A Life Changing 36 Hours

I've sat here staring at the screen for a good while now, trying to figure out how to sum this all up, yet accurately convey the emotions and sentiments of the last day and a half. There is no quick or glib way to do it, though...how do you just verbally tie up all the loose ends of an event that has completely UPENDED life as it once was? We will always look back at life before March 12, 2008 and life after it, I now know.

I went by Little School Presbyterian Pre-School to pick Carli up at just after 11:00 AM yesterday to take her over to the hospital with us. Pam drove over and dropped Olivia off at Lisa Bryant's. Pam, Carli and I met at St. Joseph's Hospital and excitedly walked into the hospital and up into the second floor waiting room to find out whether we were having a little boy or girl. After waiting about 1/2 hour, I finally took Carli down to the van to get her coloring book and crayons. We didn't take long, but by the time we got back upstairs, Pam was in the ultrasound room with the technician and the jelly on the belly and all the computer monitors. After about 10 minutes came the words that changed everything: "I'm sorry, but I'm seeing some abnormalities." I think my heart stopped. My fellow male readers will understand what I mean when I say that my brain immediately started racing to a possible fix, with none forthcoming. For a man and a father, that is a totally HELPLESS feeling. And yes, it is TERRIFYING.

Pam was crying and I was barely holding it back, and the poor nurse wasn't doing much better. She hugged us both and told us how sorry she was which really didn't help things any. She then told us she wasn't allowed to give any details and sent us over to see Dr. Eric Tuchscherer, our family doctor at American Health Network. We walked out of the hospital in a complete and total daze. I got Carli in the car and Pam got in the van. She managed to call Lisa Bryant and explain, through her tears, that there were problems. Lisa met us with Olivia at American Health, and got out and prayed with Pam right there on the spot. What a blessing that was. We made arrangements to get the kids to Steve and Vicki Lamar's, then got back to the doctor's office. We also called my parents and Pam's and our dear friend, Jed Hutchison to let them all know our news.

Dr. Tuchscherer came in and sat down and told Pam and I that we were more than likely looking at a serious type of prognosis with what he could see from the ultrasound. He explained the gamut of possibilities, and this was the first time the possibility was verbalized that the baby might not survive because of the fluid on the brain and the spinal irregularities that the ultrasound had shown. He also had tears in his eyes and gave Pam a hug and squeezed my hand. Again, very sweet, but not making us feel better, though we were grateful. (Sorry if that sounds like a jumble of emotions....but it was!) Dr. Tuchscherer made some calls and managed to get us a 12:30 appointment for Thursday, March 13 (today) at the state of the art Pre-Natal Center in Indianapolis.

By this point, we were getting calls and voicemails of support from our family and friends. We called the church and asked Pastor David if we could come see him, and of course he said to come on over. He talked with us for 20 minutes or so, then prayed with us. We felt like we wanted to talk to our Sunday School teacher, Konny Zurcher, who is also our administrative pastor's wife. Her husband, Stan, has an office across the church hall from Pastor David's, so we went in to talk to him and share the situation. As it turned out, Konny was about five minutes away shopping, and came rushing over. Konny and Stan were exactly what we needed. They both prayed, listened and cried with us for over an hour. (This was the point where all of the emotions really began to uproariously surface.)

By this point, it was around 5:30 in the evening. We went over to pick up the kids and then went back to the house. This is where the agonizing waiting game began, since there was NOTHING further we could find out until the next day.

Jed and Alyssa came over to the house, and Alyssa cooked supper. It was such a blessing to have them there, to get our minds off of everything for a few hours.

(There is a scheduled outage at 5:00 PDT tonight on Blogger, so I'm going to go ahead and post this, then do Part II whenever the outage is over.)

As if I needed a reminder that there are more important things in life than politics.... :)

I will come back to McCain/Obama/Clinton and other related subjects in due course, probably no later than tomorrow, maybe even later on tonight.