what I learned this weekend

• Car trips with an almost-eighteen-month-old are not necessarily a bad or suicidal idea, particularly if you begin said road trip by stopping at a cousin’s house and raiding his playroom. Instant new toys:  total distraction and novelty!
• However, it would be best if the route for said road trip did not contain rumble strips to interrupt your child’s nap.
• Snacks and a little cooler for “moo juice” are invaluable weapons in a mumma’s entertainment/distraction arsenal.
• A stop at McDonald’s for chicken McNuggets and wiggle time is always welcome and always a great idea.
• Madeline is terrified of the high-speed elevators at the University of Toledo Children’s Hospital – shirt-clutching, shaking, sobbing frightened.
• Some people will give you dirty looks when your perfectly healthy toddler is sobbing because of an elevator in a children’s hospital. Sorry, everyone: I know that if she could articulate it, she would acknowledge that your suffering is greater, but at the moment she was more concerned with the way the floor seemed to be dropping away entirely.

We made the trip to Toledo this weekend to visit my 13-year-old nephew Alex. If you follow me on Twitter or are my friend on Facebook, then you know that he’s been very sick. So sick, in fact, that I haven’t been able to post or even tweet about it much because the diagnosis, the circumstances, the facts have been continually changing so quickly that I haven’t really known what to say. I didn’t even talk about it much in my office, for the fear that others would ask questions I couldn’t answer or have facts that I didn’t want to hear.

I found this past week that it’s one thing to pray for others, to update on others’ situations, to hear of others’ troubles, and entirely another when it’s your family. When it’s the little boy, now teenager, who you read to and hugged and vacationed with and put to bed and discussed Harry Potter with for the past ten years. I’ve learned that, in this case, it’s not so easy to update and break what’s happening down into facts.

The short of it is that he’s currently recovering from an infection that caused large, life-threatening clots to form on his hip. He underwent surgery on Wednesday night to remove the clots. Thank God that they were able to. Thank God they caught it. The family is, at the moment, in agreement that Wednesday night was the worst/longest of our collective lives, particularly for his parents and siblings of course. He was in the kind of pain that makes the word pain an understatement. Going into it any more than that feels like a betrayal of his privacy, so I won’t. Suffice to say that he is a strong, strong little man – surely not a boy any longer, after what he’s been through.

So this weekend we made the trip to visit him at the University of Toledo Children’s Hospital. The place is giant and intimidating: simaltaneously the sort of place you fervently wish to never see the interior of while hoping that, should you ever need such a place, that this is the type of place you will receive care.

(There is another post in the recesses of my mind about this – about the frightening, throat-closing thoughts I had in those halls. I’ve written about these thoughts before, but never have I been so live in their presence – at the scene of every parent’s nightmare. Passing rooms with cribs and hearing babies cry and holding my little girl’s hand, wanting to rush through the doors and never return. Praying frantic, whispered prayers for Alex and for every child. Hating to see children’s names on wings and playrooms and programs, knowing that each was in their legacy. There is a post in my mind, but at the moment I am all out of tears.)

The doctors still don’t know what exactly caused the infection.

When we arrived on Saturday, he was in bed, in traction, and the sight of him trying to move about brought tears to my eyes. It was absolutely fantastic to see and hear and talk to him. We got to laugh a lot, to joke with him. We are lucky. On Sunday, during our last visit, he was sitting in a chair, out of bed. Maddie was able to get close then, to give him a kiss; he was much more accessible away from the giant bed we kept shoo’ing her away from (she found the counter-weight for his traction device fascinating… which is fine, except playing with them would cause Alex a not-insignificant amount of pain).

They expect him to make a full recovery, though it will likely be a long and difficult one. Physical therapy has already started and is challenging. Jimmy told Alex some of his war stories from his knee surgery, encouraging him to see that it will soon be better. Aunt Missy and I offered thoughts about incisions – not that c-sections are all that similar to what he’s been through, but I think we were all looking for some common ground. A way to make him feel less alone, less an anomaly.

It was a scary weekend, a stressful weekend, but Maddie was able to visit with all five of her cousins. That made it a good weekend. As it should be, always - all of them here, together. We are lucky.