That's going to be my mantra for the next couple of days. On Monday I take our little one-year-old charmer down to the hospital for labs (oh yay!), x-rays, and pre-surgery physical. Then bright and early Tuesday morning, we take him back down for the first of a two-day process to restore his heart to "normal" working order.
The first day he will go into the cath lab, where they will thread catheters from the large (relatively speaking, since he's only 1 year old!) veins and arteries in his groin up to his heart. They will take the pictures they will need for the next day, and then they will insert little coils into a bunch of little vessels that his body grew in utero. He doesn't need them now, so these little coils will close the vessels up. I guess they shrivel up and resorb into the body.
If all goes well and his body doesn't start yelling "Hey! What did you do! I don't like that one bit!" he will have open-heart surgery on Wednesday morning. In that surgery, they will cut open his chest and sternum, insert a patch to widen the opening into his pulmonary arteries and close a large hole between the pumping chambers of his heart. If they see some vessels in Tuesday's cath that he actually does still need, they will also move them into a better place.
The doctors are very confident that he's going to fly through this with no problems and be home in a week or less.
I, on the other hand, am nervous as our remote controls when Little Boy is in the room.
Which means I'm focusing on the wrong things. I'm focusing on all the stories I know, all the bizarre experiences we've already had in our first five open-heart surgeries. (Yes, this will be the 6th open-heart surgery in our family in the last 8 1/2 years. Even I have a hard time wrapping my head around that, and I'm living it!)
I think what happened is that I've been around the hospital too long. And unless you have something else, someOne else, to cling to when the winds blow and the ground falls out from under your feet, you lose hope and confidence in things working out well.
It's like Peter, when he walked across the stormy sea to Jesus. When he started looking at the storm and the waves and when he started feeling the rain and the wind, he lost his faith in Jesus's control of every element. And the same goes for me. When I start looking around me at all the medicine and equipment and at the pain and discomfort my son is enduring, when I start listening to the people and their stories and their best guesses about the future, I lose my faith in God's sovereign plan for the entire situation. I must close my eyes, my mind, my thoughts to all of that stuff and focus only on Him.
So, for the next ten days (and beyond), I'm going to repeat over and over, "Take a deep breath and remember who's in charge."
