: Emberleigh’s Fight for Life.1673

It has been a while since our last update. To be honest, this is one of the hardest ones we’ve ever had to write. Words will never fully capture what it feels like to be a parent living hour by hour in the NICU, where every moment holds both fragile hope and unimaginable fear. But we will try.

Late last night, just after midnight, the medical team came to us with a decision: Emberleigh needed an exploratory abdominal surgery. She had been declining steadily, and they believed waiting longer would only make things worse. The doctors explained three possible outcomes.

The first: that only a section of her bowel was damaged and could be removed.
The second: that the entire bowel was dead, which would be essentially fatal.
The third: that her heart condition was placing strain on other organs, causing them to function improperly and creating a cascade of complications.

Each possibility carried risks. Surgery itself could take her from us, but not doing the surgery could do the same. The team emphasized that regardless, she would need surgery within the next 12 hours, and the sooner it was done, the better her chances.

Hearing those words was like being pushed off a cliff without a parachute. We were allowed to hold our daughter before the procedure, knowing deep down it might be the last time. We kissed her cheeks, breathed in her scent, and held her tighter than ever before. There is no way to prepare for a moment like that. A parent’s love collides with a parent’s greatest fear, and you’re left standing there, shattered, praying your child finds the strength to survive.

The surgery lasted through the night. Every minute stretched into eternity. But finally, the doctors came out: Emberleigh had made it through. They believed her heart was the main cause of strain, not widespread bowel death. For the first time in days, hope flickered inside us. After surgery, her color looked better. She seemed more stable. With antibiotics and careful monitoring, there was reason to believe she was on a path to healing.

Exhausted, we were given a room near the NICU — bigger than the stiff couch we had been crashing on. At 2:45 a.m., we lay down, bodies drained, finally able to exhale a little. For the first time in what felt like forever, we allowed ourselves to believe that maybe, just maybe, things were turning a corner.

But three hours later, a knock shattered that fragile peace.

A nurse practitioner stood in the doorway, her face grave. “There’s an emergency in Emberleigh’s room,” she said. “They want you to come now.”

No parent ever wants to hear those words. Our hearts sank as we sprinted back to the NICU. What we saw there is forever burned into our memories: more than ten doctors and nurses surrounding our tiny daughter. Machines beeped, voices barked orders, hands moved quickly and precisely. One of the staff told us quietly: Emberleigh had gone into cardiac arrest. They had gotten her pulse back, but moments later, she arrested again — this time while we stood there helpless, watching CPR being performed on our baby.

Time stopped. The world blurred. We couldn’t breathe. Watching someone pump your child’s chest, watching her small body motionless under the weight of so many tubes and wires — it is a kind of pain I don’t think words will ever fully convey.

Miraculously, they revived her again. But her condition remained fragile, “touch and go,” they said. For the next several hours, it was a constant battle: when they stabilized her potassium, her glucose would plummet. When they fixed the glucose, another number would spiral out of control. On and on it went, a terrifying balancing act where one slip could mean the end.

Eventually, she reached what they called a “relatively stable” state. But that word — “relative” — has never felt so heavy. It doesn’t mean safe. It doesn’t mean she’s out of the woods. It means she’s alive, for now, but everything could change in a heartbeat.

We have asked Hershey to consult again with DC Children’s Hospital after this episode, because we strongly believe Emberleigh needs every possible resource, every possible chance. We will not stop fighting for her.

I wish I could put into words what it felt like, standing there while our daughter’s heart stopped. I wish I could explain the fear, the devastation, the desperation that consumed us. But the truth is, no description will ever come close. It is a pain that lives inside your bones, that tears apart your soul.

Right now, we are running on no sleep, surviving only on adrenaline and love for our little girl. We are emotionally drained, but we write this update to let you all know where things stand. Emberleigh is still here. She is fighting harder than most adults could ever imagine. She is fragile, but she is fierce. And she needs every prayer, every thought, every ounce of love people can send her way.

