Lindy Davidson

I had problems with the hospital food. I had many problems. Since I had been a long-term resident, the dietician told me I could write in requests on the menu as long as they met my strict diet guidelines. She told me what foods they always had in the kitchen so I could request them at any time. I started doing this, but apparently, the people in the kitchen were unable to understand my requests. One day I asked for a green leaf salad. I got a big styrofoam box of spinach leaves. One day I asked for a baked potato. I got three raw new potatoes. This kind of thing was very upsetting to me. I’m sure I was nowhere near mentally stable at this point, but I was railing against the unseen cafeteria food preparers. I plotted ways to get back at them. I considered going down there and stuffing raw potatoes in their mouths. Fortunately for them, I was under close supervision. And fortunately for me, I had kind nurses who worked hard to make sure I had something decent to eat at every meal.

The nurses were the great comfort of my hospitalization. Doctors are great, but they never hang around for very long. Nurses are the people who make or break a medical crisis. They are the mamas who cared for me when my mom couldn’t be around. I got to know most of the nurses on the high risk unit. We watched tv shows together, talked about their children, laughed about different things, spoke disparagingly about the cafeteria staff, we just hung out. One nurse in triage told me that she liked working triage because she didn’t have time to get attached to her patients. I came through triage every time I had an infusion, so we saw one another constantly. She told me when I left she would miss seeing me and that we’d have to go hang out by the pool or something. Sadly, we haven’t kept in touch. I think of her every time I look at the back of my left hand. I have a scar from an IV she gave me there, just one of many marks left from my hospital “residency.”

Scars are things that some people, especially women, try to cover. By the time I left the hospital, I looked like I’d been in a fight with a porcupine, and I had definitely lost. I still have scars from many of my IVs. I have scars on my belly from the troker, and I have the ultimate badge of honor for any mom, stretch marks. I thought I was going to be in the clear on the stretch marks. My belly didn’t have a single one. I felt this was only fair since I had so many other battle scars.  What I did not realize was that stretch marks are not limited to one’s belly.  Let’s just say those nasty things literally sneaked up behind me. Oh the joys of pregnancy.

The stretch marks only added more marks of the battle. My belly had been a pin cushion for two months, so I had pin-pricks all over it. Every time I had an infusion, I would get a shot of Terbutaline in my shoulder, which often left a bruise. Oh, and did I mention I have an Rh negative factor, so I got Rhogam shots in the rear after each infusion as well. The diabetic diagnosis meant I had my blood sugar checked 4 to 6 times a day, each time meant a prick in the finger. One would think I would stay as far away from needles as possible, but the hobby I spent the most time on in my last few weeks of hospitalization…quilting. I guess you could say I was a glutton for punishment.

Eight years later, I still have many of these marks, and I would never dream of trying to cover them or have them surgically “fixed.”  It would be like trying to erase the past, and although this was a difficult time, erasing it would be like erasing a part of me, or worse, erasing Will.  Scars only exist on the living.  If a wound kills, it doesn’t leave a scar.  A scar is a sign of healing.  People who are scarred have been changed by something difficult and are living life on the other side.  When the resurrected Jesus presents himself to His disciples, he shows them the nail marks in His hands.  If Jesus stands on the other side of death with scars, there must be great beauty in bearing a mark for the sake of another.

One problem with being in the hospital for a long time is that I lost track of the days. Every day was exactly like the day before. The only things that changed were the tv schedule and the menu. The hospital where I gave birth to Will had a menu that repeated itself every week, so if I was having succotash, it was Friday night. Needless to say, I didn’t like Friday night, but then again, I had an endless parade of food offerings to supplement the undesirable hospital fare. I was always marking days in my pregnancy and checking my charts to see how big Will should be and what developmental milestone he should have reached inside of me.  I remember a poster on the wall in my room that had footprints of babies at different ages of gestation.  It said something like, “Every day counts.”  In my pregnancy, I was marking the days, but as far as the rest of the world around me was concerned, it was as if time stood still.

After I’d spent a few weeks in the hospital in a private room, the nurse came in and told me I’d been upgraded to the private suite. Apparently, they gave the private suite to the person who had been on the floor the longest. Lucky me. It was nice because I had my own private shower and a refrigerator to expand my 7-Eleven stockpile. The room was slightly larger also.

I was in the big room when I reached 28 weeks. This is a magical number in every pregnancy because it is when they give the glucose challenge test to check for gestational diabetes. I failed the first test so they gave me another one. I had to drink this horrible sweet drink and then have my blood tested a little later to see if my body had processed all that sugar. Hospital lab schedules being what they are, they gave me the nasty drink at six o-clock in the morning. I drank it, rolled over and went back to sleep. I now believe that this was a big mistake. I failed the second test, just barely, but failure is failure so I was declared DIABETIC!!! (You should hear scary, horror-movie organ music right now.)

No more sugar for me. No more Krispy Kremes, no more Snickers, no more Tootsie Rolls, no more Little Debbie cakes, no more fun. About two hours after the declaration of horror, a friend of mine showed up with a massive cinnamon roll and a bowl of fruit. I had to fight back the tears. She felt really bad, but her other food offerings had always been met with great enthusiasm, so how could she have anticipated this?

