Of Patients and Patience

He leaned on the foot of the crib, watching Julianna while he talked to me, just as he has for the last…well, I think it’s six days now (it’s all running together)… explaining why he had ordered the nurses to slow the process of weaning Julianna off dobutamine, and thus keep us in the ICU for another 36 hours. I sighed and nodded resignation, and he turned kind eyes on me. “Thank you guys for being so patient through all of this,” he said.

“W-well,” I stammered, wondering if my lack of patience was broadcasting clearly enough that he was reacting to it, or if I’m just a good enough actress to make him think I actually am patient. “Umm…thank you for everything you’re doing for her.”

Our family has now dealt with eight hospital admissions/stays in four years, beginning with the birth of Alex in 2005. Luckily, most of them have been relatively short and easy to predict: three C-sections (4 days), a burn treatment (outpatient), heart surgery (4 days) and an overnight for croup. It’s just Julianna’s two major illnesses that have stretched on and on, the ground constantly shifting beneath our feet, so that we can’t plan our life. And let’s face it, Christian and Kate Basi really do plan everything.

Time in a hospital is a very amorphous thing. You spend most of it waiting—waiting for the doctor to come in, or the other doctor to come in, or the results of the test to come back, or for the numbers to improve. Waiting for answers, especially to that most important question that no one can answer: “When do we get to go home?” For a few days, you can plan projects and be very productive, but after that, staring at the same four walls and the same beeping monitors numbs the brain. The hours slide by from one meal to the next, and despite being hyper-aware of the clock, you lose all track of the day of the week.

Being a patient (or a patient’s parent) requires patience. And a lot of it.

Until today, I never processed the double meaning of that word: patient. Right before Julianna turned the corner, I kept thinking, “What am I doing wrong here? Am I not praying hard enough? Am I using the wrong words? For goodness’ sake, we have the entire city of Columbia praying for her, and multitudes outside it as well. If that doesn’t qualify us for speedy recovery, what does?”

Now, having sat through Julianna’s second life-threatening illness, I realize that the first was no fluke. When she gets sick—not cold sick, but really sick, I mean—we’ve just got to expect that recovery is going to take twice as long as it ought to. Chances are, it’s in the chromosomes. Her RSV stay was ten days. This one is ten days and counting. I guess we just have to brace for that, and pray that she’s about through that age where kids get life-threatening illnesses.

Well, in any case, we expect to be moved out of the ICU sometime this afternoon. On to Phase II of the hospital stay. Please God, it won’t be very long!