My daughter’s room was entombed in an unnatural twilight. The only light leaked from the monitors hanging from the IV poles and the enormous screen bearing her weak vital signs. Enormous curtains draped the windows, which, instead of revealing the living city, opened to the hallway and the nurses’ station.
Fitting I suppose. Life is a very fragile thing in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit—something to be tucked away and protected, outside the reach of the infection ravaging the limp body of the girl on the bed. This place was no place for a 12-year-old girl who 3 weeks before swam in one of the most elite meets in the state.
Moments before, a mass of medical humanity had swooped in moved my girl from a normal room to this place. They’d adjusted, measured, and then left my daughter and me alone in the belly of a beast. Safe for now. As I rubbed my daughter’s shoulders in a useless attempt to ease pain even the strongest narcotics couldn’t touch, I fought for some semblance of peace, of reality, and found my only solace in numbed shock.
Tubes snaked across the room threading into my daughter—one traveled down her nose into her stomach, another coiled long in her belly before draining out her side, the third and fourth pierced an arm and her hand respectively. She was too weak even to push a sheet off her body when her temperature soared.
I was so tired I could barely sit upright, let alone stand. After a year already full of tragedy and hospitals, hadn’t we already been through enough?
My girl’s head barely shifted. “Mama?”
I leaned close to hear her raspy voice and asked her what she needed.
“Why is God punishing me?”
I nearly choked. Why indeed?
Through my tears I answered back something along the lines of God isn’t punishing us and he promises he loves us. But deep in my heart I wondered if I was lying. If the God preached in our church actually existed.
After all how could this be love? How could it be love to allow a child to have two surgeries in one year? To be in this much pain? To be this close to…I couldn’t even allow myself to think it.
Throughout the 12 months before the hospital stay, my girl had been wracked in pain even as I dealt with my husband’s spinal surgery, my son’s pneumonia and struggles with asthma, and my own hysterectomy and autoimmune disorder diagnosis.
I have heard countless versions of, “It can’t get any worse.”
A trite answer that has nearly sent me sinking beneath the waves, a silent scream on my lips.
The truth is that the promise inherent in the comments make me hope for a soon-coming deliverance that has yet to arrive. This last year has left me drained of hope and questioning our concept of healing and God’s desires for our lives. Is there really a guaranteed end to our physical suffering? Does God promise to heal?
The dictionary defines healing as the process of becoming healthy again. Oh to be healthy. I yearn for the moment when my girl is healed, when life no longer threatens to pull us under. I long to be back in the boat with calm seas, for the journey to be done.
But I also know that life and healing is a process.
I know I’m incomplete not because I’m falling apart, but because I’m not finished yet. [tweetthis display_mode=”button_link”]I’m incomplete not because I’m falling apart, but because I’m not finished yet.[/tweetthis]
I know that God is making my girl and I into something amazing. Something with a plan and purpose. But it doesn’t change the fact that it hurts, but it somehow gives me hope.
As I type this and watch my girl sleep, I’m praying for my faith to be strong enough to step out on the waters and trust God enough to help me stand. I have hope, not because I’m promised an end date, but because I have faith that I have hold of the hand of a God who won’t let me drown.