A Homecoming

Yesterday morning we met with the physical and occupational therapists.  It was sort of a show and tell day.  We were shown what his rehab has consisted of, how it has progressed and how Benjamin has met or exceeded the goals set at the onset of his stay.  They practiced exercises and stretches.  They showed all the skills for independent living such as showering, getting in/out of a car, toileting, putting on socks and shoes, safely transitioning from a lying to sitting position and sitting to standing position.  It is remarkable what they've done for him in the last two weeks.  He's not the same person that was transported here by ambulance.  I've told you numerous times and I'll tell you again.  God is has been so good to us.  People have been so good to us.  Benjamin's therapists all gave him hugs on the way out, making him promise to WALK BACK IN one day to visit.  One therapist gave him a nice card, telling him she was praying for him and gave him some Scripture to stand on.  

It's been almost a month.  That's a long time.  I remember driving away from the hospital when we had our first baby scared to death.  I felt like I had a fragile cargo of eggs that I needed to be very careful with.  I checked the streets twice for on-coming traffic, so protective.  I felt the same way today.  I was nervous, like the first time I sat behind the wheel.  I pulled up to the doors of the exterior of the hospital and Benjamin, as he practiced many times, got into the car.  We stowed the wheelchair and walker in the trunk and started the 40 minute drive home.  Home!

We arrived to balloons on the mailbox, signs on the house and well-wishers.  He emerged from the car all smiles.

I'm sure we're going to cramp his style for a while.  He's used to living in Lake Charles in a house that he and Tanner and Owen (his roommates) rent.  Now he's back with us for a while.  He will start out-patient rehab three days a week here in Jennings starting Monday.  That will go on for four weeks.  In two weeks he has an appointment with his orthopedic surgeon.  Hopefully, at that point he will be deemed load-bearing on his right leg.  Then we have an appointment with his neurosurgeon in early November along with x-rays to gauge where he is in the healing process.

For now, though, he exhaled and was happy to be home.

Belle, his Great Pyrenees, was SO happy to see him.  In a later photo, that I wasn't able to capture, that big old dog tried to climb in the chair with him.

Then it was up the ramp and into the house.  What a homecoming!

He still has a lot of work to do.  Our next goal is to get him back to work.  With his mother following behind us in another vehicle, I had an opportunity (a captive audience) to talk to him on the way home.  He wouldn't have therapists working with him, pushing him every day, although he'll go 3 times a week.  The other days it would be incumbent on him to push himself and not slack off if he wants to continue the progress he's made.  

I told him to keep up the hard work and make it to the finish line.  I brought to his attention that he has four titanium rods in his legs and two in his back.  That's a lot of titanium.  I had googled the value of titanium per ounce and it ranges between $0.52 and $10.00 per ounce.  I told him that's a lot of money and warned him that if he starts slacking off, I'd sell him for scrap.  He laughed and promised me he wouldn't let us down.  I know he won't.

Home Sweet Home.

Why We Were Silent Last Week (Part III)

So this is the third and final installment in this series.  If you haven't joined us for the last two postings, CLICK HERE for Part I and CLICK RIGHT HERE for Part II.

Let's end this series by talking about what we learned.  Life is a big learning opportunity and our experiences can be a classroom, if we listen to the instructor and learn.  There are certainly exams in life and I want to pass the exams instead of fail them.

Here's what I learned:

1. God is God and I am not.  He is in control and He is So Good and Faithful.  He helps us to walk through difficult times and is there to carry us when we can't muster the strength to walk.  I realize that it is easy to say this now, but even if this had not turned out like it did, God would have seen us through this and would have given us what we need to survive.

2. Family and Friends are more important than silver or gold.  During this ordeal our family and our friends mobilized on our behalf, sending cards, money, flowers, texts, emails, feeding our animals, making meals for us, coming to visit us in the ICU waiting room even when we couldn't see them.  They cried with us, they shared our burden, they were there for us during the storm.  When the storm passed, they praised God with us.

