22 Weeks

July 4, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

I rarely dream, but quite vividly there were children in my dreams last night.  An 8-year-old named Wendy Daisy and her baby sister Emily.  I feel like it’s a recurring dream, like last night was the second episode.  Both times, I snuck into Wendy’s room at night and sat there praying for her and holding Emily until Wendy woke up, and then we talked a little before I put Emily in her crib and rushed out so their parents would not catch me, a total stranger, in their home.  They were so real, I thought about them on my bike ride to work.

Every few months comes a really bad day, traumatic in some way, like someone bleeding out all over the floor, or someone threatening suicide, or someone falling out of bed and dying suddenly.  I almost never cry.  But today I cried uncontrollably and for hours.

It started out insane and just got worse.  The computers were down because of a fire in the building where our server resides, so no one knew what was going on or could communicate very well.   When I arrived, one of my patient’s blood pressure was dropping and no one could get an IV in so we couldn’t do much to help her.  Somehow the controls on her bed had failed to work too, so I found her slanted with her head down- and stuck that way.  Thankfully, that’s where she needed to be with a low pressure, so I made sure she was ok (at least temporarily ok…) and dove right in to checking the other patients.

Down the hall, I began taking vitals on the next one.  She was 18 weeks along when she found out she was pregnant.   Young, and with too many other children, she wanted to get rid of the baby.  Some other health issues in the next few weeks caused her to come to the hospital, and that’s how I came to meet her.  I heard the story during report in the morning- how she had an appointment to take care of it in 4 days if she was stable and out of the hospital.  She slept through vitals, and for the rest of the morning seemed to be busy when I passed by, talking to the resident, the social worker, or on the phone.  The resident came out and said they were going to do an induction, a 3 day process.  I was sad, and told the resident so, but I didn’t really understand what they were planning to do, I was not familiar with the procedure.  I wanted to talk to the patient, make an attempt to talk her out of it, and I just assumed that when the craziness of the morning slowed down I would have an opportunity.  The problem was that it never slowed down.

When I went in to hang a new bag of her medication, the OB was with her, talking about tubal ligation.  She refused it.  During their conversation a transporter arrived to take her to Ultrasound.  He whisked her away as I hurried around doing innumerable other things for my other 3 patients: sent slanted-bed lady down to get an IV placed in her neck, gave antibiotics, paged Dr. twice, charted meds and pain re-assessments…ran around until I was ready to pass out from low blood sugar and left many more things unfinished to go downstairs for lunch.

It hit me when I sat down to eat, and the crying started.  A beautiful child possibly dying while I was sitting there eating yogurt…  I hadn’t had a chance to say anything, not a single thing.  22 weeks old.  My friend delivered a baby prematurely just a few weeks older than that and she is a happy thriving beautiful little girl now.  I would adopt a baby now, in an instant, as a single person, if it meant saving its life, and I hadn’t even had a chance to offer that.  I prayed that God would cover this baby with the blood of Jesus so that it could go to be with Him.  I wondered if it had already gone.

She returned from ultrasound just as her brother arrived with her oldest child, a darling little 6-year-old.  He smiled, shyly told me his name when I asked, and then sat quietly playing games on someone’s phone while his mom showered and I changed her sheets.  He did not know that 20 minutes before, she had chosen to have a tiny needle stuck into her tummy, straight into her baby’s heart, injecting a lethal dose of potassium.  Maybe he didn’t even know that he had another brother or sister.  Hopefully he will not have to be around when his mom delivers the dead baby in a day or two.

I still don’t know what to do with this.  After hours of crying I finally stopped to think and remember that God is sovreign: He numbers the hairs on our heads, He knows when a sparrow falls, He created this child and ordained its 22 weeks of life.  He is also good: He came into the world to proclaim the truth about Himself, to be killed- taking the penalty for every selfish thought, every action born out of people worshipping convenience and image and comfort more than Him, and then to rise again triumphing over death- a promise of the eternal life that He bought for us with His life.  I pray that this child will enjoy that, enjoy God, without knowing the sorrows of this broken world.  I pray for its mom too, that she will find hope, forgiveness, redemption by Jesus’ blood, so she can see her child again and know God.