Please keep Emberleigh in your hearts. Please hold our family in your thoughts. This journey has been heartbreaking, terrifying, and exhausting — but it has also shown us the incredible strength of our daughter, and the power of hope, even in the darkest hours.

Because as parents, we dream of nothing greater than this: to see her breathe, to hear her cry, to one day watch her laugh and grow. To see her live.

And so, we cling to hope. We cling to love. And we cling to the belief that this tiny warrior still has a story left to write.

From Ruin to Return: A Mare’s Long Walk Home.1733

The sky over the Kansas prairie turned the color of a bruised pear hours before anyone said the word tornado out loud.

Horses know first.

They taste the change in the air and hear the thunder in the bones of the earth.

Juniper, a bay mare with a star no bigger than a coin on her forehead, lifted her head from the hay and stared west.

Wind pressed the grass in long, shivering sweeps and lifted the barn’s tin eaves like someone flicking a fingernail.

Mara, who owned the place and owed more to it than to any bank, checked her phone and the old radio because she trusted both and neither.

“Watch, not warning,” the announcer said.

But the barometer on the kitchen wall had dropped so fast it left a finger of fear tracing her spine.

Cal, her twelve-year-old, was kicking a ball in the yard and squinting at the sky like a child learning to read a secret.

“Inside, babe,” Mara called.

“Get the go-bag and the flashlight.”

Cal opened his mouth to argue and closed it again when the first hail hit the hood of the truck like thrown gravel.

By the time they reached the cellar, the sirens began.

The sound unfurled across the fields and into the shallow river and along the fence lines, and even though Mara had heard it a hundred times, the first note always sliced her clean.

She texted her neighbors, the kind of quick roll call rural life depends on.

You okay.

You in.

You need help.

Tyler from two miles over wrote back, “Basement now.

Storm chasers on 50.

Hook echo’s ugly.”

On the monitor in Mara’s palm, the radar looked like a mouth opening.

Green and yellow, then a rupturing red.

She made a list in her head the way people do when they can’t control anything.

Check propane.

Shut the chicken coop.

Horses.

Juniper.

Where was Juniper.

In the stable, the air had already bent weird.

Smell of rain and dust and electricity braided into a taste like pennies.

Juniper snorted and shifted, pawing once with her left front, the little habit that always meant I know something you don’t.

“Easy, girl,” Mara said, clipping a lead.

“We’re gonna ride this out just fine.”

The wind fell without warning, a sucked-in breath, a held note, and the hair on Mara’s arms lifted.

Then the world hit.

It was a noise like nothing you can describe, the famous freight train without a schedule, a beast breathing a town-sized lung.

The barn door tried to leave its hinges and almost did.

A 2×4 sailed past her like a spear and lodged in a post with a sound Mara knew she’d never forget.

The rafters groaned.

The stall doors rattled like teeth.

Cal screamed her name from the cellar steps, and she screamed his back, each trying to rope the other with nothing but air.

The tornado found them the way tornados do, with mathematics and violence.

It lifted the roof clean, peel-and-stick and plank and nail leaping skyward in one horrible shrug.

The pressure punched Mara’s ears until the world went woolly.

She threw herself against Juniper’s shoulder to keep the mare from slamming into the wall, and for a second Juniper pressed back, the two of them the only firm thing in a room gone liquid.

Then something gave.

The wall.

The stall front.

The day itself.

A white glare swallowed Mara’s vision and the air turned to fists.

Juniper’s body rose and wrenched, and Mara’s hand tore open as the lead rope ripped through it.

For an instant, long enough to build a lifetime of regret, Mara saw the mare lifted as if by God’s angriest hand, and then Juniper was above her, hooves tucked, neck stretched, a ship in the terrible ocean of wind.

The tornado flung her.

Three hundred yards, they’d say later, like measuring what cannot be measured might make it less impossible.

Mara’s knees hit the straw and then the slab, and then she was moving without deciding to.

She crawled under something that used to be a stall door and rose into a rain that had not only water in it but splinters and shingles and the loose harvest of other people’s lives.