3. There is Power in Prayer. This dovetails with #2.  Our family and friends are prayer warriors.  When Tricia needed it the most, people prayed.  These precious saints called other people to pray.  People across the nation and (thanks to the Internet) across the world prayed.

4. Miracles still occur.  I am a big skeptic.  Things like this  always happen to 'other people.'  This time it happened to me.  Right before my eyes.  The doctors still don't know what caused this.  They sent her home on no medicine.  I think they realize that perhaps all the medicine they threw at her didn't heal her.  God is still in the miracle business.

5. I love my wife even more than I thought I did.  We have been married for 26 years,  8 months, and 28 days, or looked at another way, for 9,768 days.  The thought of losing her shook me, scared me, and made me realize that I love her much more than I even thought I did and I already knew I loved this woman.

6. Cherish life - take nothing for granted - say what needs to be said. Things happen fast.  It seemed that things went from bad to worse and before I knew it, Tricia was on a ventilator, sedated and unresponsive, unable to communicate.  I realized that I didn't have time to communicate things that I wanted to say in the time that I needed to say them. Don't let that ever catch you by surprise.

7. Plan - and communicate your plans.  We are planning people.  Every Sunday after lunch, we have a family tradition we've been doing for years in which we put coffee on, get out some good chocolate and our whole family sits in the "parlor" with a calendar and goes over everything that is going on in the upcoming week.  I realized that we haven't exactly planned appropriately.  Although this is morbid talk, I didn't know where Tricia wants to be buried, what songs she wants sung at her funeral, where the passwords are to all the accounts and websites.

8. It is So important to be a member of a loving church.  We sing a song at church that says, "I'm so glad, I'm a part of the Family of God..."  Our little country church is small in number, but big on love and giving and praying.

9. Pass On the Love.  2 Corinthians 1:4 says, "who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."  We  aspire to be to others as those people were to us during our time of need.

I was going to end this list with 10, but I began thinking about #9 more and I think I ought to stop there.  Besides, in Scripture, the number 9 is the number of finality.  I think that is a good way to end this three part series - with finality.  We'll be back tomorrow with a new topic.

Why We Were Silent Last Week (Part II)

Yesterday I gave the first installment of a series explaining our absence from "the Blogosphere" last week.  Today is Part II, but you can Click Here to read the first installment of the series.

In the photo below, my wife's face is blue.  Although she was definitely feeling blue, she told me that she wanted absolutely no hospital photos in the blog.  I cheated a bit by coloring in her face.  I hope she doesn't mind.

So to pick up where we left off yesterday...  As the hours passed in the ICU, and despite numerous antibiotics and antifungals, Tricia's condition wasn't improving. They put in a PICC line to give her meds.  One of our ICU nurses told us she had never seen someone pumped with so many antibiotics.  They even pulled out the "big gun," amphotericin, an antibiotic nicknamed ampho-terrible because of its side effects. Her lung xrays were getting worse and they scheduled a bronchial lavage in which they went into her lungs with a scope and took a fluid sample to send for testing.  What was causing this infection?

Numerous tests were run on her blood.  Every test (to this date) has come back negative. They tested all bacteria that she could have picked up from cows, goats, chickens.  They tested for leukemia, autoimmune disease, and rare infections that the infectious disease unit brainstormed.  Due to all the fluids pushed on her, Tricia began to swell.

Over night, she became very restless.  She was struggling to breathe and it was making her heart rate increase, and her pulse oximeter decrease.  Her blood pressure began to fall and they started giving her albumin.  Finally, in the morning, they asked me to leave the room and they intubated her.  They put her on a ventilator so that her breathing wasn't labored.  The machine was doing the breathing for her.  They put in a feeding tube to give her nutrition.

Although she could no longer talk, she would motion for a pen and would communicate to me on a napkin.  We like to pray the Psalms, so she requested the following and I read them to her:

The doctors kept coming in and out of the room and I could see the concern on their faces. The doctor told me, "I hate fighting an enemy that I don't know."  Things were not going well and for the first time, I began to think about things that I didn't want to address.  Our daughter was on a mission trip in South Africa and that was a full 2 day flight to get back home.  Finally, I walked out of the room and asked the nurse to shoot straight with me.  "Do I need to call my daughter back home?"  She paused and said, "You are asking me a hard question.  Right at this moment, I would say that it is not a life or death situation, but a lot can change in two days.  I can't predict where we might be in 2 days."  I called my daughter and she arranged to come home as quickly as possible.  Things looked bleak.

