#spending a solid 111 hours on this painting.

[conscydraws]

It's finished. My 111 hours long lovesong dedicated to Jusant ~💕

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

Penance at Discharge (Post 111) 10-14-15

                        Last Wednesday evening I traveled from work in Youngstown to Cleveland to pick up Stephen and take him home after the completion of his week of testing for epilepsy.  I decided to work the full day and arrive at around 5 PM because I believe I had previously tried every conceivable pick-up time at John Muir Medical Center and a dozen other hospitals and have always still found the hospital staff woefully unprepared to discharge either Pam, Nick, Abby, Stephen or Natalie on almost every single occasion.  Because I spend my professional life using Lean Manufacturing tools to carve minutes and seconds out of processes to achieve savings, unnecessary hospital discharge delays always grate on my nerves. Luckily, in a former life, decades ago, I wore the uniform of our country and am hardwired to tolerate circumstances where a “hurry up and wait “outcome is assured.

Upon arrival in Stephen’s room, I was greeted by mysteriously mixed signals.  Stephen was already garbed in sweatshirt, sweatpants and sneakers like he was ready to head home, but he still had an IV visible on his hand.  Usually when a person is being discharged after a serious illness, removing the IV is nearly the last precautionary order of business.  Stephen, though, had checked in for testing in a relatively healthy state and had not had any unexpected issues during the tests.  His nurse soon arrived to dispel my confusion; he let me know that Stephen would be ready for discharge immediately after completing an MRI, for which he had waited all day.  Evidently, University Hospital’s policy is to assign the highest daytime priority for MRI, CT, Ultrasound and probably every other possible test service to outpatients, because, theoretically, inpatients can stay all night.  We left the hospital about three hours later at 8 PM. Not the most customer pleasing denouement to our visit, but otherwise Stephen was treated very well.

If I were a cradle Catholic, I probably would have remembered to offer up the entire experience, but, in actuality, Stephen’s hospital room was equipped with a passable selection of cable television channels so I think I passed the time treating my senses to an electronic barrage following the entertainment fasting conditions we have been living under since we moved out of my parent’s house.  I can’t remember what I watched.  Maybe I didn’t watch television at all and instead scrolled through Facebook, but I don’t think I could have whiled away three solid hours weaving through all the pages of what my friends have posted.  Usually I can only take so much Facebook as the recycled memes are often very repetitive.  Also I have a number of Libertarian, atheist and Pro-Choice friends that rake my scrolling sensibilities with morally questionable material or untruths that I generally try to identify and pass by like the doggie deposits that Natalie’s pets have peppered across my lawn – mowing my lawn is somewhat like hopscotch. For instance, I am friends with one of my high school football coaches, with whom I seem to agree and am able to “like” for less than ten percent of his posts. Luckily he has children and grandchildren, but I digress.

By Thursday morning I had largely forgotten the ordeal of disembarking from UH the previous evening. Natalie and I shared a last breakfast together as I planned to return to my regular morning schedule of 3 AM reveilles and 4 AM departures on Friday morning.  The work day proceeded and ended without significant event as I prepared notes and outlines for a leadership course that I intend to teach for supervisors this week upcoming.  At the end of my shift I felt quite relieved to be headed on only an hour commute home to Streetsboro instead of orbiting onward for an extra forty five minutes north eastward through Cleveland and only back to our cozy two-story after visiting Stephen. Normality seemed an alluring flavor after a week of passing time in extra driving and all too familiar clinical surroundings.

My phone buzzed as I was pulling into a gas station to top off my tank near the on-ramp of I-76, my tollless thoroughfare of choice from the Eastern border towards north central Ohio. I thought it would be a receptionist calling to provide information for Stephen’s follow-up appointment, but instead I recognized the heavy accent of my son’s neurologist who was calling to provide the results from the forgotten MRI.  I made her give me the date and time for the follow-up appointment first as we were both surprised that no scheduling information had been provided at discharge.  She then let me know that they had found something abnormal on Stephen’s MRI.  It was a sunny afternoon, but my soul seemed to darken with her words.

There was an unusual but small spot on his scan, that hadn’t activated with contrast so she thought it was unlikely to be cancer.  I asked clarifying questions with the concerned detachment of a person used to the responsibility of interpreting medical information for others including the patient.  The spot was not in the vicinity of the locus of Stephen’s epileptic activity as determined by a PET scan during his hospital stay.  The spot was being termed an “incidental finding” to be monitored by a follow-up MRI before Stephen’s next neurology visit in November.  The spot was consistent with the lesions often found in the brains of people who suffer from migraine headaches.  Stephen doesn’t get migraines.  The phone call ended and I resumed my drive.

