A Roller-Coaster Week

As they say, life is a roller coaster ride, and I feel like I’ve had the ride of a lifetime this week.

At work, we landed one of the most important orders in our company’s history.  It will be a huge challenge, with tight deadlines and critical manufacturing deadlines, but it opens up a new relationship between our little company and one of the largest construction and engineering companies in the world.

Then as the week progressed, we truly thought we were going to lose a dear friend of ours to a vicious blood infection and subsequent sepsis.  Days passed as we watched Lisa struggle.  It looked like there was nothing the doctors could to do save her.

Monday was incredible, as I got to be with Alycia and Aaron just minutes after the birth of Nolan Rhuel Taylor, our second grandchild.  I arrived in the delivery room just in time to see my beautiful daughter holding her new son in her arms.  It was amazing to watch the immediate bond between the two of them – how he responded to her voice, how he looked straight into her eyes, knowing that he was safely in the arms of his Mommy.

Then a few minutes later, the medical team whisked baby Nolan away to the Pediatric Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit, to begin the process of defining and correcting a serious and rare congenital heart defect.  While we were all awestruck by his perfect body, ten toes, ten fingers, blonde hair, dark blue eyes, and his round and beautiful face, our joy was overshadowed by the knowledge that within a few days, surgeons would have to open up this perfect, tiny little body to try to save his life with open-heart surgery.

The ups and downs of the week continued.  Nolan thrived.  We watched the most incredible group of doctors, nurses and technicians take care of him.  He looked so healthy and strong that we had to constantly remind ourselves why he was in the pediatric CVICU.  We were all ready to just take him home!

Lisa’s condition worsened.  In my conversations with Kenny, we even talked about the circle of life…birth and death.  I thought more than once about how some life circles could be really big and full, while some could be really small and unfilled.

What would we have done without Margo this week?  She definitely provided the joyful peaks to offset the valleys of heartache.  As she stayed at our house through the week, we talked to her about her new baby brother.  I really think she understood fully where Mommy and Daddy were, and what they were doing.  I’ll never forget Tuesday morning when she first met her new baby brother in the hospital.  She gently touched his head and toes, talked to him in words only she (and perhaps he?) could understand, and then offered up her prized Donald Duck stuffed toy to him, which the nurses promptly put into his incubator beside him.  I’ll also never forget how she proudly told strangers on the elevator about her new brother, showing them pictures of him on her mommy’s cellphone.  I’m not sure they totally understood what she was saying, but I sure did!

Through the week, we waited as the doctors monitored the natural closure of an opening in Nolan’s heart, and to let him eat and stabilize somewhat, prior to the upcoming surgery.  One can never prepare fully for such a major ordeal as open-heart surgery to be inflicted on a newborn, but I was amazed how Alycia and Aaron had studied the defect and educated themselves about it.  At the same time, my heart broke for them as they prepared themselves for the inevitable.  It seemed so unfair that such a beautiful and healthy baby, perfect in every other way, should have to go through such a terrible ordeal, so early in his life.

Late Wednesday, the decision was made to put our friend Lisa on dialysis.  While this decision could very well have jeopardized the function of a kidney she received by transplant over 10 years ago, it seemed like the only option to help her recover.  After 4 hours of dialysis Wednesday night and another session on Thursday, Lisa turned the corner and now appears to be headed for full recovery…a definite peak of joy on this roller coaster ride.

The ride continued on Friday, with Nolan’s surgery finally happening.  Thursday night, Aaron shared some touching photos of the baby with his eyes open.  It was the first time he had held his eyes open for very long.  As he stared at his mommy and daddy for 30 minutes or more, it was as if he was saying, “Don’t worry Mom and Dad, I’ve got this!  I’m strong!  I’ll be OK!”  I have to believe he simply wanted to connect to them before his big day.

Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston’s Texas Medical Center is an absolutely amazing place.  Like so many others in need of specialized neonatal intensive care, we were so blessed by being there in that facility, with those amazing medical experts looking after this baby.  In the waiting room, there were families there from Oklahoma, Waco, and Louisiana.  Invariably, people said they were there because it was the best place in the world for infant cardiac care.  God’s Miracles happen in that place, everyday.

We learned that children who come there for treatment of cardiac conditions are patients for life.  Infants and children who have had cardiac surgery at TCH are invited to come back each year for a check-up and monitoring.  As we waited during the surgery, we met a 17-year-old young man who was there for his annual checkup.  He had had three heart surgeries when he was a child, the first at 9 days old.  He was good-looking, healthy and strong.  His mom told us his life story, which was inspiring.  God wanted us to hear his particular story, at that particular time.  We needed to hear it!  Alycia asked him what he was doing now, and he answered that he was a college student, studying biology.  He wants to go to medical school.  He wants to become a cardiologist.

God heard a chorus of prayers this week for baby Nolan.  Friends and family members from all over have been lifting him up for God’s attention.  From Houston to Montgomery to Tyler, all over Texas, to Missouri, even from Brazil, God has heard our prayers for this child.  I believe that prayer matters in situations like this, and I’m so grateful.

Our week ended on a high point.  The surgery to repair Nolan’s heart was successful, and the surgeons were extremely pleased with the outcome and the prognosis for his future.  As the surgeon talked to us in the conference room, I looked down at his two hands, and thanked God for the miracle He had enabled through that doctor and those magnificent hands.  We all are feeling so blessed, and so very grateful.

Late Friday, as I stepped quietly into the room full of beeping monitors, pumps and equipment, I was in awe as I looked at him.  My jaw dropped, my eyes filled.  I watched his tiny body breathing rhythmically, a giant pad taped over his broken breastbone, with at least a dozen tubes, probes and monitoring devices attached to him.  Then I looked at the stable numbers and the colorful graphs as they smoothly ran across the bank of monitors.  A different picture than before.   I watched the medical team as they calmly checked the various data inputs and prepared for days of constant monitoring and care.  I watched a loving father lean down and whisper sweet words of encouragement to his struggling son.  I thought about how strong this boy will surely be, having gone through all this.  I thought about how this was just the beginning of his own roller coaster ride that will define his journey through life.  I thought about what it will be like when I take him and his Dad to an Astros game.

As my Brazilian friend always says in his struggling English, “Thanks God!”

“With peaks of joy and valleys of heartache, life is a roller coaster ride that’s both scary and exciting at the same time, the rise and fall of which defines our journey.”
– Sebastian