CARETAKING A LOVED ONE'S ILLNESS

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness...it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."  -- Virginia Woolf

                  ILLNESS

                   By  Claire Wright Stanard

      I had dared to take a breather from the demands of single parenthood after nineteen years.  My twenty-one year old son had just completed his junior year in college and was spending the summer working for his father in another city.  Experiencing a forgotten luxury, I began focusing attention on my own life by re-marrying and relaxing into fanciful freedom.   Then, the telephone rang and my life was forever changed.

       “Your son has been blown up by two car bombs and is not expected to live….you need to get up here immediately,” the doctor recited officiously.  He then rushed back to the operating room to continue removing shrapnel and debriding the extensive burns which had ravaged my son’s body down to the bone.  Having no further information, I immediately rushed into flight and fight mode, removing any shrapnel of fear from my mind and debriding all thoughts of my son’s possible demise.  The ‘obdurate oak’ emerged, shadowing any weeping willow.   Since there was no file in my head capable of assimilating this inconceivable disaster, I armed my heart and soul for war.

        Upon first seeing my son in the ICU, swollen into one giant, gauze-wrapped blister  with over twenty-eight tubes jutting out of every mummy fold and orifice, I wilted with a faint.  When I ‘came to’ (though I never truly ‘came to’) the battle began, and I became invincible.  Thus, began five years of dragging my son through one battlefield to another, all filled with the land mines of certain death.  The battle was for survival against bacteria, pain, infections, pneumonia, seventy- eight skin graft operations, medication overdose, medical negligence, and hopelessness.   I pushed my son to keep moving, though his doctors insisted he would never walk again.

         Eighteen hours a day of tending to my son’s every need, witnessing his unbearable pain and screams for relief, bolstering his mustard seed of faith, and advocating for his medical care:  the demands of intensive caretaking of a loved one were relentless.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, my soul was slowly being chipped away by the impactful stresses of the fight for survival.  My soul was permanently scarred.

  

        The world shrinks in the face of illness.  One room became a metroplex of  procedures, a temple of prayer, and a chamber of horrors.  One hallway became a mountain to conquer, a road to success, and a bridge of support.  The hospital was the entire world, and the nurses were our best friends.  The doctors were saviors, as well as  enemies to distrust.  Moments of quiet and painlessness became God’s greatest gifts.  My heart was like a frozen tundra – a desert devoid of feelings.  Adrenaline poured into my brain like a constant drip of energy.  Each day was the same day, a new day, a day of setbacks and a day of possibilities.

      And, finally, one day there was recovery.  And the next day there was collapse.  The tundra had been flooded by a tsunami.  There was no room in my heart to absorb so many feelings.  I was drowning and another fight for survival had just begun.