Jane Doe, Alive and Well

(Note: Yes, I’m writing in continuation again. You’ll have to go all the way back to the “On Being Alive and Well" entry - about four entries back - if you want the whole story. Sorry! I’m trying to build up stamina for when I write my novel!)

Fortunately, this illness was nothing like the last one. It was more like a bad cold. It was just enough to make her a little clingy , and needing extra attention for Friday and Saturday. Forget about all the things on my list that we were going to do together. We could cuddle in the rocking chair all weekend, if that’s what she wanted. Bubbles and sidewalk chalk and parks and picnics could wait. Was I going to turn down a chance to snuggle? No way.

We rocked, and it gave me time to think about this crazy month.

It just seemed too coincidental that our daughter would just “happen” to get so crazy ill the same week that Mark “happened” to be fully across the nation, and that Peggy and Chip just “happened” to need us right when Mark got home and baby girl “happened” to be recovered so their kids could stay with us and our son didn’t “happen” to get sick until Peg and Chip decided to go ahead and take the kids home.

It just don’t happen like that.

I think – I know - well, I think I know that circumstances happen for a reason, and that in everything in there is a lesson to be learned.

So, now the hard part. Uncovering the lessons.

Probably most of the time in life we don’t learn our lessons because one, we’re not open to learning them, and two, even if we are open to learning them, we don’t take the time to reflect and find out what the lessons are. I mean, life does go by at the speed of light, at least in the child-rearing season.

The first lesson, for me, is to be more available to my friends who are single parents, and to make sure that they know I’m available – day or night. I only walked a week in the shoes of single parenting and while I thought each of you was incredible before...well, now I have new appreciation of what you go through. Single parents, you are amazing.

The obvious lesson is that by golly, we all need friends. (cue “Lean On Me” background music here) Good friends. Giving friends. You can pour all of your time and energy into your job, your hobbies, your on-line chat rooms (your on-line anything, for that matter), your television shows, but none of those things are going to be there to help you when your life gets crazy and you need someone to take your boy to baseball practice. You’ve got to invest the time it takes to build friendships. You’ve got to be willing to help other people in their times of need – which means, you need to be aware of other people and not just be living in your own little bubble.

A lesson that could be possible to miss is to make sure my spouse knows how much I appreciate him. I love, appreciate and pretty much adore him all the time (feel free to roll your eyes here), but having him gone reminded me of how much I appreciated him. Just his mere presence brings a measure of stability and calm to me and to our home. So I checked in with that one – yep, he knows, he feels loved and appreciated. (Guess I need to work on the adoring part).

Being thankful is another lesson that comes to mind. It’s the whole “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” lesson. I’m not sure exactly why I needed a reminder on this one, since I really do practice thankfulness almost daily for our good health. But, apparently, I needed a little reminder!

So those are the obvious ones (did I miss any?). Now, onto the not so easy ones…asking for help, and dealing with control issues.

Posted by Tina at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Not quite an hour before the kids left to home, though, my son got sick.

Now, read the post from two days ago, inserting “son” instead of daughter, and you know how sick he got. That was the second week of illness, made better by the fact that my wonderful husband was home, but made hard by the fact that it’s more difficult to keep a younger child occupied on her own than an older child.

On Monday night, Peggy’s dad died. It was bittersweet; it was a mixture of pain and relief all jumbled together.

On Tuesday, I hugged her good-bye as she went home with her mom to start the practical things that a death requires, and to be there for her as emotional firestorms caught up with her. Grief will eventually drain, one slow day at a time.

On Wednesday, I got a less than “everything is A-ok” report from an annual checkup, so follow up is needed to find out what’s wrong. But the earliest follow – up appointment is….four weeks. Sigh.

On Thursday night, number one son seemed to be on the mend, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t recommend doing that, should you find yourself in this kind of season of life.

On Friday I woke up with conjunctivitis. I had been hoping to pick up a per diem shift at work on Saturday, which was now out of the question. And it’s actually good that I didn’t even try because…

On Saturday afternoon, I got sick. It started with a fever….oh, no, I thought. Here we go again. But my virus presented a bit different. I had vertigo. Really bad vertigo. I think I would choose nausea over vertigo, but then, I wasn’t given a choice, was I?

Most of Sunday I spent lying very, very still, and plaintively asking for Mark and the kids to please not wiggle the bed so much when they so sweetly came to check on me.

On Monday, I was up and about - thank you, God. And my dishwasher broke. Not a big deal, I know. But it’s nice to think of blazing hot water cleaning the dishes when viruses are running around my house. It was quickly fixed by my handyman husband. If only everything in life could be fixed as quickly.

On Friday my husband left for a week-end long trip with our son. They went to a father – son camp out on the coast. They’ve done this trip in the past with the same group and it’s been a great experience. I was happy for them to go and excited for the time they would have together.

And on Friday, my daughter got sick.

I knew life was cyclic, but please, not this again!

Posted by Tina at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, I got by with a lot of help from my friends, and Mark was due home on Friday at 3:00. Believe me, I was counting the hours. He was as anxious to be home as I was to have him home. In many ways that whole week was worse for him than it was for me, since he was so far away. But child number two was now nicely on the mend, the week was behind me and things were looking up.

At about 1:00, the phone rang. I expected it to be Mark, telling me the plane had landed, and hold on just a little longer, baby, because he was on his way home.

It wasn’t Mark.

It was my best girlfriend’s husband. The one I had called earlier this week – quite early, remember?
Like, at 12:45 a.m.

“Oh,” I thought quickly. “He’s returning my call to see how Peggy was doing.” She had had an outpatient procedure early that morning.

No. That’s not why he was calling.

