Smelling the Roses

This afternoon I was walking with Anna from the common area at RMH to our apartment (about 150ft). As I so often am, I was focused on getting where I was going - it was dinner time after all and I was hungry. Anna, on the other hand, was not. Before we had gone 10 feet, she saw a bee buzzing around a bush. She immediately pointed it out, said, "bee!", and made sure I was watching it. We watched it for several minutes before it flew off and we moved on. Our next stop involved an odd looking bush along the path. Anna stopped to look at it and I tried to encourage her to keep moving. She grabbed my hand and pulled me back to the bush. She then sat down next to it and motioned for me to sit down next to her. I sat and she told me all about it. I again tried to get us moving back to the room for dinner when leading off the main path were five stone steps in a patch of gravel that led to a picnic table. Anna showed me how to walk across these steps and we went back and forth at least two dozen times. A large arrangement of wild flowers was the next thing along our path. Anna showed me how to smell every one of them and told me their colors. We were then able to proceed to the room.

Had I had my way, we would have been back to the room in two minutes. Instead, I got to go on a 15 minute journey of discovery with my daughter and still made it in time for dinner. There's probably a deeper lesson in here about making the most of the journey instead of just focusing on the end. The end will come.

I got to have a long chat with the neuro nurse practitioner (I may have made that title up) today regarding the latest on David's brain. He is still not draining fluid on his own and we won't know for one to three months if he will need a shunt put in. If that happens, we will have to move hospitals as that is a complicated surgery and will require more specialized care than they can give here. She said the left side of his brain isn't looking too bad but he has a massive amount of damage to the right side as a result of the bleeding. The damage is such that she says they can already tell (since brain tissue doesn't heal) he will have loss of motor function to the left side of his body - mainly his left arm and left leg. As far as higher brain functions go, we probably will not know anything until he is around nine months old and they do an MRI to see how the brain development is progressing.

Hearing all this, I felt a should be a mess inside but instead, I found myself at peace. I thank God that he has my little David in his hands - his whole life already planned. I continue to pray for a complete miracle healing for David. Please continue to pray for restoration for David, peace and strength for Crystal and I, and for Anna - that she would continue to grow and adjust to the craziness of her life right now.

Joel