A single moment can make all the difference between chometz and matzah, between success and failure. They raced the clock — and beat it!

The massive pneumonia Aviva came down with around her first birthday caught us by surprise. It’d been a whole six months since we’d last been in the ICU, and we weren’t really prepared for it.

When I called the doctor to get a prescription for antibiotics because she wasn’t breathing well, and he said to come in, I went. When he told us that her lungs sounded as dead as a piece of meat, and we had to go straight to the hospital, I listened.

But somehow, the gravity of the situation was still lost on me, and when the doctor said they were taking her up to the PICU for closer observation, I still didn’t realize how bad the situation was.

When the head of the unit called me in a while later and told me things didn’t look good, I was alone. My relative complacency meant I hadn’t realized we needed both parents on site, ASAP. So when the doctor continued talking, and told me they were most likely going to need to intubate and she wasn’t sure it was worth going that far to save her life, I was thrown.

She went on to direly predict that they’d never be able to extubate, that we’d leave with a child who’d need to live in an institution on a ventilator, and that the life expectancy for a one-year-old who weighed five kilograms would only be another year or two.

I was stunned and completely lacked the presence of mind to ask for a few minutes to call my husband and have him speak to a rav. So I did the only thing I could think of. In as confident and assertive a tone as I could muster, in Hebrew and English, I told her she was to do everything, and I meant everything, she could to save the baby’s life.

Then I stumbled out of the unit, a quivering piece of Jell-O, and stayed that way for a long, long time.

Ultimately, they stabilized her without needing to intubate, but I’m certain that my insistence the staff do everything possible to save Aviva surely influenced her care, and I’m grateful Hashem gave me the strength to do what had to be done.

It’s more than that, though. As my long-suffering friends know, the special-needs, medically fragile world we live in isn’t all cotton candy and fairy bliss. Having my living room look like an ICU was never one of my dreams in life. But this incident, traumatic as it was, crystallized for me something I feel very deep inside.

When Hashem sends us a child to care for, our job is to do just that. And — with halachic guidance of course — to do everything we can to prolong life. What we feel about the situation is irrelevant, what’s important is what we do. Like I told this same doctor in a later discussion, “Hashem can do what He wants, but our job isn’t to return a child to Him on a silver platter.”

Sometimes it takes years to see the results of our actions. But other times, we’re privileged to see how, in a just a few moments, we can save a life

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 736)