Write for God

Almost a year ago, I started this blog as a way to stay sane after losing my job, my health benefits and my retirement savings. As the only working parent in our household, my income meant the difference between eating and not eating for a family that included 13-year-old twins and two college students. My husband’s calling as a peace activist and stay-at-home Dad kept him busy serving God for no pay.

As the first anniversary of this blog approaches on December 28, what had seemed as an insurmountable tragedy as 2007 was ending became just a blip on our radar screen as 2008 progressed. The post before this one was on July 1 and things would change dramatically that month to take me away from writing here for many months.

In early July, life seemed to be settling into a safe routine. I was employed at a research organization and the twins were looking forward to outings at the beach with family. We kept our baby grandsons for a week while our college-age daughter vacationed with her partner’s family in Puerto Rico. On an evening when my husband Kevin and I were exhausted from caring for an infant and a toddler, we went to bed and woke up to new reality in the middle of the night.

We think that Kevin got up to go to the bathroom after I had finally come to bed. I woke up shortly after when I heard a thud. Thinking that our oldest grandson had fallen out of bed, I got up and opened our bedroom door. Kevin was snoring on the terrazzo floor next to the door. Thinking that he had gone to sleep in a strange place because of a backache, I didn’t think much of his napping spot. (He has slept on recliners, couches, chairs, yoga mats, camp cots and everything else in between.)

I told him to come to bed and he didn’t respond. I said it louder, to no avail. I shook him several times and he seemed out of it. Alarmed at this point, I turned his face to me and suddenly noticed blood and bloody matter coming out of his right ear. I ran to the phone to call 911 and, before I hung up the phone, paramedics were in our house in the middle of the night while the twins and the grandbabies continued sleeping.

A medical helicopter transported my husband to the nearest trauma center 25 miles away as I called family members for help at about 2 a.m. Thank God that my parents and siblings are about 25 miles east of us. Some of them arrived to care for the children while I dressed and drove to the hospital on a deserted highway.

Kevin spent three days in the hospital with a fractured skull. He still has no sense of taste or smell and his right eye won’t close properly. Other than that, he’s with us and God has kept him out of serious harm. The best that a neurologist could guess was that he had fallen, had hit one wall and then ricocheted onto the hard floor.

All of this without medical insurance, since I had lost the health benefits we had all barely used while I worked for Pinellas County. At my new job, family insurance cost so much that I would have lost a third of my small salary to insurance premiums. Kevin was uninsured, but I was able to use Florida’s Kid Care program to provide low-cost benefits for the twins. Medicaid had to help us cover his trauma center care.

Kevin was healing and we were all looking forward to better days when a Wednesday night trip that the twins and I had taken regularly ended tragically on September 17. I made a left turn into a shopping center to pick up some items at the market when a Jeep came out of the darkness and broadsided us. Ethan, our boy twin, and I walked out of the car, but our girl twin, Tally, was unconscious.

Another member of our family took a helicopter ride to the same trauma center where Kevin had been received about two months before. I won’t describe the horror of that night for our family because this blog will be inadequate to express what happened, but Ethan and I were on emergency room gurneys with minor seat-belt contussions when we found out that our daughter was in critical condition with a traumatic brain injury, eight broken ribs, collapsed lungs and three pelvic fractures.

She was unconscious and a bolt drilled into her skull was monitoring the swelling in her brain. A trauma crew was trying to save her life as the swelling threatened to become so severe that surgery to relieve the pressure seemed to be a possibility. Those moments as our daughter was wheeled to All Children’s, the pediatric hospital attached to the trauma center, are still unreal. A respirator was keeping her alive and the pressure measured by the bolt seemed dangerously high.

For the next 10 days, I lived in our daughter’s hospital room in the pediatric intensive care unit. I slept on a fold-out chair, I bathed in a sink or sneaked a quick rinse in an area reserved for patients. Our daughter remained in a coma for more than five weeks and was then transferred to a pediatric rehab hospital for another five weeks as she relearned how to talk, walk, write, brush her hair and come to terms with her injury. My writing project became updating friends and family via a daily blog that outlined her care and her struggles. A nurse working on the night shift during our daughter’s darkest days in pediatric intensive care suggested the CarePages blog as a way to update others, but it also became a way for me to work out my feelings of grief by writing.

Tally’s traumatic brain injury has changed our lives. Her personality has been altered tremendously: the driven perfectionist who was ranked first in her grade at school is now trying to remain at grade level in homebound school and a deep spiritual glow surrounds her. She uses our phone to dial into her classes from the kitchen table and does the work while she’s guided by a teacher on the other end. Tally walks slower, talks in a very low voice without much expression and has very little short-term memory. Still, she’s alive and she’s with us at home.

God was all over her recovery, which I’ll detail at another time. Suffice it to say that she opened her eyes for the first time on the 90th anniversary of Padre Pio’s gift of the stigmata and the 40th anniversary of his having been healed of the same stigmata. When our daughter was well enough to describe what her weeks in a coma had been like, she said we woke to angels hovering over her telling her they loved her. She’s very sure of what she saw and how she opened her eyes to see her big brother sitting near her.

Tally came home for the first time on November 25, just two days before Thanksgiving. We still don’t know what her traumatic brain injury will mean in terms of her schooling, her self-management and her health. Doctors are telling us they’ll know more a year out from September 17. Many wonderful people have told us about children and young people who survived similar injuries and are living fruitful lives now once they were able to make adjustments. Personality changes and short-term memory loss are very common for these patients.

We have been in prayer since July as Kevin and Tally have suffered and recovered. God has been with us in a real way thoughout our ordeals. As the one-year mark of this blog nears, we are still a family struggling with the aftermath of several major tragedies in the span of a single year.

In the span of 12 months, we have had people that we don’t even know praying for us. Internet peace community friends of my husband’s in other states and nations have sent their prayers and vibes. Churches we don’t belong to have prayed for Tally’s recovery. This Thanksgiving, we all felt grateful for their presence in our lives.

As Christmas nears, we are filled with love and thankfulness that Kevin and Tally are with us. If we could have been grateful for everything every year, we would have been farther along on our spiritual path already. It seems that none of us thinks about what we already have before we wish for what we don’t really need.

Losing my job, my benefits and my retirement was just water under the bridge. The prospect of losing my husband and my youngest daughter were far more serious. It’s been a year of tears, desperation, grief, thankfulness and spiritual growth.

May 2009 find us wiser and more grateful as we journey toward spiritual enlightenment. God has us in His palm even when we think all is lost. Our family has learned that the hard way this year and, while the road seemed very dark at times, He was always with us. Because of our sufferings, we have been kissed by God.