Cal was at the cellar opening, reaching, and she folded her boy into her chest and counted him like coins.

Ten fingers.

Ten toes.

Heartbeat under her palm.

His voice broke against her collarbone.

“Juniper,” he said.

“Mom, Juniper.”

The cellar stairs funnelled them down into the earth, which has a talent for holding what the sky wants to steal.

They crouched in the space with the storm slogging overhead and the flashlight rolling on the floor like the last boat in a bad sea.

The siren rose and fell and rose again.

The house groaned and kept its shape because old wood sometimes remembers its promises.

Water crept under the door.

The dust was wet and tasted like hay and fear.

Cal’s hand shook in Mara’s, and somewhere in the shaking a prayer began that neither of them would have recognized as a prayer any other day.

It was a name, and then another, and then a please, and then a stay, and then the list of all the things you swear you will be grateful for if the door opens and the sky has forgiven you.

When they climbed back up, the air had the stunned quiet of a room after an argument.

The light was wrong.

Tornados change the math of light, subtracting color and adding a metallic sheen, as if the day has been filed down.

The barn wasn’t a barn anymore.

It was a low geometry of ruin—posts, beams, an accidental sculpture of straw and broken fence.

The chicken coop was a rumor.

The swing set lay on its side, chains twisted.

The oak had lost some limbs and still stood, the stubborn old saint.

“Juniper,” Cal said again, standing small in big boots, scanning with eyes that wanted to be older than they were.

They found the trail first.

Hoofprints gouged deep in the mud for twenty yards, then nothing, then a scrawl where a body had slid, then a long, scuffed arc punctuated by a sudden, ugly crater where a fence post had gone in and out of the earth.

“Did she—” Cal began, and could not finish.

“We look,” Mara said, and did not stop moving long enough to let fear harden.

They stepped through a world that had been unstitched and pulled inside out.

Corn leaves braided with insulation.

A mailbox three fields over wearing someone else’s street name like a borrowed hat.

A carpet nailed to a cottonwood tree by nobody’s hand.

Cows called from behind a chunk of roof.

A neighbor’s photograph lay face-up in a puddle, a child in a yellow shirt frozen mid-laugh, and Mara put it in her pocket with a tenderness that felt like a promise.

Tyler rolled up in his truck with his arm out the window and his dog quivering in the seat.

“You folks okay,” he asked.

“We will be,” Mara said.

“Juniper.”

“Let’s go,” Tyler said, and his dog leapt out and began to work the wind with her nose, a metronome of devotion.

They found her in the shadow of the cottonwoods down by the creek, where the bank had slumped and made a low cradle of dirt and branches.

At first she was only shape and color, the familiar bay made strange by the angle of her body.

Then she flicked an ear.

Then she lifted her head.

A sob tore out of Mara so big it became the only sound in the world, and Cal ran the last yards and went to his knees and said, “Sweet girl, sweet girl, sweet girl,” until the words blurred into the sound a mother makes when she was almost an orphan.

Juniper breathed the way injured things breathe, low and careful.

Her left hind was ugly, two gashes along the cannon where a wire had done its ugly, mindless arithmetic.

Her barrel was scraped raw on one side.

Her right eye wore a halo of swelling that made her look like a boxer in the eleventh round.

But her legs were under her, more or less, and her breath filled the ribs that had not broken, and she put her nose in Cal’s hair like she always did, as if counting her herd.

“Don’t get up,” Mara said, as much to herself as to the horse, and pulled off her jacket to make a pillow for Juniper’s cheek.

Tyler was already calling the vet, talking fast and clean, dropping the quarter miles in a voice that knew the land by its old names.

Sirens threaded the air again, but smaller now, the kind attached to volunteer fire pickups and the white vet truck with the dented fender.

Dr. Elkins hunkered beside Juniper with hands steady and eyes that had seen a lot and never, ever what they had seen today.

“Lucky, unlucky, lucky,” she said under her breath as she palpated and peered, a litany of triage that ended in a nod.

“No broken limbs I can feel.