As I drove, I slipped back into long practiced habits.  I finished my Divine Mercy Chaplet for the afternoon and offered a few extra prayers accepting whatever the overall outcome might be but also with hope that Stephen’s continued bad health not lead us down the cancer trail into a terminal cul-de-sac.  Then I picked up the phone and gave Pam’s mother the first call as I drove.  It is not the type of phone call that I relish making, but I prefer to give correct and realistic information directly to Barb rather than have her hear half-information from second-hand sources. I called my brother Sean next because I’ve found that giving several key people complete information is much better than giving lots of people partial information.  I called Abby as well and repeated almost verbatim what I had told Sean and Barbara.

I knew that none of them would splash the news onto Facebook, but all would be able to provide clarification once the news did hit social media.  Everything eventually ends up on Facebook.  Nicholas, unfortunately, found out that his mother had died via social media while he was on break at Straw Hat.  I hadn’t considered that possibility when I informed several family members of Pam’s death, but chose not to tell Nicholas for safety reasons. I didn’t want him driving home in a condition where he couldn’t pay attention.  I have since remembered to consider the possibility of a Facebook spill with sensitive information.

By that time I had arrived my parent’s house to pick up Natalie.  (The bus drops her off there in case I am held up at work.)  I let my parents know about the spot on Stephen’s MRI face-to-face.  That is my preference for difficult news, but personal conversations are not always possible once the pebble has dropped into the pool in our information age.  With both sets of grandparents dutifully briefed, I drove the couple of miles remaining through Streetsboro boulevards and avenues so that I could pass the bad news to Stephen.  I expected that he would have questions.  My son is in a much better place now with regard to paranoia, but I remember some very bad times with him after Pam’s death.

Instead Stephen smiled at the news and asked me why I didn’t remember watching Nicola Tesla.  At first I thought he was talking gibberish, but after several minutes of further conversation, I realized that Stephen had remembered a forgotten incident from a decade previous back when we lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  

A bi-polar child misdiagnosed as hyper-active, Stephen’s made a long promenade through various unsuccessful treatment plans until eventually a doctor decided that Stephen needed a brain MRI.  In preparation for the scan Stephen had to stay up all night the day previous to his test. I stayed up with him.  At about 4 AM we ended up watching a long documentary about the imminently brilliant and simultaneously wacked-out physicist Nicola Tesla.  I had totally forgotten about the entire experience.  Nothing to help Stephen’s condition was found by the MRI, but Stephen did remember being petrified by the discovery of an “incidental finding” of a spot on his brain that was not immediately dangerous but should be monitored in the future.  I guess I forgot to do so.

I spent the next half an hour reeling back in the thread of incomplete information that I had earlier cast out.  It made me chuckle to have finally found the missing bookend of experience to complete the short-lived horror from all those years ago.  An incident that had appeared to be random and pointlessly scary until its import made its comet-like return to my solar system at a time so remote that only my most distracted son remembered the original occurrence. Because there is a God, I know that everything in my life has a purpose and a reason even when the mosaic of occurrences appears too close to be deciphered from my vantage point.

Unhappily, I was reminded that life can be hard to understand in a different way on Sunday. A 16 year-old daughter of a good friend from my youth died unexpectedly from a brain hemorrhage at Saturday field hockey practice at a high school in New England. I could see no purpose to the death of a young girl within a close proximity to her teammates.  I have seen the impact of that type of situation on servicemen and can’t fathom how a bunch of young women will suffer the impact of witnessing the loss of a friend in those circumstances.  Unfortunately, my imagination is probably sufficient to paint the details of the scene in my head if I try to do so:  a teary-eyed teammate sprinting for help, an adult coach working to revive or fix something in a little girl’s body that cannot be repaired, a collapsed collection of sobbing teenagers left at the scene after the ambulance has departed.  I can make no sense of what has become of the poor girl’s short and seemingly glorious years – she tutored underprivileged kids.

While there is a Mass card for her waiting for pickup in my mailbox, I have no adequate words to send to her teammates or family.  Yet I do know that flowers of love will sprout from the death of Casey Dunne in Braintree, Massachusetts just as good things have come from Pam’s death years removed and a continent away.  That does not mean that I am happy to have lost my wife, Barb’s daughter and the mother of my children.  I accept the experience and understand that good was achieved through God’s plan. While I am very happy that it does not look like Stephen will need a craniotomy, I am no longer naive enough to believe that Pam’s death was the last tragedy that I will experience. I do know that I will accept what comes and trust in God’s goodness even when my human understanding is insufficient to grasp the providence of a horrifying situation.

[eduardowarman3-blog]

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