“What did he say, Helmut?”
With his fist to his forehead, his elbow supported by the examination table where our son lay, my husband raised his free hand and groped for mine.
He turned and looked up at me, tears brimmed his eyes. He winced before he spoke and when he finally did, his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else.
“Something’s wrong,” he whispered.
In the summer of 1984, Tracie Frank Mayer, a young black American woman, uproots herself from family, friends and life as she knows it when she marries a German man and moves to his country.
Though not understanding the language is unsettling enough, twelve days after her anxiously awaited child’s birth, her psychological balance tumbles fully into despair:“There is no surgery to save him,” the doctors explain to her husband in German. “Let your baby die,” they say to her in broken English.
Their son, Marc is born with Heterotaxy Syndrome; essentially a two chambered heart rather than four, an extremely rare and fatal condition.
Battling her husband, the doctors who don’t believe Marc can survive, his innumerable infections as well as her own fears, she does her level best to hold on in the maelstrom while doing all she can to ensure that her son has a chance at life.
Tracie’s enthralling memoir is a remarkable tale of rebellion and resilience; an inspirational story of one woman’s fight for her child’s life and a testimony to the perseverance of the human spirit.
It will indeed give hope and encouragement to anyone facing any battle not of his or her own choosing.