Stage II: Ferocity

When it comes: A day or so after diagnosis; runs concurrent with Phases I, III and IV

General behavior: Focused, single-minded, highly protective (all tinged with prevailing feeling of terror)

Duration: Five weeks

How it unfolds:

1. Devour everything you can find about children’s hospitals. Discover there is an entire children’s health care system in this country, and it’s filled with doctors and nurses who are called to wake up every day and take care of children like yours, even though their pay is less than half what it would be if they were treating grown-ups and their cases are routinely heart-breaking and often unwinnable.

2. Scour the Internet in search of something, anything, that will help you make the right decisions for your child: hospital rankings, surgeon rankings, success rates, infection rates. Discover none of it does anything but muddy the waters. Well, except the stuff that steers you absolutely the wrong way. Do your best not to panic.

3. Vow, once again, to stay off the Internet.

4. Beg doctors, hospital administrators, ER nurses, children’s health care advocates to give you some answers. Discover they don’t have the answers. And THEY don’t know where to find them, either. Wonder whether there are answers.

5. Spend every waking moment weighing the pros and cons of traveling for surgery, staying home for surgery, picking a surgeon with tons of experience, picking a surgeon with less experience but more state-of-the-art training. Discover that there are universally as many cons as there are pros. And vice versa.

6. Stop everything to find a new pediatrician. Discover you’re in luck. The practice you’ve chosen includes the wife of your child’s cardiologist. Consider it a beautiful piece of serendipity and go with it.

7. Resume your frantic search for answers. Call your cousin, the cardiologist for grown-ups. Surely he knows where they are. Except not.

8. Talk with one cardiac kid’s parent, who swears by Surgeon A. Talk with another cardiac kid’s parent, who calls Surgeon B “the closest I’ll ever get to God.” Ask your child’s doctor whom he’d choose. Try not to cry when he says either would be fine.

9. Lose yourself in your research. Go down rabbit holes. Find only rabbits. Turn left. Wish you’d turned right. Turn right. Wish you’d gone straight. Go straight. Forget where you were headed in the first place. Fall into bed each night and beg for sleep. Mercifully, it comes.

10. Wonder how people with fewer resources, less support and no health insurance manage to wander through this maze without throwing themselves under a bus. Look at your beautiful child. Realize they figure it out. And so will you.

11. Wake up one morning to find your wits strewn about the floor next to the bed. Rejoice. Gather them up and be on your way.

12. Decide to stop amassing information and begin to process what you have. Discover you have everything there is and nothing you need. Do not weep. Be glad for that.

13. Have a talk with yourself. Inventory your instincts. Take notice of your gut. Listen to your inner voice. Realize it feels astoundingly good.

14. Run into your child’s cardiologist at the childrens’ museum. Talk with him, parent to parent, admiring his sweet child whose heart is probably normal. Startle at the physical pull his presence exerts over you. Silently beg that he stay right there, next to you, until this whole nightmare is over. Or until your children are done at the water table. Whichever.

15. Finally sit with your spouse to make some sense of it all. Discover that the two of you, who have trouble deciding where to have dinner, are in lock-step. Consider it a sign from the universe and be done with it.

16. Wake up tomorrow. Call everyone who needs to be called with every piece of information they need. Feel like you’ve done the right thing for the first time since this whole thing started.

17. Meet Surgeon B. Immediately trust Surgeon B. Never question your choice of Surgeon B.

18. Visit the hospital. Immediately feel at home in the hospital. Never question your decision to stay home for surgery.

19. Schedule the surgery for two weeks from today. Set every wheel in motion. Start preparing your child. Never question your decision to get it over with as soon as possible.

20. Breathe. And pray.