A little bit of craftiness

Two or maybe three years ago, this friend had discovered my ability to crochet. She then gave me a few skeins of yarn and told me to make something for her sometime. Well, I guess the time finally came! When the weather starts cooling off, I get the itch to do some crocheting and I happened to find a couple free patterns online that looked like a great fit for my friend and the yarn she gave me! So I started on a couple projects for her and her soon-to-be-born baby girl. I started working on a baby blanket from the soft white yarn she had given me, but it was taking longer than I wanted, and I wanted to get something sent, so I whipped up this cute little cupcake hat! I found a pattern online for one of these a couple years ago, but ended up modifying it a bit. Here's the original pattern.



Do you like my model? Hahaha!

Eventually, I did finish the baby afghan that I had started, and I think it turned out really nice! I had hoped to get it done a lot sooner, but life just gets in the way of crocheting sometimes!



I also made a cowl for her and made some fingerless gloves with the leftover yarn to match. I don't know why I did not get a picture of those, but here is the pattern and picture that goes with it. Mine ended up fitting a bit more snugly than the one pictured.



The fingerless gloves I just winged it! Haha! I used the same stitches as the cowl, but to fit my wrists. When it got to where I wanted the thumb to be, I skipped enough stitches to fit my thumb through. After that, I just did a couple more rows and called it good!

Strength

I get told a lot these days how strong I am. I don't know how I feel about that. I mean, I'd probably say the same thing to another person if our roles were reversed, but I don't feel that I am exceptional. The circumstances are exceptional and go beyond anything that I ever thought that I would be able to muddle through. Some days I do great, seriously, I amaze myself sometimes! But not most of the time. Most of the time, all I can do is muddle through, just trying to make it through the day and take care of the most basic necessities. Some days, I don't know if I even do that.

I remember shortly after loosing our baby, Renee, I met a mom with a severely handicapped boy. He had serious physical and mental disabilities. He was in a wheel chair. Although he was awake, and I sat only 3 feet from him, I don't think he ever acknowledged or even noticed my presence. That mom was not having her best day, I think. I talked to her a bit and her frustrations oozed out in her tone and manner. She was dealing with so many things that, even now, I just can't imagine. After that, I thought, this is why my baby didn't make it to term. Because I couldn't handle that day in, day out effort that it would take to raise a special needs child. God knew I couldn't do that.

In retrospect, I think it's safe to say I was wrong on more than one level.

Here I am, doing the very thing that I felt I was being saved from and even told a friend afterward that I didn't believe that I'd ever be able to do. If anything, it was the opposite of what I believed at the time: I was being prepared and given perspective.

But I still don't know what to say when people tell me how strong I am. I do feel that there is a core of strength within my outwardly mushy middle, but I don't feel that I deserve the credit for it. Heaven knows I didn't go out looking for it! Being strong has never been a goal of mine. It's been something that I have had to be forced into. So here I am, being forced to step up and be strong.

The wonderful thing is, it is not just me stepping up. As long as I am making an effort, I feel that I am strengthened beyond what I could normally do. And when I'm too burned out to make an effort, someone else is there to step in. I know I couldn't do this alone, and I am so grateful to have knowledge of and faith in a Heavenly Father who strengthens me. He has put incredible people in my life that have helped me more than any of them could know. My strength does not come from me. My strength comes from Him and from the people around me. I could not do it without His love and the love of those who have served our family. So many prayers have been sent to Heaven on our family's behalf, and I know that they have been answered. I have felt that love and faith and it has strengthened me through long nights, hospital waiting rooms, ambulance rides, emergency room visits, and the daily to-do's.

So thank you, thank you for adding your faith to mine, whenever you have. That faith and love is what makes me strong. Thank you for that strength.

Dread and Hope

Every time I have a friend who has some crazy sounding thing happen to their child, I mentally relive the hours I spent sitting in Instacare and hospital rooms the night before Isaac was life flighted to Primary Children's Medical Center. I have this new hyper vigilance for anything out of the ordinary.

