Christmas 2009

Psalm 118:17, "I will not die, but live, And tell of the works of the LORD."

Christmas Eve the night before had been a wonderful time of memory-making. We had gone to the Harned's and watched Isaiah, Dell, and Logan sing Jingle Bells while loved ones passed Timothy around. He slept contentedly in Matthew Stock's strong, secure arms for half the night!

I don't remember much about Christmas morning... I know we opened presents and were preparing to drive to San Diego to have dinner with my parents and grandparents. On a whim I decided to change Timothy's shirt to a "My First Christmas" tee he had gotten from Mary Ann and Larry from across the street. When I undressed him, I noticed with each breath, his entire chest caving in. "He's okay... right?...no, that just doesn't look right," I thought. I put the shirt on, then lifted it up to look again. No, it didn't look right.

I called the Kaiser nurse, who told me to call 911. I was skeptical. "Won't they just drive him to the ER?" I asked. "Yes," she said, so I thought, no big deal, he's not dying, we can just drive him ourselves. Shannon was faster at getting ready, so I figured he could get a head start by driving Timothy there first. Then we wouldn't have to wait too long. We weren't in a huge hurry.

Shannon got ready and took Timothy to the Kaiser Anaheim ER while I packed up the car for my parents' house. I assumed we would be at the hospital for a few hours, they would discharge Timothy, and we would drive down after that. I dressed up Isaiah in the special Christmas outfit Dellene had gotten him, and he looked adorable. I snapped a couple of pictures of him then headed off to the hospital.

When I walked in, I saw the ER pediatrician, Dr. Murtari, pacing anxiously while a nurse kneeling down next to Timothy's bed tried again and again to get an IV in his foot. There was blood on the sheet where she had failed to insert it in the other foot. Dr. Murtari firmly and urgently told the nurse that she needed to get the IV in. He explained to me that they were going to inject Timothy with a steroid to reduce the swelling, which he suspected was compromising his airway. "Is he going to be okay?" I asked. "He needs to respond to the steroid," was his answer. Timothy cried furiously with each prick. Nanette, one of the NICU nurses who had cared for Timothy after his surgery, heard him and stopped by to help. At long last the IV was in. "I prayed," said the nurse who did the job. "When your husband told me about the hygroma, I suspected that was the problem," said Dr. Murtari. We are going to do a CT scan on him shortly to see if this is the case." "How long would he have made it if we hadn't brought him in?" I asked. "He probably wouldn't have gone much longer than a couple more hours like that," he replied. Slowly I started to understand that Timothy's condition was much more serious than I had realized.

At about 2:30 I started to make phone calls. I let my parents know that we probably weren't going to make it. My mother had made Christmas dinner for all of us, and my grandparents, and my grandmother had broken her arm on Christmas Eve and also wasn't coming. Christmas dinner hot and ready for an empty house! The Harned's offered to come pick up Isaiah, which they did. By God's grace, Timothy's breathing eased up after the steroid was injected and he slept peacefully for several hours, despite us not being allowed to feed him.

His CT scan showed that, indeed, the cyst was growing back and blocking his airway. The plan was to intubate him and transport him to Kaiser Sunset, where we thought he would be receiving another resection surgery. After several hours of waiting, they wheeled me, with Timothy on my lap, to the OR for the breathing tube to be placed. Timothy woke up and started to cry as he saw the lights passing by over his little head. I will never forget his cry, or the look of fear on his face as he sucked on his little blue fish pacifier. It was as if he remembered being wheeleed in this way before - did he know from his first surgery? Whatever the case, even at only 6 weeks old, he knew something was not right.

The medical transport team from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and the anesthesiologists and ENTs on staff at Kaiser Anaheim, let me kiss him goodbye since we were not allowed in the OR with him. A look of fear crossed his face as if to say, "Why aren't you coming with me?" Then the doors shut behind him and Shannon and I were alone. He was put under general anesthesia for the breathing tube and did not wake up again until after the New Year.

Shannon and I waited in the X-ray lobby for them to tell us when to make the trip up to Hollywood. While we waited, we saw Dr. Lau and his wife delivering Christmas cookies to friends. We talked, but I'm not sure what we really said... I think Dr. Lau didn't know what to say...

We ate Christmas dinner in the hospital's basement cafeteria. Shannon said he was relieved, that he had been worried about Timothy's breathing for some time. I had been in denial, until earlier that week when Shannon had said he thought it might be growing back. "I don't think we're out of the woods yet," he had said. He was right.

At long last, the ambulance boarded Timothy after a chest X-ray to verify the correct placement of the breathing tube. We tried to follow the ambulance for some time, but lost it after parking one of our cars at the Holiday Inn in La Mirada. After a ton of traffic and a detour around Los Feliz due to some kind of event at Dodger Stadium, we finally completed the long drive up to Kaiser Sunset. This would be the first of many in the following weeks...

It was a cold night and I hadn't dressed for a long walk outside on Sunset Boulevard. We navigated the maze of hallways, elevators, and corridors with some help from a security officer and finally found the PICU on the 5th floor. There was Timothy, drugged to sleep with a tube in his mouth. I felt the same numbness I had on the day of his birth. It was close to midnight and we were told to come back in the morning to meet with the surgeon, who would go over Timothy's options.

And that was our Christmas, 2009. Someday I plan to show this account to Timothy so that he can understand how God intervened that day to save his life. Christmas will from now on be a day of remembering God's hand in protecting our son. Had God not intervened, Timothy might have stopped breathing on the way to San Diego in his rear-facing car seat, and we would have just thought he was asleep. God was gracious to us in sparing him when we failed to call 911 as directed by the nurse. God has a plan for Timothy, and He wants him here on this earth to bring glory to Him. I can't wait to see what He has in store for Timothy's life.