The last few weeks have rendered everyone in our family sick and tired. When it rains, it pours, and now we all feel like we've been beat up and robbed. Such is life in a fallen world. But all glory to God that when life punches us in the face, we don't stay down, for our heavenly Father always lifts us up. (Gift #734) And every little trial that comes our way works together for His glory, molding us into his likeness and drawing us closer to Him. (Gift #735) So when trials come, we must always rejoice. Again, I say, "Rejoice!"
I was asked to teach AP Statistics at our kids' school two weeks before school began, so I did not have much time to learn how to teach, learn the subject to be taught, or begin lesson planning. I learned the first topic in a 15 topic syllabus, and planned a few lessons, and then I hit the ground running. Within a few weeks, I was substitute teaching a variety of rhetoric classes and tutoring Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Trig at the school while trying to cut back on the SAT, elementary Common Core math, and SSAT tutoring I had been doing outside of the school. My minimal prep work caught up with me, and grading projects I had initially planned for a class 1/3 the number of students I have now took over my life.
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| When grading projects has your eyes glazed
over and feeling like they've just endured a rigorous glaucoma test,
it's time to call in reinforcements. Get busy, Muffin, because those
papers are not going to grade themselves. |
I began pulling very late nights (3am-5am bedtimes) to catch up, and when I did go to bed at decent hours, insomnia would keep me up all night anyway. I was running at this frantic pace shuttling kids to their activities (12 hours of gymnastics for the girl, piano for the boy, TKD several times a week, Bible study, church activities, play dates, etc.) all evening and then doing prep work for four subjects plus grading all night during the weekdays. Sleeping in until 9 or 10am on Saturday mornings (Gift #736) was my redemption, especially after staying up late Friday night attending football games and other activities to support my students.
When I am running on empty like that, my wagon will usually break if any extra bricks are added to the load. But alas, by the end of last week another pile of bricks fell upon my wagon. I summarized the extra load for concerned friends as follows:
In
our family of four, we have two adults with bad backs, a girl on
crutches due to a broken toe and possible stress fracture, a girl with
possibly the worst virus she's ever had, a boy with periodic migranes,
and a mom who has endured a week of nightly insomnia in the midst of
pressing deadlines. So, perhaps the fact that I fell asleep on the yoga
mat only 60 seconds into a Pilates workout is not merely an indicator of
how dull and boring I think Pilates really is. Maybe it's just proof
that even Mama can get "tard" sometimes.
At the beginning of our daughter's first gymnastics practice last week, just one gym day after we had paid over $900 in nonrefundable competitive gymnastics fees for the first meet, she broke her toe which will keep her from competing in the next meet or from coming to the gym for at least a month. In an instant, our $900 was wasted, and our girl could not walk.
We did not initially realize her toe was broken, for she merely stumped it on the gym mat, but when the swelling was still an issue two days later, we got advice from a doctor who assumed it was broken. We taped it, tried to stuff her foot into a tennis shoe, and procured kid-sized crutches, but she came down with a nasty virus about the same time which knocked her out for the next five days anyway. With a fever, headache, sore throat, stomach ache and extreme fatigue, she mostly just slept while missing school, church, and gymnastics and making it much more complicated to keep all my teaching, tutoring, and church commitments with a sick kid to nurse, but somehow I managed to fulfill all obligations that week.
The insomnia and late nights continued as I had to squeeze in more chores involving my daughter's care as well as doing her chores for her. I had to find time to take her to a number of different doctors for her virus and her toe, for X-rays which confirmed that she not only had a broken toe but a stress fracture, and for spinal adjustments. I also had to take her to the medical supply store for an orthopedic recovery boot, and finally to an orthopedic doctor. All of these extra tasks added to my already overloaded teaching/tutoring schedule were breaking me down.
In the midst of all those hassles with my daughter on crutches, my son came down with the same virus she had (the same virus many of my students and I have had), and both my husband and I were suffering from our own backaches and headaches. Our family was a mess.
For months, my daughter and I had been looking forward to a mother/daughter purity conference and our Princess' Kiss Bible study we would be attending with school friends last weekend, but because of her virus, we could not go. She slept while I continued trying to catch up on lesson planning. I had to go to church by myself Sunday morning and help with children's ministry without my daughter who is usually such a big help as my assistant in the special needs ministry. I was so tired by Sunday but felt relieved that we had survived another week and assumed the worst was over.
My son was still feverish on Monday and Tuesday, so he could not go to school. While he was home from school, the bunny got really dirty, so I gave her a bath and placed her in my son's arms.