I sometimes mentally go through the hours that led up to our emergency room visit and try to imagine what might be different now if I had realized something serious was going on sooner. Could we have gotten him help sooner? I honestly don't know. I don't know if anyone could know. When he had his first surgery, they couldn't do much because he was still bleeding on his spinal cord. They couldn't even see what was going on in there. This leads me to think that it probably wouldn't have made a difference. But I can't really know that, and I can't help but wonder.

I think of my two year old lying in a bed struggling so hard to breath that his soft round tummy lurched with the effort of pushing air in and out of his body. I remember the nurse waking me up after only two or three hours of sleep because they needed to life flight him. He was still conscious. Every few breaths, he would let out a little call for me. "Mom, " lurch, lurch, lurch, "mom," lurch, lurch, lurch... But there was nothing that I could do for him. I listened to the nurses and another doctor, whose name I don't remember, debating whether or not to "bag" him. I had no idea what that meant, but in my world then, bagging something meant putting it in a bag. I tried to picture what kind of bag they could put him in that would make anything better. They talked about trying to intubate him as well. Another term I didn't understand, but would very soon, because the life flight nurses would do it when they got there. And why were they taking so long? I had been woken up at 4 and been told they had called the life flight plane. The flight is only about an hour, so I didn't know what could be taking so long. When they arrived at 8:00, it didn't really occur to me to ask what had taken them so long to get there. They were too busy trying to save my child's life. One does not ask those things when they are busy signing papers to allow them to insert a tube in their child's throat (intubate him) so that he could breath with the aid of a machine. I had no idea then what we were all in for. No one knew what was wrong or how to fix it.

After the flight and the checking in, I talked to a Neurologist who would take Isaac in for the first MRI of his spine. It would take a couple hours. She seemed to have an idea of what it might be and although there was some urgency in getting an actual diagnosis, it sounded like something we would just have to wait out. Something his body would deal with on its own. He would probably have to be in the hospital for a few weeks, but he would gradually get back to normal.

Four hours later, I was awakened from a not so deep sleep and told he was being moved to a private room. Once I got to the new room, I was asked to tell them again when I had first noticed something was wrong and what had happened. As I recalled the details to them, they told me that it was not what they had previously thought. The doctor told me that there was something on his spine. The first thing I thought of was a tumor, but no, that was not what we were looking at. I had a brief moment of relief before they told me that it looked like a blood vessel had burst on his spinal cord. It was something called an AVM. I had no idea what that meant. I remembered the HHT that ran in my husband's family and caused bloody noses, and, I had heard, could cause bleeds in other areas like the brain and lungs. I tried to ask the Neurosurgeon if that could be what caused it, but I couldn't remember the letters. Was it THT? I couldn't remember, and the doctors didn't have the slightest idea what I was trying to express. Oh, well, it's probably not that anyway, but we need to get him into surgery right away. We need to relieve the pressure on his spinal cord by cutting into the bone. I had heard of things like that before.... Somewhere. I was approached twice, by two different surgeons, to tell me that if he bled during the surgery, there was a good chance they would not be able to stop the bleeding. Did I understand what that meant? Yes. Yes, I thought, that means I could be saying goodbye to my baby. But what choice did I have? He had not opened his eyes since the life flight nurses sedated him to intubate him. He couldn't get better on his own. The surgery that could kill him was his only chance at living.

Late that evening when the surgeon came out to tell us that Isaac was still alive and that the surgery had been at least a partial success, I felt like I could breath again for the first time in a very long 24+ hours. There was still so much ahead of us, most of which was unknown, but I could sleep a little.

That is what I think of when I hear of a child with unexplained and unusual symptoms. Not that I expect them to have the same diagnosis, but I remember the exhaustion and fear that ruled over me for those hours. Most of the time, their ER and doctor visits are far less dramatic and end with the child and parent sleeping in their own beds that night. I hope that every one of them has that outcome and dread learning of one whose experience more closely resembles ours.