I’ve gone through three life altering moments in my life. By life altering I mean facing the thin veil between life and death feeling as though I could reach my hand out and touch it if I only extended my fingers ever so slightly.
The first was 2012 when after complaining of severe pain in my side when I was pregnant with my son (only to be essentially ignored by the resident doctor), I was diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive cancer caused by the pregnancy; stage 3/4. Side note – the pain was due to a tumour in my spleen, but I digress.
The second was when I was pregnant with my youngest and I was diagnosed with placenta percreta. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when the placenta grows right through the uterus and starts attaching to other organs. It’s extremely life threatening and I got the privilege of (weekly) being told the many ways I could spontaneously bleed out and die.
The third was by far the worst. My five week old premature son needed surgery to fix an inguinal hernia. He had been born 7 weeks early and weighed all of five pounds so we were super hesitant about it but it couldn’t be delayed. The surgery went well and he was supposed to be awake within the hour but after about 90 minutes they came back to tell us that he wasn’t waking up from the anesthesia and they were transferring him to intensive care.
It’s one thing to face a medical issue when it’s your own life in jeopardy. It’s quite another when it’s your child’s life.
My 9 year old son has been getting debilitating headaches/migraines for the last 3 years. Over the last year they’ve gotten worse and more frequent and he spends hours vomiting from the pain. In December I demanded that he be seen by someone else because despite what I had been continually told, I knew this was in no way normal.
He had an MRI on May 16th and they told us that the results would take two weeks. They called me a week later asking for blood work to be done ASAP and with an appointment to speak to a neurologist about his MRI results. Yikes. I haven’t been told what the results are because my doctor is out of town until next week.
I’ll be honest, this has been hard. It’s challenging to balance between fear and faith when it’s my child. I can distract myself with work, and family time, and creative outlets but in those quiet moments it’s all I think about. The what ifs can take over if I let them.
So this is me, showing up through the hard stuff. Showing up raw and vulnerably because I believe that when we do, it helps others not feel so alone. If you would keep my sweet Micah in your prayers, I’d sure appreciate it.
If you want to link arms with a community that holds each other up through the dark times, feel free to jump into my group here.
P.S. Since I posted this blog my son is totally fine and hasn’t had a migraine in over a year!