Peggy’s dad had been in a serious accident, he said. He had been airlifted via Lifeflight to Enloe. They didn’t know if he was going to make it. Peggy’s mom was at the hospital, and Peggy’s brother was either there or on his way. Peggy wasn’t meeting the discharge criteria for the surgery yet. Could I go to the hospital to check on Judy? Could I take their kids for the night when they came down? Oh my God, yes, and yes.

So for the second time that week, I called my girlfriends for help. One dropped everything and came over to be with my kids so I could go to the hospital and find Judy, who was doing remarkably well. I waited until some more (wonderful) family friends came, then I got home ten minutes before Mark did. A couple hours later three of our favorite kids in the world were added to our family for the weekend (and a dog), and by nine that night we got to have one of the cousins come stay, too.

So our family of four swelled to a family of eight for a couple of days. It was great, it really was. I felt a bit guilty, actually, that we were having so much fun under circumstances so tragic. It did feel a little bit like an emotional yo-yo, receiving the latest info from the hospital, and reporting to Peggy how the kids were doing, what questions they were asking, and then coming back to party central.

You already know how it ended, from my previous post ("On Being Alive and Well") . But of course, at the time we didn’t know how it was going to end, and there was plenty of emotion to have to deal with. Peggy and her husband decided to try to keep life going as normal as possible for the kids, so our brood shrank back to original size on Sunday afternoon.

Posted by Tina at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’d like to thank Life for a couple of weeks that were difficult to handle.

No, really, now that it is past, I am thankful for it. While in the midst of it…well, let’s just say that I was experiencing some other emotions.

It started when my husband left on a Friday for a week long trip with his Dad. They went to Louisiana to build homes in the areas destroyed by hurricane Katrina. They’ve done similar builds in the past and they’ve always been great trips. I was happy for him to go and excited for the time he would have with his dad.

Saturday went great.

Sunday, our youngest got sick. Really sick, really fast. As vomit was running down my leg and into my shoe (sorry to be so graphic, but you’ve got to get the mental picture) I guessed that we were dealing with a 24 hour stomach virus, and maybe, now that she’d puked out about 1/8th of her body weight, the worst of it was over.

When her temperature began to climb to levels that even had me, who is of the temperature's-are-a-good-thing mindset concerned, I knew I had guessed wrong. Neither of us slept much Sunday night, maybe four or five hours. And keep in mind that I’m an 8 hours of sleep at night person. Eight hours, minimum.

Monday was a little hard, but I have a really capable boy who managed for the most part on his own. I made a list of schoolwork for him, and he worked at it diligently, bringing me the parts he needed help with or the books I needed to listen to him read aloud. I sat in the rocking chair, cajoling sips of fluids into the sick one, putting on blankets or cold packs, as her temperature or chilling indicated. But still, I was in good spirits, even teasing my husband when he called to check in, about how much snuggling time I was getting that he was missing out on.

Monday night was worse. The temperature peaked at 1 a.m. I think I got four or five hours of sleep. Actually, I wasn’t thinking much.

Tuesday was much the same as Monday, except for calls to the doctor on guidelines to mange this, and calls to the naturopathic doctor for some holistic remedies.

Tuesday night was the worst. At midnight, neither sick little girl nor I had been to bed. At about 12:30, she started doing the strangest things. She may have been delusional because of the fevers. She may have been proving the homeopathic remedy. She may have been trying to clear the copious amounts of mucous in her nose and throat. Whatever she was doing, it scared the crap out of me. I called my best girlfriend in tears (she lives 2 hours away). I didn’t know if I should take her to the emergency room, I didn’t know who to wake up to come watch my little boy. I was beyond exhausted, I was not thinking straight, I was running on adrenaline. My girlfriend was the best; she made some calls for me, she got me through it. I think we finally got some sleep at 2 a.m.

On Wednesday, I caved, and made phone calls to local friends. My one friend told me later that I scared her a bit, since I couldn’t get more than a couple of words out a time without dissolving into tears, and that is very much not like me. Within two hours I had two people come by to pray for us and offer support, a ride to classes followed by all day babysitting for my boy and dinner delivered that would last us for two nights. My extra-special girlfriend Kelly volunteered to stay the night on so I could sleep uninterrupted for the first half, knowing that someone was awake listening for my little sickie to cry out. She took the first shift, and I took the second, and I finally got some sleep.

I have some amazing, wonderful friends. They checked in frequently, they prayed, they got me through it. What would I have done without them? I felt so blessed, I felt cared for, and I felt….embarrassed.

Yep, embarrassed.

Embarrassed to be asking for help. Embarrassed that I couldn’t handle this situation on my own. Was I not prepared enough? Had I lost my independence? Was I not a good enough mom? What mistakes did I make? I poured all this out, along with a bucketful of tears, to one of my friends that came over to check on me.

No parent is ever prepared for having a child be ill, she said. It strikes fear in every parent’s heart. And being a nurse, well, maybe… she said delicately, maybe it gave me a little too much information, since most parents don’t consider viral meningitis when their child has a fever. No, I had not lost my independence, she reassured, I’d only lost my rational abilities because I’d lost so much sleep. That fact that I was so worried proved I was a great mom, she insisted. And the only mistake I’d made was to not call for some help earlier, she asserted.

Call earlier? No way. I should have been able to handle this. It was such a little thing compared to what some people have to deal with. I mean, what about parents whose kids are seriously ill? What about the pioneers who managed without doctors to call to reassure them? What about mothers in war torn countries who have no motrin to give or even water to cool their babies with? They all handle their situations!

You. Are. Not. Rational. My friend told me this very slowly. You. Need. Sleep.
Listen, she said. Haven’t you stepped up for people in the past? If you had a friend going through this, wouldn’t you be upset if she didn’t call you? Wouldn’t you help her?

Yes, yes, and yes.

And, little did I know how soon that would be.

Posted by Tina at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)