Blessed Health
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Faith on Tuesday, February 01, 2011 10:17 PM
Two years ago right now, newborn Blaise was in the hospital with RSV and I was struggling, big-time.
Having a sick child is never fun. Having an eight-pound infant hospitalized for a week and a half while you’re dealing with postpartum hormones is awful. It was supposed to be our babymoon, but I spent ten nights of it catching snatches of sleep in between comforting a newborn who couldn’t understand that he needed the oxygen from the nasal cannula attached to his face.
I was a mess. I cried a lot.
But we got discharged and our now-healthy baby grew quickly, and as time passed I gained some perspective. A couple months later I wrote a post on my personal blog in which I recognized the reality of our situation in Blaise’s early weeks: we didn’t have a sick baby. We had a healthy baby who happened to have a rough couple of weeks. Big difference.
In the time since Blaise’s hospitalization, I’ve long since worked through the grief I felt (mainly about the family time we missed out on during those days) and come to a surprising place, one that my fraught two-years-ago self wouldn’t have believed: I’m grateful Blaise got sick.
Even when I was struggling to make it through each day in the hospital, the rational part of me knew the truth. We were blessed. Our baby was never in danger, our stay was short, and we walked out the door with no expectation of coming back. For many of the people on our floor, those things were not true. It was only by the grace of God that they were true for us.
The fruits of that experience have both deepened and sweetened motherhood for me. I feel a burden on my heart to pray daily for critically and chronically ill children and for those who care for them and love them. When one of my own children comes down with a bug, I still hate it - especially for their sakes - but when I wipe warm foreheads and administer medicine and offer comfort in the middle of the night, I think of the parents who would give anything to have a child so healthy that a simple cold was a nuisance.
This morning we had our 20-week anatomy scan for our twins. It’s the “big” ultrasound in most pregnancies, the one where you can find out your baby’s sex, but it’s also the one where they make sure the organs are working and look for markers that might indicate genetic abnormalities.
The doctor was grinning when she stepped into the room after she’d gone over my ultrasound results. “This is exactly what we love to see!” she told us. “Everything looks completely normal. As far as we can tell, your babies are as healthy as can be.”
And then a nurse knocked on the door and the doctor excused herself, explaining that she needed to take a call from a patient who had gotten some bad test results. The woman was anxious, she said, and wanted to talk to a doctor.
We told her we understood completely, and then Bryan and I stood together in our little room and said a prayer for the lady on the other end of that phone line. It seemed bizarre for us to be getting such happy news, such wonderful relieving news, while someone just on the other end of a phone line was struggling to process something hard and sad.
It was one of those moments that show the beautiful complexity of our Creator - how he makes things good but allows ill to occur at the same time - and my heart was full of thanksgiving to him for blessing us this time, yet one more time. We certainly don’t deserve it, but I am all the more grateful because of that.
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