As I stood there looking into her pitiful, frustrated wet face, I thought that at least she gets the pleasure of
being held and cuddled by a cute, loving
boy while she dries. These images reminded me that while I may look
just as irritated as that rabbit does by the light and momentary
trials that come my way, I too am being held by the same hand that
upholds and sustains the entire universe. (Gift # 737) Muffin may not like her
baths, and I may not like the trials, but both work for our good to make
us clean.
7 For You have been my help,
And in the shadow of Your wings I sing for joy.
8 My soul clings to You;
Your right hand upholds me. (Psalm 63: 7-8, NASB)
Once again, however, I had the challenge of finding childcare for a sick child while I taught and tutored. It's hard to find a substitute teacher to cover for me since I don't teach enough sessions to pay a substitute enough to cover the gas expense and effort to get there, so I took my son with me on Tuesday and set up a clean mat in the back of the classroom for him to lie on while I taught.
As class came to an end, I found it difficult to focus. I had trouble answering a student's simple question because my mind was elsewhere....concerned about my son I suppose. After class, the struggling student I had agreed to help after class did not show up (God's providence!), so I immediately ran to check on my son. He could not talk and seemed to have labored breathing. I have never had asthma or been around someone with asthma, so I did not recognize his breathing as being too much of a concern, and I knew the virus would run it's course with him just as it had with my daughter who was now back at school and feeling better, albeit hobbling around on crutches. Yet, something inside of me (mother's intuition?) felt an odd sense of urgency, so I gathered my items faster than I ever have before and abandoned my sweeping chore (which I usually do fastidiously), rushed him downstairs to get my daughter and shouted for her to hobble to the car on those crutches as fast as she could. I raced to the doctor's office half chiding myself for worrying over nothing and half feeling anxious with that haunting sense of urgency.
We arrived and waited without too much concern. My boy was more slumped over than usual, but his color was normal and he seemed fine. He obviously wasn't talking, for he had lost his voice just like his sister had with the same virus, and he doesn't usually say much anyway. I knew they could take care of him there, so I relaxed and even pulled out some papers to grade.
A P.A. student evaluated him first. She took a lot of time with him but finally admitted that she did not know what was causing his wheezing for his symptoms were not textbook at all. So, she called in the P.A. she had been shadowing, and he began breathing treatments immediately, but those did not seem to help my boy at all. He tried two different medicines in additional rounds of breathing treatments but none seemed to help. At this point, I had put my papers away and was becoming more anxious. Then when the PA we usually see seemed at a loss as to how to help him, he called in a pediatrician. As soon as she examined his chest and neck, she ordered a nurse to call EMT. What? His oxygen was fine. He doesn't have asthma as far as I knew. Did he have that terrible virus I had been reading about in the news that had already killed several children? (The answer turned out to be "No!") They thought he was going into anaphylactic shock, so they administered epinephrine and gave him viles of who knows what. I was beginning to panic.
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| Receiving breathing treatments at the pediatric office |
Since I get no cell coverage whatsoever in that building, I ran outside to text and call my husband, but I kept getting his voice mail, and he didn't reply to any of my texts. I asked the nurse to look up the number for his employer's switchboard operator, and she didn't answer either. I left a frazzled voice message as tears began to flow. When I returned to his room, I found the PA student, the PA, the pediatrician and three nurses in there. I had flashbacks to my daughter's crisis delivery when the alarm sounded and over a dozen medical staff flew into the delivery room, jumped on the bed and started doing all sorts of strange maneuvers on me and on my baby girl to save her life. There wasn't any room for me to even enter that examination room at that point, so I went to the waiting room to inform my daughter.
Meanwhile my daughter was sitting in the waiting room watching paramedics race into the office with no clue they were coming to get her brother. I told her that her brother was in respiratory distress, so we needed to follow the ambulance to the county's largest hospital 30 minutes away (instead of the ER right across the street from the pediatric office because the PA thought he needed to go to the one with a children's ER unit where child specialists could better help him - yikes..that made his condition seem critical). Once she understood, I expected our drama queen to go into her usual theatrics, but she stayed relatively calm. As I continued my frantic efforts to reach my husband (something was wrong with his phone) while loading the car seat into the ambulance and packing up my vehicle to head to the ER, she prayed. All the way to the hospital, she prayed and quoted Bible verses even naming the chapter and verse, claiming God's promises for her brother. While I was in a state of panic, my 10-year-old drama queen was the spiritual leader, calming me and calling down the power of Heaven upon her brother. (Gift #738) That girl who drives me nuts with all her tween drama and right brained shenanigans encouraged me so much. I'm so glad she was with me although having her in tow meant I could not ride in the ambulance with my boy.