The ICU waiting room was full of family, friends, and church members all praying. I went to the waiting room and we all knelt, held hands and prayed.  Prayer Warrior friends were fervently lifting Tricia up to our LORD.

Late that night I would hold her hand and pray with her and tell her I loved her.  I read Psalm 27 to her.  The last verse in that Psalm, verse 14 says,

Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.

I told her, "That's what we're going to do.  We are going to wait on Him."  The next morning the team of doctors met with us and looked at a curious rash on her stomach and thighs.  They took pictures of the rash.  In hopes of providing clues, they asked the ICU nurse to give her a shot of morphine and they would be back in a couple of hours to take a biopsy.  They showed back up, lifted Tricia's gown... And the rash was gone!

They looked all over and the rash that was there was all gone.  The doctors were dumbfounded!  He looked at me and said, "Someone in this room is going to have to pay for this biopsy tray, because I already opened it!"  Tricia's breathing was a little better and they were able to move her ventilator to 40%.  The doctor said, "Girl, you are getting better. It is going to take a while, but you are going to get better!"  Tricia smiled with her eyes that were filled with tears - tears of joy and relief this time.

The doctors left the room saying, "I don't know what just happened there."  I looked at her and said, "I do. God just happened!"  We prayed, thanking Him for His Goodness.  I said, "Tricia, you are going to make it.  We're going to be able to walk around the yard and smell the magnolia blossoms again.  We're going to be able to have coffee in the rocking chairs on the front porch again!"  She motioned for the pen and wrote the following:

Tricia loves fresh-squeezed tangerine juice from our fruit trees!  I was getting my wife back!  The change in one day was unimaginable!  In a couple days, she was released from the ICU and a couple days later, she was discharged from the hospital.  She still has a fever (on Wednesday, it will mark 3 weeks straight that she has had a fever every day) and has lost a lot of weight and is very weak, but she is getting better every day and I know she will recover.  The doctors still don't know what caused this.  There are lots of mysteries about this illness, but there is one thing I do know.  Our God is an awesome God.  God is our Healer and I KNOW he answers prayers and is still in the miracle business.  I witnessed it with my own eyes.

Why We Were Silent Last Week... (Part I)

I want to tell a story to testify as to God's Goodness to us.  I'll likely get to that in Part II tomorrow.  It all started two Wednesdays ago when my bride had a fever and felt miserable.  Tricia is not one to take medicine.  She always feels like the body can heal itself and that fever is a mechanism that the body uses to fight infection.  The problem that we ran into was that her fever persisted Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  On Sunday afternoon, I took my wife to our local ER where they ran tests.  The tests all came out negative and they informed us that it was likely a virus and it should be at the tail end of the illness.

Well, by Wednesday, things weren't better.  Still running fever.  Still feeling lousy. She went to our local doctor Wednesday at noon and he promptly admitted her to the local hospital.  Many tests were run.  One thing that was concerning was a rash, coupled with high fever, coupled with some odd cells being produced by Tricia's bone marrow.  Our doctor ran a test to check for leukemia.

On Friday at noon, the fever was still there and suddenly, she was having difficulty breathing and a chest x-ray showed a build-up of inflammation in here lungs.  Our doctor told us that this new development necessitated the transport of Tricia to the ICU of a hospital in Lake Charles within the hour since the hospital had a pulmonologist and an infectious disease department. 

We got settled in at the ICU and the doctors interviewed Tricia and I, trying to get down to the bottom of the fever.  They ran test after test.   They began treating Tricia with IVs of a number of different antibiotics; however, the fever never went away and actually things began to worsen.  I began getting "the look" from doctors & nurses that my wife was a "very sick lady."

Tomorrow I'll pick back up where I left off today.  By the way, the story gets better.  Tune in tomorrow.