Canny Reflexology

22/03/2024

“𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚’𝙨 𝙣𝙤 𝙀𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙀𝙜𝙜 𝙝𝙪𝙣𝙩 𝙞𝙣 𝙄𝘾𝙐!”

I thought to myself as it became apparent that Nate would spend Easter in the PICU and my eyes filled with unshed tears. It's probably just as well since most of the children and babies there are fed either intravenously or through some form of feeding tube.
Nate had just managed to get home in time for Easter the year before, and it had been a bittersweet time of having a two month old with an uncertain future. Since then, he had spent little more than a few weeks at home in total and now here he was, missing the first Easter he would kind of understand the excitement of. He was recovering from his seventh life saving surgery and we knew that any day now we would once again lay his life in a surgeon's hands. We had made possibly the biggest decision of his life. It felt like we said that an awful lot. It didn't feel normal to say that so often. Then again, we weren't living in normal circumstances. We were constantly living life on edge, while Nate was constantly living on the edge of life. It had been less 2 months since his surgeon had last wheeled him into a risky emergency surgery just hours after his infection levels dropped slightly after going into septic shock. It had been about three weeks since we had been told we had to make a decision about allowing him to have a ureterostomy when there really was no decision at all. The choice was simple - allow him to have him to have it or he would certainly lose his kidney, his only kidney before the age of 4.
I remember wondering... What kind of choice was this? A choice gives you options. There are no options here!
So there we sat on Easter morning, with so much uncertainty and so little joy and so many smiles on Nate's face. We put his bunny ears on, his paediatrician told us to melt some chocolate and dip his dummy in it eventhough strictly speaking that was not allowed (he gagged furiously on the taste) and we spoiled him with all the love we could. We looked for little signs of hope in a room he had been in for almost two months already and we had tried so hard to make home and we sat and told him about the world outside that he knew so little about. We told about all the things he would one day get to do, including the Easter egg hunts he would one day go on and the bunnies, Easter and real ones that he would one day see.
And I prayed, I prayed so hard that the things I was telling him were not empty promises.
And at the end of Easter Sunday we left his tiny little isolation room in the PICU with heavy hearts and so much fear.
The very next day the professor walked in and said Nate was on the surgery list for Tuesday.