The only thing worse than hospital food is diabetic hospital food. (Airplane food rivals hospital food, but airplanes go to fun places, so it doesn’t count.) Dr. Al-Malt cut me to 2000 calories a day. I tried to explain that this would shock my body and there was no way I could survive without my Krispy Kremes, but he was unshakable. Adam came in with a big bag and removed all the sweet treats from the premises. It was the meanest thing he ever did. I think I saw horns coming out of his head while he was stealing away with a nearly full package of Snickers.

Ok, so that last post was pretty heavy.  You can push the tissue box back for this one.  I’ll go easy on you here.

Although we were very much living “life in the deep”, it wasn’t all serious.  I’m a big proponent of well-timed levity, and where better than an operating room to “infuse” a little happy chatting?  (pun intended)  The infusions took 30 minutes to an hour, so there was plenty of time for conversation.  And what do you think the favorite topic of a starving pregnant woman would be?  You guessed it, food.

Before each infusion I was NPO, that meant I couldn’t eat. I hated those letters. They’d post a big sign on my door at midnight and the morning breakfast cart would just pass on by. So while the infusion was going on, I was thinking about what any sensible, pregnant, eating-for-sport, nothing-else-to-do woman would be: what I would eat when I got out of there! Dr. Al-Malt, Melissa, Dr. Ricketts, Adam and I would talk about our favorite area restaurants. Everyone knew I was partial to Krispy Kreme and Taqueria Quetzalcoatl (just say “TQ” in your head if, like me, while reading you get stuck on words you can’t pronounce even when you don’t have to because you are reading silently.) Sometimes there was talk of black beans, but I am not a fan, so I tried to steer those conversations back to spinach queso or donuts.  In short, we managed to spend about 5-10 hours of OR time talking about food. It was a masterful way of taking my mind off the needles pricking me in the belly.

Also about this time, there was an event going on just down the street from me that I was missing.  Of course, I was missing everything because I was a patient in the hospital, but this event was particularly significant, more significant than I realized at the time.  In February of 2002, about six weeks before I found out all of this trouble was occurring inside of me, I signed on to speak at a women’s retreat to be held in downtown Orlando for a church from Lakeland.  I had a couple of connections from seminary to this church and they had received my name as a speaking candidate for their retreat.  I was very excited to do it, and even when I found out there was trouble with my pregnancy, I was hopeful that I would be able to manage the retreat somehow.  It was only when they locked me up in the hospital that I let them know I would not, in fact, be able to speak.  (Something they had already figured out from my previous reports of trouble.)  My contacts at this church were Gretchen, Tammy, Susie, Kathy, Tricia, and Kacey.  Some girl named Luchrysta filled in for me at the retreat  And even after bailing on them, someone named Creigh sent me a sweet e-mail about how she had been praying for us.  I later got a card in the mail from the women’s organization of the denomination saying they were praying for us.  I remember the name “Lucia” was on that card.  These mostly anonymous women had been pulled into the gravitational pull of “Will’s story,” and they would all become much more closely related to me in the next few months and years.

The pictures I saw on the sonogram in the OR meant the world to me because while my belly was playing pin cushion for Dr. Al-Malt, my mind was taken up with Will. I rarely looked at what they were doing to me.  I stayed focused on the sonogram, but Adam saw it all. He is the strongest man I know. In one intense picture, he saw his son in peril and his wife in pain, and he could do nothing to fix it. But he did do much to soothe it. He prayed for me constantly. He held my hand through everything, literally. I squeezed his hand with every stick of the needle, and he bore it without complaint. He would tell me what was happening so I would be ready without having to watch. He absolutely took care of me. What he did was beyond support, it was more like life support, but for my soul.

One day Adam showed up in my hospital room with his guitar. Contrary to the perceptions of some, my husband does not sit around serenading me with romantic songs on a regular basis.  In fact, most of the songs I hear him sing are nonsensical lyrics to familiar tunes.  On this day, though, he had written a real song about our whirlwind experience of parenthood. He pulled out his guitar and began to sing to me. I wish you could hear the deep emotion yet unimaginable strength in his voice as he sang it. It’s dated May 3, 2002. These are the words:

I dreamt that I fell in the ocean,

And sank to the floor of the world.

The current was swift and the water so cold;

The silence so heavy I thought I’d implode.

How I wish it were only a dream;

I’d wake up on dry land with sun in my face,

But the torrent and waves sunk my ship to the bottom.

I must find a way to get out of this place.

There is life in the deep of the ocean:

There’s hope in the darkest and coldest of worlds.

In the wreckage of all who have fallen before,

Who didn’t see the peace for their suffering souls.

The wreckage is full of their stories,

The ones who looked to their own strength to survive.

They swam for the surface, groping for air,

Struggling somehow just to stay alive.

But the fish are so gnarled and unseemly,

Is life worth the living at all?

Remember the one all forsaken;

In the deep you can just hear his call.

There is life in the deep of the ocean;

There’s hope in the darkest and coldest of worlds.

In the wreckage of all who have fallen before,

Who didn’t see His peace for their suffering souls.

This was the first time either of us expressed a concept I now try to emphasize to anyone who begins to pity us.  What we have in our wacky little family is life.  We are living, not dying, and in that moment Adam put into words something that was very important for us to remember.  We weren’t alone in the deep, and knowing our Savior had forged the path ahead of us is what kept, as I tell my kids, our heads up and our feet down.