surgery

Owen had surgery this morning at Children's Hospital. He needed to get ear tubes placed again.

Everything went smoothly, and he's now home letting the anesthesia wear off while watching a movie with his very gentle big bro (on spring break). It's wonderful to bring home a little boy whose pain is easily managed with tylenol. Last time was a completely different story. (That time, tubes were the least of the concerns, since the surgeon also took out tonsils, adenoids, and turbenates.)

The surgeon said she was doubly glad we did it, because one eardrum shows sign of long-term pressure and inflammation. We already knew that Owen has had intermittent hearing loss for most of his life due to these ear issues, and we're hoping the new tubes will get his hearing more consistent. 

This is our fourth family surgery at the University of Colorado/Children's Hospital campus since moving here. Phew. Of course, for those of you who know me well, hospitals bring back a lot of memories from my brother's months in various hospitals, plus the fuzzier memories of my grandparents and Momie, with their long hospital/hospice stays. I always feel really raw and temporally unhinged any time I'm in a hospital.

As we stood in line to get checked in, the intake person told a couple with their black-haired little boy that they'd be in the waiting room for at least six hours. Then she came out from behind her desk to hug the tearful mom, saying, "This surgery is going to change his life."  

I couldn't help but tear up myself, feeling all that that mom's anxiety and worry and love tied up in a little ball. And honoring, too, the sensitivity of the busy intake person who took the time to hug her. Hospitals are like that, just popping with love and fear, despair and kindness.

I feel pretty full right now: full of gratitude that Owen's surgery went well and that we were able to bring home a healthier boy with no life-threatening issues. There's a sadness in my own joy and gratitude, though, because I know that many families don't get to bring home a healthy, whole child today. I remember sitting in a small consultation room like the one I was in this morning, being told David would never walk again. I remember my parents living on hospital beds and at Ronald McDonald houses, with no end in sight and our whole life on a sort of prayer-infused hold. Flavorless meals in cafeterias. A certain formaldehyde stench I can still pick up in any hospital room. Bleached hallways pinging with chipper weekend rehashing and hacking sobs in a corner. Watching my six-foot-five-inch Dad hunching over his Bible late one night in some ridiculously tiny room in the D.C. Ronald McDonald House. I remember the tears in his eyes, and his phoenix-like trust that God still held David in the palm of his hand, and always would. My mom, always there like a ray of sunshine, rubbing feet or finding someone's favorite drink--born to be amazing in any crisis. I remember praying that David could come home, and be normal again, and then having to wait, not knowing if he'd live, or ever walk, or have a normal life. Trying to not flunk out of college, to somehow keep my role in a school musical. Watching David clunk in on crutches at the end of the semester, to see me play Cinderella, rags to riches. The metal braces still in my parents' bedroom to this day, reminding me of the dusty church in Guatemala with all the wooden crutches left abandoned in the back, testimony to healing and new beginnings.

Someday I'll find a way to write more about all this, but in a hospital it's there, just under the surface. And I feel unending gratitude to God for the handsome, kind, amazing brother who did live, who did learn to walk again, who is stronger and wiser and more talented and godly than any "normal" could have been. But it still hurts.

For those families in consultation rooms staring at the shards of their lives all over the floor, for the ones watching endless cartoons to wile away the painful, drugged hours without sunshine or dirt, for the doctors and nurses and therapists trying daily to heal some of that pain and suffering: I pray that they will find themselves hugged unexpectedly, in a dark moment, or that they will find the strength to be the one stopping to touch and honor these harder parts of loving.