W has been sick for the past three days with some kind of stomach thing (brought on by teething perhaps?) and with W’s health history (five weeks in the hospital with a pancreatic cyst at two months old) stomach things make me nervous.
The past three days I have rocked, and sung, and prayed, and wondered, and worried, and tried to let go of the worrying and trust that the same Healer who brought W through the first illness and led us through a serious illness to the right doctors and treatment can do so again and again if necessary. But my mind and spirit kept going back to those days- the uncertainty, the wondering how to care for the other children (staying with a church family) wondering if this was going to be a chronic problem and most of all wondering why?
Why now? S had no job at the time which brought its own questions
Why this child? Should I have done something different while pregnant?
Why this hospital? There was clear provision in the doctors, one of whom had been treating a friend’s child for years, but why these doctors? these nurses? Where we there in part for T, the young nurse who went through the experience of having a pediatric cancer patient die while we were there? Or for H, the young PICU nurse who had W as her first independent patient, and who made some mistakes that could have been serious if S hadn’t been aware of everything and caught them…
I don’t know and perhaps I never will, but today W seems better… and I am thankful and filled with joy to wake to a new day….
Thanks to Thee, O God, that I have risen today,
To the rising of this life itself;
May it be to Thine own glory, O God of every gift,
And to the glory of my soul likewise.
O great God, aid Thou my soul
With the aiding of Thine own mercy;
Even as I clothe my body with wool,
Cover Thou my soul with the shadow of Thy wing.
Help me to avoid every sin,
And the source of every sin to forsake;
And as the mist scatters on the crest of the hills,
May each ill haze clear from my soul, O God
(from The Carmina Gadelica)