Holding Steady

(David's last day in the ICU)

David “graduated” from the ICU yesterday.  His new room on the regular hospital floor is very comfortable, but it has been a hard adjustment for me to have him in there with less intensive care than he has received up to this point.  There is no longer even a single screen in the room monitoring any of his numbers.  He is down to just his feeding tube and his PICC line (a fancy IV line).  He has scheduled visits from the nursing staff every 4 hours to check his vitals, and they come in between checks when they are called or if there is medication to give.  But nobody is watching him as closely as in the ICU.

I am glad the doctors think he is stable enough to move on, but it’s a little uncomfortable for me to not be able to see everything going on with his body in colorful waveforms and end-tail numbers on an LCD screen.  He also has not made any major advances neurologically and sleeps most of the time, even though he is down to just one kind of painkiller and some antibiotics.  When he is awake, he still does not speak or follow verbal commands.  He does indicate when he needs to go to the bathroom, and he did give me a high-five last night after I successfully read his cues and helped him pee in the little hand-held urinal.  And he has been more liberal with his smiles.  Agonizingly slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

After we were married David and I went on an extended honeymoon trip to Zimbabwe, a place that continues to call to me, to us, all the time.  While we were there we traveled to the mighty Zambezi River and went on a wild whitewater rafting tour.  I have the details of the trip written down elsewhere, but something that has come back to my mind during this week is the feeling of that moment we first pushed off into the current.

It was deliciously frightening and exhilarating and disconcerting all at once.  A feeling of complete surrender to the pull of the current.  A knowledge that there were no brakes on that raft, no stopping, no going back.  Only forward.  Forward into the rush and the rage of the whitewater, the surge and power of the magnificent, cold river.  A feeling of complete powerlessness, of smallness and weakness and lack of control.  True surrender.

On the river, it thrilled me to my core.  But the magnitude of the current I am now being swept into dwarfs the Zambezi into shame.  Part of me continues to try to cling, to claw my way back to where we started.  But my hands rake through the water and find no purchase.  There is no stopping, no way back.  I am carried inexorably forward, clinging to the unstable little raft of my faith, my hope and trying desperately to guide my little family into and through the huge gaping maw of this rapid we are entering.  To say I am terrified doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel.  

I am doing my best to face forward.  To trust in the things I have been promised in blessings, and in the knowledge of the great, over-arching plan of our Creator.  But it is the struggle of my lifetime to surrender to this, to navigate it and to hold steady to the course, believing that He knows the end from the beginning, when I certainly do not.