This has been quite a week…
My daughter has been planning her wedding for months and it was this last Saturday. She met a wonderful man through a dating platform and it has been a whirlwind romance since last summer. While she only had two children living at home (a 15 yr old and a college student), her life has been busy with a granddaughter and two adult children. Wedding planning has been all consuming for many months! Have you experienced this relay of food and cake tastings, dress fittings, picking nail polish colors, flowers, gifts buying etc. I am grateful they did not register anywhere – they were combining two households so no need there! And then there were the late night melt-down phone calls of “what are we going to do?” The final request- the day before the wedding – Mom, what are you planning to say at the reception? REALLY??
The Wednesday before the wedding, the six year old granddaughter had an emergency appendectomy. She will not be in the wedding party….Followed by a reaction that landed her in the pediatric intensive care unit – Mom (daughter #2) will also not be in the wedding either.
We made it through the wedding with great joy and fun plus lots of prayers for the little one and her parents. Sunday brought the opening of the cards and resting. Monday was the chaos of leaving on the motorcycle for a week-long honeymoon. Finally, they were off and those of us remaining took a deep breath. I headed to the hospital to see the little one and her parents.
Little did I know, I would be greeted by my great-granddaughter surrounded by multiple monitors, a maze of medical tubes, a ventilator and a diagnosis of sepsis! I lost it!!
No one had told me about the sepsis – I was devastated to think that these young parents were left to deal with this with very little support and yet, none of us knew and I am not sure how much really registered with them. They just know their little girl was in intensive care, receiving 24/7 nurse care, was seriously medicated to keep her from trying to pull out one of the many tubes in her little body and they were keeping her breathing with the ventilator. I was so overwhelmed by all of it I could barely talk to the doctors who were assuring me how much better she was doing!
Why am I sharing all of this? Life hands us situations and experiences we often do not expect. The question is how will we respond?? For me, the response was immediate – “muster the troops”! I reached out to family and friends – come support this mom and dad – send prayers, light candles and meditate directing the energy of love and health to the little one…plus the information tree of texts and messages was activated. None of us are alone and our only “real” job is to send love to each other. Today (two days later) I can talk about it without bursting into tears and the latest report from the mom is that the little one may be off the ventilator soon.
One more opportunity to Rediscover myself!
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