I brought him home again, yesterday, minus about 17 pounds.
So much has happened and there has been little time to process it. It’s not the kind of crying I want to do with
people in and out of the room all day. So I stuffed it. I stuffed, crammed
down, and glossed over all the horror of the last few weeks. And today I feel the effects of compacted
trauma oozing out in sporadic tears, short tempers, and absolute fatigue. In fact
I swear my brain is in a fog.
So many “moments,” images of suffering, gut wrenching fear,
and pure rage are imprinted into my brain, triggering post traumatic stress
symptoms at inappropriate times. Tonight
I don’t even know how to process them, but they are there, and they have
changed me to the core. You go from one day to the next accepting the worst
case scenarios that seem to surround you, all the while thinking, surely this
is it…things will get better.
It took 10 days to get him well enough after surgery to come
home from Rockwall after they resectioned his infected intestines and took his
appendix out. He lasted nearly 4 days till he started to pass out from low
blood pressure. So we took him back in
for fluids thinking he was just dehydrated. But after multiple bags of IV
fluids and a continued drop in blood pressure, they decided to admit him.
Begging to go to the bathroom but not enough pressure in his
vessels to allow him to stand up, we resorted to humiliating means to get him
relief. And I cried. More IV’s inserted to give blood, and I cried
some more. He was so pale and barely staying awake. They said it was time to transfer him to Children's.
By the time I was hoisting myself up into the ambulance from
Children’s Hospital the next morning, I think I went numb. I briefly remember a chaplain from Rockwall
Presbyterian hugging me and promising to pray for us. Luke was strapped in a
gurney with IV’s and blood dripping, heart monitors beeping and blood pressure
cuffs inflating. The ride there was a
blur after being up all night knowing he was bleeding inside, somewhere, enough
to drop his blood pressure to just barely…
Shortly after being admitted at Children’s he was evaluated
and had an Nasogastric tube inserted from his nose into his stomach so they could pump jugs of bowel prep into him. I thought Luke was going to give up at that point. He gave me a desperate look begging me to do
something. The prep and bathroom trips continued until Tommy called a halt to
the craziness at 4:30 am. They’d been up some 25-30 times to the bathroom and
had reached absolute exhaustion. But that wasn’t the end of chaos.
Half jokingly, Luke warned the Anesthesiologist the next day
that things never go easy with him. And
as they entered Luke’s stomach and small intestine for the endoscopy, they
found a mass of ulcers, oozing blood.
One of them had ulcerated clear through to a blood vessel which broke
open during the procedure, causing more chaos in the OR and spilling more precious blood he couldn't afford to loose.
After two more units of blood followed by a very long weekend of no food or drink while the ulcers healed, and being isolated to his room, he
was allowed to go home…some 7 days after going back to the ER in Rockwall.
There are so many instances of seeing God’s hand, His
provision, His comfort and His miracles. And I want to write about those times.
But tonight I feel the panic with a need to just cry. Hoping that the tears will clear the way to
remember the good, the sweet, and the compassion we’ve been shown…for another
day.
