[CobaltFire]

Your description of being in a trance after you found out is eerily similar to how I felt when I got the message that I needed to get to the hospital and start signing paperwork because my son had cancer.

My life has a stark demarcation of before and after that, and sometimes it feels like nothing is quite real since.

[throwaway356356]

Strangely, I feel that my wife was able to come to terms with this demarcation much more quickly than I, although she was obviously much more traumatized than me in the time immediately after the event. (I quickly talked to her on the phone when she was in the ambulance, she was mostly incoherent and it was impossible to even get the information out of her whether our daughter was dead). I think this is mainly because it was entirely and only her who saved her life. She took control of the entire situation just seconds after it collapsed on her, and successfully turned it around completely by herself. I, on the other hand, was forced to be completely passive for nearly 2 hours, alone, with incomplete information, and with periods in which I thought I had lost my daughter. It was me who had a breakdown in the night after the event, in a dark hospital room, and it was again my wife who handled that situation.