{Conclusion} We’re Gonna Make it

This is the conclusion to the last two posts I’ve written about our experience with a complication to my now, nine month old son’s surgery. You can read parts one HERE and two HERE.

“Go.” My husband said.
“Are you sure?”
Jack was sleeping quietly, we’d been moved back to his room following the successful drainage of his seroma and the insertion of the drain. He had awoke briefly in same day recovery and had nursed, now he was sleeping off the anesthesia.
“OK. I’m going.” I changed into my running clothes and signed out of the pediatric floor. When I stepped outside it was cool and overcast. The prospect of running seemed odd. I glanced up at the window of Jack’s room, I felt a tug drawing me back but at the same time a yearning to get out. We had been in the hospital for three days and I’d left the pediatric ward only a night to sleep at David’s House. I needed to get out, to not see walls and windows but trees, mountains and the road ahead.
I started to move forward, running down past the parking lot and down the hill towards the Dartmouth College Campus. On the downhill I let my body go, allowing the act of movement to flush out all the tension that had built over the past three days. I thought about the day: Tuesday. By far it was the best day, Jack was doing well. Before his procedure in the morning he’d seemed almost completely himself, his back was still swollen, but that wasn’t stopping him from playing with his toys and attempting to crawl around in his crib. The procedure had gone smoothly and the doctors seemed optimistic that with the infected fluid removed we would go home the next day. And we would know the culture results soon, they said sometime in the afternoon.

I charged up a small hill before heading down the other side into the town of Hanover. I felt like a stranger in the world or “normal life.”  Cars, pedestrians: people going to and from. It seemed such a foreign concept, the events of the past three days had started so abruptly in the middle of the night on Saturday it was now Tuesday. How did I get here? I asked. I didn’t feel like a participant, more like an observer in a foreign land. These people don’t know. I thought. They don’t know what I’ve been through. They don’t know that I have a son in a hospital crib, just up the hill. It made me wonder, how many other people, strangers I pass by are going through something equally or even more difficult. How many people are walking around hurt? Broken? Grieving?

I ran down the side walk, onto the Dartmouth Campus. I wove between buildings, across dirt paths, until I came out the backside of the campus onto a narrow, tree-lined road. It followed the shore of a small pond: Occum Pond. The pond was quiet. Still, except for a blue heron in the marshy reeds.

The road looped around the end of the pond and continued around along the other side. As I approached the end of the pond an older man was ambling towards the end of his driveway.
“Hi.” I called as I ran by. And for no apparent reason, he looked at me, then looked up and said, “I think we’re gonna make it.” I’d passed by him before I could utter a response, but I smiled. Yes. Yes sir. We ARE gonna make it.

Maybe he was speaking to me, maybe to himself or maybe to the sky. But his words to me were truth. Another reminder, a tangible one, that God was with us and that we were gonna make it.The last three days had been some of the most difficult I’d ever encountered. But throughout there had been glimpses of hope, reminders of the goodness and light that is still present in the midst of darkness. That man at the end of his drive way, whether he knew it or not was one of them.
When I returned to the pediatric ward the nurse informed me that my husband had taken Jack for a walk in the Wagon. I found them across the hospital, I could hear them before I could see them. Jack perched in the wagon cooing, my husband proudly pulling him along. Jack looked great: completely himself, alert and drooling like crazy. Together we walked back to our room on the pediatric floor.

Once back in our room, the pediatric team rounded and informed us of the latest: Jack’s culture results had shown a non-resistant strain of staph (not the feared resistant strain known as MRSA). The strain was treatable with oral medication, which they would start that evening. Oral medication meant that we were one step closer to going home, his previous antibiotic could only be administered through IV. But we would have to wait until the morning for the plastic surgery team’s assessment of the drain. They would decide on Wednesday if the drain would come out at the hospital or if they would leave it in longer.
On Wednesday morning the  plastic surgery team took a look at the drain, the were pleased that the fluid that had collected overnight was minimal: a good sign. They decided to take the drain out in a week and scheduled a follow up appointment for the next Tuesday. They gave us the OK to go home. The pediatric team was also pleased that Jack had been without a fever for the past 48 hours and all his vitals had remained strong and stable, they too signed off on our discharge. By lunch time we were packing up the few things we had arrived with and were on our way home.

When I asked the doctor what could have caused it her answer, “Random complication. Bad luck, really.” They speculated that he could have bumped his back or rolled over something, easy for a rambunctious nine month old to do. It was a relief that we didn’t do anything “wrong” but kind of anxiety producing to not know the cause, could it happen again? The doctors said, probably not.

It has now been almost four weeks since this all happened. Jack had his follow up on Tuesday the 25th, the drain was removed and his next appointment is scheduled for September 6th. In typical Jack-Attack fashion he seems stronger now than he every was before: he’s more aggressive, more animated. He is back on the attack.

Perhaps I am stronger too. I have lived one of my biggest fears. Fear is a funny thing. It amplifies and makes room only for the negative. Yet even in a situation that I feared would be devastatingly difficult, there was hope and goodness and love. You just don’t see it until you’re in it. If you are in a dark place and you look for love, it will there. Because LOVE WINS.

And remember…You’re gonna make it.

-Sarah