I finally reached my husband by phone on the way to the hospital. (Gift #739) Thank you, Lord, for protecting us despite my foolish decision to talk on the phone while driving through rush hour along a route I've never taken. (Gift #740) Please help my kids to never follow that poor example. We took a different route than the ambulance which helped us miss most of the rush hour traffic, so we arrived at the same time as the ambulance. I followed the EMT to the ER and rushed to my son's room. They already had him hooked up to lots of monitoring devices by the time I checked in and got there.
His heart rate was soaring likely due to the steroid medicine the EMT gave him, and his fever was 102.8. His respiration was still too high, so they began what I call the "triple crown" breathing treatment which took 30 minutes and involved three different medicines, if I remember correctly. My husband arrived 30 minutes after I did and took my daughter home after our boy started returning to a stable condition. (Gift #741)
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| "Triple Crown" breathing treatment with heart rate at 155bpm and still sawing logs in his sleep |
As I sat there alone with my son watching him connected to all those wires in a hospital bed, I remembered the last time he and I camped out at the hospital when he had needed me 24/7 for practically everything. That was 7.9 years ago, when I had been so overcome with enormous joy over this precious gift that had just been placed into my arms, heart, and life. For those brief moments at the ER this week, he was helpless again, and oh how I cherished his nearness.
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| The day of my baby boy's birth |
About a half hour after my husband left, my parents arrived. (Gift #742) They drove through rush hour over 70 miles each way to see my boy in the ER even though I told them it wasn't necessary to come. My mom tended to him so lovingly, even spoon feeding him what little we could get him to eat for dinner. Then my mom came back the next day to help care for him. She's such a God send (Gift #743) with her top two love languages being those that are hardest for me to express and which are love languages sorely needed in our home.
After about four or five hours of waiting and watching, they finally released him from the hospital. My dear parents waited with me until he was discharged. He slept all the way home and doesn't even remember receiving his 11pm and 3am breathing treatments that night. My husband has to get up earlier than I do in the mornings, yet he volunteered to do his middle of the night breathing treatments since he doesn't struggle with falling back to sleep like I do. (Gift #744) I love that man!
The next day was a logistical challenge, but thanks to my mom's arrival around 9am, I could manage. (Gift #745) I watched our boy early that morning while my husband took my daughter to school which made him late for work. After hearing my hysterical message on the voice mail yesterday, I'm sure the receptionist at least understood. Mom watched my boy and administered breathing treatments while I picked up my daughter from school and took her to the orthopedic doctor and back to school. Mom continued tending to his every need while I jumped over hurdles and through hoops to get the insurance to approve all my son's prescriptions which required going back to the pediatrician to reorder the prescriptions since the insurance would not acknowledge the ER doctor as able to write prescriptions for us. She continued tending to him while I shopped several stores for the few specialty foods my sick boy could eat, and then I rushed home for his next breathing treatment and to reschedule my tutoring sessions for that day.
By now, however, my boy knew how to use the inhaler and tube himself without any assistance at all. (Gift #746). His fever was completely gone (Gift #747) and with the steroid medicine in his system, he had enough energy to finish his schoolwork, practice piano, and enjoy quality time with Nana. I made more phone calls to follow-up with his doctor and get answers to questions about his medications. I also had to cancel or reschedule lots of plans we had for that week.
During his follow-up appointment the next morning, the pediatrician cut back his inhaler dosage from 6 puffs every 4 hours to 2 puffs twice a day and released him to return to school. What a wild ride we had in just 43 hours. But what a relief that he was recovering so quickly. (Gift #748).
His quick recovery is an answer to countless prayers. I had posted the following on my private Facebook page from the ER:
After
2 hours of breathing treatments at the pediatric office, my boy got to
take a ride in an ambulance. We could all use some prayer.
Within an hour, we had over 100 people mention that they were praying for him specifically. My assistant principal started the prayers going at school, and my son's teacher made sure all his classmates were praying as well. What a testimony his recovery is to the power of prayer and to our gracious, merciful, powerful, healing Lord. (Gift #749)
As the week comes to a close and my to-do list is still very overwhelming, post stress adrenal fatigue has set in with headaches and nausea as unwanted bedfellows. Yet, I keep thinking of our bunny's bath and how all these little trials (I realize they are quite small compared to what far too many people face on a daily basis) work together to make us clean and push us closer to Jesus. As
we suffer light and momentary trials, we connect more deeply with the
Great Suffering Servant, who bore all our punishment in our place. So let us rejoice when trials come because there is no greater joy than walking hand-in-hand with our Savior and King! (1 Peter 1: 5-7)
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