Maybe a cracked rib or two.

We’ll get fluids, clean those cuts, and give her something for pain.

We keep her quiet.

We let her tell us what hurts.”

They slid a catheter in and the bag hung from a branch where the leaves still shook though the wind was gone.

The saline went in silver and slow.

Cal held the line like it was a lifeline because it was.

Mara stroked the mare’s neck and felt the twitch of skin under her palm, the flicker of life that had refused to let go even when the sky had tried to claim it.

Neighbors stepped out of the wrecks of their afternoons and brought the immediate liturgy of disaster.

A thermos of coffee.

A pair of bolt cutters.

A roll of gauze.

A generator loud as a sermon.

Someone brought cookies because there are always cookies and the sweetness tasted like something from the old world, the one that had existed that morning.

When Juniper tried to stand, they made a circle around her without deciding to.

Hands on halter, hands on shoulder, voices low.

She rose by inches, a ship on a cautious tide, and when she found all four feet the small congregation exhaled in a single, wobbly amen.

They walked her home by a different path because the old paths were gone.

The horizon had changed its mind.

Fences lay like broken sentences.

The barn was a story now, a before and an after, a place they would rebuild with new lumber and old vows.

Juniper limped but she walked, head a little low, eye half-lidded, each step a deliberate refusal to surrender.

In the yard, someone had righted the swing set.

The oak shed a branch as thick as a waist and still shadowed the porch where the dog bowl waited and would be filled because the dog would come home too.

Mara led Juniper to the only corner of pasture still fenced and Tyler ran two more t-posts like a man sowing something that would not be stolen.

Dr. Elkins taped a note to the halter with the times for meds because ink and tape can carry memory when a mind is too tired to.

“Hydrate.

Clean.

Watch.

Call me if she favors the right fore or if swelling climbs,” she said, and put her hand on Mara’s shoulder, a small pressure that held more than advice.

That night, after a head count that included chickens they hadn’t known had survived and a cat that materialized from a rain gutter with the expression of a burglar caught and forgiven, they sat in lawn chairs around a lantern because the power was out and the stars had opinions again.

Cal leaned against Juniper’s rib and listened to the drum of her heart the way children do when they want to hear the proof.

Mara looked at the roofless square where a barn used to be and let herself imagine its shape one day soon, boards straight and roof tight and the smell of cedar and hay suggesting a future.

A photograph from the puddle dried on the truck dash.

In the morning it would go back to the house it belonged to, returned by a chain of hands that learned one another’s names because wind had introduced them.

News crews would come, and someone would say the distance again—three hundred yards—and everyone would shake their heads because numbers sometimes tell the truth and sometimes only circle it.

The drone would show an elegant scar across the map, a path you could trace from cloud to ruin to river.

But the camera would miss the best part.

It would miss the way a boy’s hand fit perfectly on the warm slope of a mare’s neck.

It would miss the way a woman who had lost a roof and found a reason sat straighter when her horse snorted and reached for clover.

It would miss the chorus of small sounds that mean life when the loudest noise has already passed.

A cricket.

An exhale.

Someone laughing too hard because they were too tired not to.

Juniper dropped her head and pulled grass with a slow, satisfied rip.

The sound cut across the dark like a promise.

Mara closed her eyes and let the promise root.

They would fix what could be fixed.

They would mourn what could not.

They would build with hammers and with hands and with the strange lumber of gratitude.

The sky would bruise and heal and bruise again because that’s what skies do.

And in the center of that big, fickle blue, there would be a mare with a coin-sized star on her forehead and a boy who knew what it meant to hold on, and a woman who had learned that love can be flung three hundred yards and still find its feet.

Tomorrow they would begin.

Tonight they would keep watch.

Juniper breathed, and the lantern burned low, and somewhere beyond the cottonwoods a creek remembered the shape of its own bed and made no announcements about miracles even as it performed them.

The wind went to sleep.

The house kept its secrets.

The prairie, patient and wide, pressed its good ear to the ground and listened for hooves.