While I Was Away

The last two days have wiped me out, to the point where I am electric with emotion.

As soon as James told me over the phone earlier this week, I'll be there, I felt a huge sense of relief. It meant I was going to have help getting Parker moved, getting him home from the hospital, getting myself moved out of the League House, getting Parker's variety of medications purchased and organized, getting the wheelchair, handling the shockingly disappointing insurance issues, scheduling the multitude of doctor appointments for next week ~ I would have help with all of it. He would be here to hold my hand through the entire process.

But James left this afternoon and I realized as we got closer to the airport, I am homesick. I am so ready for Parker to be well so I can pack up and leave myself.

It feels wrong, somehow, to say that. I am incredibly grateful my son is alive. There were so many agonizing days when I thought I'd be spending this summer in mourning. But I am so done with this whole thing. Sleeping on a foam covered table in his hospital room, out of habit listening to every breath he made ~ even in my sleep ~ running to the League House for an hour or two each day to shower and wash clothes, the only fresh air for my lungs inhaled while racing between the hospital and the parking garage. The constant worry, the total focus of my existence on a singular being, and the feeling ~ although inaccurate ~ that I alone was responsible for keeping my child alive.

These are the kinds of things that happen to you when you spend four months next to your child's hospital bed. You go a little nutso. Everything is out of context. People say things and you take them the wrong way, and can't understand later why you didn't get it. You talk only of the child who now lives, but almost left you. Everything is focused on that one thing, as if your life, too, depends on it.

And then it is over and you look around and think, Wow, the world kept right on rolling on without me while I was gone. I'm embarrassed to say, I don't even know what kind of President Obama is turning out to be, or what kind of dog his kids got. I know Michael Jackson died and Fedderer beat Andy Roddick in the finals at Wimbledon, but I don't know what the guy in North Korea has been up to, or which of my nieces and nephews birthdays I missed. I've been gone. For four months, my world has been about one thing, and one thing only. Keeping Parker alive.

We did it. He's alive and right now sitting on his couch playing some kind of video game. He has been emotional and cranky, but my friend tells me, Given everything he's been through, I'm surprised he's not a cranky, pouty, spoiled brat all the time. Tomorrow we go to the Wound Care Guru, Dr. Cervantes. Parker wants to see what she says about his going back and having the skin graft surgery the end of this week. He is so tired of everything and he, too, wants his life back. The trach bothers him a lot now and the lung docs won't take it out until the skin graft is done.

Also this week we have appointments with his internist (who has probably spent the weekend reading everything the hospital sent him about Parker's lengthy admission), the physical therapy group, his surgeon and I think he is also supposed to see the lung doctors, but I can't remember for sure. He has to go for wound care and PT every day. Ugh. It's still 105 degrees here.

But the good news is he wants to get everything done asap and get back to his old life as quickly as possible, too. I'm sure he will forgive me for wanting the same.

My friend asked me to compile a wish list of what we need. She meant for Parker, for his new apartment, his new healthy living lifestyle, since he had nothing before the hospital. But every time I think about her saying that, the overly exhausted, post traumatic stress part of my mind teases me and I think, Okay, what I need (and of course things are turning now and it can once again be all about me!), what I need is a week in Bay Head with my parents to sit on the beach and cry, followed by a week at TriangleX in WY to ride along the Snake River, in the shadow of the Tetons, and cry the rest of it out on horseback. Then I need to go home and begin my life again.

That's quite a wish list! :-) So I bought a lottery ticket today.