All is well

Such have been the themes of my heart for the last four weeks and change.

Yesterday we got our answers, for that’s when we loaded the tribe in the BMV (Blue Mommy Van), tossing in Oreos and movies behind them.  Clambering in with my backpack and white mocha (oh, there’s a delicious story behind that one), we set off, heading south for the state capitol, rolling past greening roadsides and budding foliage.

For weeks, we’d lived with uncertainty.  (If you’re new to the blog, you can read the story here.)  And for weeks, the house had been quiet without the typical wrestling and hollering and thundering of feet that houses with boys just have.  And now…what?  What would the doctor find?

Having a vivid imagination isn’t always a blessing.  Give me a “what if,” and in 60 seconds flat, this girl can have the worst case scenario written, edited, proofed, and printed.  In color.  Which is not good.  And four weeks gave me plenty of time to run the possibilities, to imagine a future with heart disease, and to conjure up 437 reasons for anxiety.  Knowing that a first-degree relative of my mother’s dropped over dead from the disease we wanted to rule out did not ease my concerns, I can tell you now.

It was a strange feeling, for sure, to pull into the parking lot and to see the brick building towering just there with these words on the front, “Riley Hospital for Children,” and to know that we weren’t there to visit and pray over someone else’s child.  We were there with ours.  It’s hard to explain the things that go through your mind when you walk by those little red wagons and you know that those are there for kids with cancer and toddlers with rare diseases and children who are mortally ill.  And you’re there with yours to see a heart doctor on the fourth floor…

With an appointment time of 12:45, it was just a hair past 1:00 when they called us back.  Boy Two and Boy Four were peacefully occupied in the waiting room and simply nodded when we left.  A nurse, just doing her job, took his height, weight, and blood pressure. Do you know that this day, this ordinary day of work for you, may not be so normal for us…? 

She took us back, then, through ever-long hallways to an exam room in the very back.  And there he came, that doctor with the foreign accent (I’m thinking German?), smiling wide, shaking hands, and boom-bam-bing, in mere moments, he was leading us right next door for an echocardiogram on the spot.

For a cardiology transcriptionst who’s typed thousands of reports for heart patients, it was riveting.  The same test I’d heard dictated over and over again was being performed before my very eyes.  There on the screen was the heart of our boy, beating away. 

Throughout the procedure, Dr. Schamburger talked to us, pointing to the images on the monitor.  There they were!  The septum, measuring beautifully.  The ventricles; the atrial chamber; the mitral, tricuspid, aortic, and pulmonary arteries; and then a four-chamber view with all four pulsing in their normal, God-breathed rhythm. 

He turned on the color, and we watched the blood flow through his heart.  We watched that critical muscle throbbing, pumping, contracting in that tiny room, and we gave thanks.

Then came a short exam.  He listened to K’s heart in every conceivable position and asked us a bunch of questions.  Next was an EKG by a lovely girl named Pria, “because it will show me things I can’t hear,” and then a reading of it with a final report by Dr. S.

And that was it.  In 30 minutes on the dot, we were walking out, a Mt. Everest-sized burden lifted, prayers answered, and restrictions lifted (or “lefted behind” – thanks, AL) with hallelujahs on our lips. 

Later on after we’d returned home safely, I knelt down there in my house beside the basket of clothes I was preparing to fold and gave thanks.  “Thank You,” I whispered to the Blessed Controller of All Things, “that You said ‘yes’ and didn’t ask us to walk that road this time.  Thank You.” 

Outside, right there before the barn, three boys and their father were celebrating with thanks in their own way.  I looked out the back room window to see that harbinger of spring, that bouncing circle of delight (the trampoline) being erected piece by piece by piece.  And I gave thanks again.

Let the chasing begin!  Let the jumping start!  Let the yard games commence, for all is well and all will be well!

Time is short today, or I would talk to you about the lessons we learned and what He’s been speaking to mylistening heart.  I still have questions, but until then, let me just thank you most sincerely from the bottom of my grateful, relieved heart for all the prayers you’ve offered, the hard work of intercession that you did, and your loving thoughts and comments. He heard them, and they mattered.