I am one of those annoyingly chipper optimists. You know the ones, where every cloud has a silver lining?! I can and do find the humor in almost every situation. Simply because I HAVE to. The truth is, if I don’t, I would probably sit in the corner and cry non-stop forever! Or sit in a bathtub full of Cheerios, playing with my rubber duckie until the men in white coats came to get me! Seriously though, I constantly remind myself that it could be worse, it could be much worse. Which is how I have gotten through so many things in life, the curve balls.
When a geneticist told me that my oldest son would need surgery at less than a week old I looked around the NICU and thought, my son has a pretty healthy heart, his organs in general were healthy. So, he had mild hearing loss at the time, he was intubated because he could not breathe on his own until after surgery. The point was, with that surgery, he would live!
When a few months later, another surgery later and two hospital stays later, we found ourselves in the hospital yet again for our fourth stay, I looked around and thought it’s not so bad, we’ve had some time at home with him. When he had an NG tube put in I was just thankful that they could get anything down his nose to help feed him. It was his nose that they had operated twice on. When he dropped enough weight to hit only 5oz over his birth weight, that was the first time I couldn’t handle a curve ball. I went straight down to the chapel and told God, if he was going to take my sweet baby boy, to do it now so he would not have to suffer anymore but, in the same breath I wanted to keep my baby so much I prayed that he would recover that day, I begged for it.
That was the last day things were bleak for him. He came home a week or so after that. He went through physical, occupational and physical therapy, early intervention and even graduated their program at 18 months! By 2yrs old when his “quirks” began to really show, I was ready to jump on board and ride the curve ball train again! …continue reading
