Hope Hopscotching

it's quite fascinating. i realized today that for the last week-ish my emotions have kind of paralleled the emotions i was having that correlating date three years ago. like i really am re-living the whole experience. still present and aware of what's going on here and now obviously, but memories flood back of where i was when, inevitability bringing my emotions along with them. but in most cases my emotions don't even need to recall a cognitive memory to feel how i was feeling, my body just knows. it's automatic... the "going there."

here's an example to make my point. the last couple of days i've felt extra heavy (see yesterday's or the day before yesterday's post as to why that might be the case). but today i had a pretty good day. now there could be a number of reasons for this. (i don't know. like maybe a best friend babysitting my children for a couple hours?)... but in reflecting on what was happening on june 9, 2013 it sort of makes sense.

on this day our roller coaster ride sort of leveled out. like the part on splash mountain where you're just slowly cruising around watching the country bears dance.

noah was on his second day of ECMO and doing pretty much everything his care team were hoping he would do. oxygen sats were high. great urine output. he was the definition of stabilized.

it allowed us a moment to take a breath. to establish some type of routine. to regain that itty bitty ounce of control we thought we still had.

with each and every small victory thoughts like, "maybe he'll really be okay" would enter back into our minds. we'd hold a little extra confidence.

i remember coming in noah's room one time and the nurse was high-as-a-kite-excited that she suctioned a huge glob of phlegm out of noah's lungs. and because my hope for anything good was so sensitive, i latched on to that like it was his salvation. i literally remember all day thinking, "does this mean he'll get better? was that the issue all along?" 

sweet, clueless mccayla.

my heart tried so desperately to believe what it wanted to believe.

these small wins were of course wins. but the game wasn't over, we just happened to earn a couple runs that inning.

and if we could hardly keep straight what the hell was going on for ourselves, how were we expected to give updates to our out-of-town family? or respond to the loving text asking how's noah doing? ...not to mention how and what to share with the great masses on social media. looking back on it we had no way of truly communicating to anybody with any sort of accuracy what was happening or how noah was doing. or how we were doing. 

we could be speaking with someone in a pocket of time where we got a bit of good news from the doctor, so we were feeling good, leaving our loved one perhaps with the wrong impression. maybe, like us, they could, if just for a moment, forget or deny how unbelievably serious noah's condition really was. 

because no matter what wins happened that day, the facts were still facts. he still was on life support. they still didn't know for sure what was causing him to be so sick. he still was the most critically ill patient in the NICU at that time. (or so i was told by one of our nurses.)

but as i continue to process more of what happened those 13 days i go back and forth between being upset that we were given (or chose to embrace) false hope (because it feels like lies) and being grateful that there was hope at all, in whatever quantity, for whatever reason.

because hope saves. it saved, and continues to save, us.

over and over and over and over again we would get an email or visit or prayer that would carry us to the next moment. we survived those days in the hospital, like literally survived... i'm not trying to be dramatic... by hopscotching on hope. one to the next to the next. 

and i'm telling you, those dashes of hope almost always came at the exact moment we needed them most. i wish i could remember more specifics right now, but trust me on it.

i'll try to lace future posts with these hope lifelines because they were just that - lifelines. and an essential piece of noah's story because they were the undeniable ways God was present to us during that time. 

the rainbows that declared the promise, 

i will never leave you nor forsake you.