Chapter 10

December, 2006

Don went into the hospital on December 22. The procedure to drain the fluid off his lung and seal the pleura was called a pleurodesis, and it involved making an incision in his side to drain the fluid, then injecting chemicals to irritate the pleura. They were hopeful he'd be out before Christmas, but they couldn't promise anything.

My inlaws came into town, and my mother-in-law kindly took care of the kids so I could be at the hospital. My father-in-law sat by my side at the hospital, and we talked.

"You know," he said, "I'm not giving up. Miracles happen."

I agreed that miracles could happen, and offered the thought that maybe we'd gotten our miracle when Don had been cured of Hodgkin's disease. I was struggling to make sense of this whole thing in my head, and was doing my best to think of this situation as fifteen happy years Don easily might not have had, rather than a good life cut drastically and tragically short.

Understandably, my father-in-law wasn't thinking along those lines. He hadn't yet come to grips with the finality of the diagnosis, and he still had hope.

I had hope, too, but my hope revolved more around keeping Don alive for a few years, so that his youngest child would remember him. The baby was almost two, and if we could just keep Don alive till he was five...

It was what passed for hope, as far as I was concerned. By now I knew better than to hope he'd live out a normal lifespan. Beneath my romantic exterior, I was a realist, and realistically, I knew that just wasn't going to happen.

Hours stretched by. A friend from church dropped by and talked to us for a little while. My father-in-law and I talked, and acquired pastries from a food cart that went by. At last a doctor came out and let us know the procedure had gone well, and that Don was awake. He informed us they'd drained about 2.3 liters of fluid off Don's lung, despite the earlier draining, and that the lung had been almost completely compressed.

We went back to the recovery area to see Don. He didn't smile, because he never came out of anesthesia or surgery well. He'd told me more than once that he was a big wimp when it came to pain, and proud of it. I thought he was tougher than he gave himself credit for, but there was no doubt that coming out of surgery, he tended to be sullen. Not that I could blame him.

Lying on a hospital bed, a monitor next to the bed, he looked grimly unhappy, and he didn't have much to say. But when I put my hand in his, he squeezed my fingers, telling me without words that he was glad to see me.

Tubing stretched from between his ribs to a container that had measurements on the side. A straw-colored liquid was still draining out of him. I stood next to him, stroking his hair and talking quietly about nothing in particular. He didn't have much to say, but he seemed to like listening to my voice.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with him, then went home and relieved my mother-in-law for the night. Over the next few days, I ran around frantically, trying to get last-minute shopping done and visit Don in the hospital and keep things relatively normal for the kids. We'd managed to decorate a tree-- rather late, but we'd done it. Baking cookies fell by the wayside, under the onslaught of stress, and there weren't quite as many packages under the tree as I would have liked. But I did my best.

Christmas was a terrible time of year to have a loved one gravely ill and in the hospital, of course, but I tried to remember we weren't the only people suffering through this sort of thing. I wrote the following reflections after reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my kids for the umpteenth time:

I never before fully realized what an awesome metaphor that story is, a metaphor about celebrating Christmas even when you have bad things going on in your life:

Every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any presents at all!
He HADN'T stopped Christmas from coming!
IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

As I walked through the corridors of the hospital yesterday, I realized there were plenty of other people there with us. Unfortunately, bad things still happen at Christmastime, because death and sickness and sorrow don't take holidays. And yet, no matter what grief happens in our individual lives, Christmas comes just the same.

My Christmas wishes were simple this year. All I wanted for Christmas was a husband home from the hospital. And I got what I wanted. To my joy, they released Don on Christmas Eve. Naturally we wouldn't be traveling to visit our inlaws and family-- everyone would come see us.

On the day he was released from the hospital, the nurse removed Don's tubing and taped a fresh dressing to his ribs. She told him to get dressed and left the room, giving him privacy. He sat up, and the dressing promptly came loose as a stream of straw-colored fluid poured from the wound.

I managed to bite back my first comment, which was Ewwwww! I'd been a mom long enough that I could tolerate grossness pretty well, even something like liquid gushing out of my husband's chest. Don, ordinarily so Zen and easygoing, seemed rather horrified by all the fluid coming from his incision. He looked like he was on the verge of a panicked freakout, so I stuck the dressing back on over his incision and said, very calmly, "I wonder if that's supposed to happen. I'll go ask the nurse about it, okay?"

The nurse assured me that drainage, even copious drainage, was normal, and that he should sleep on a towel for a few days. We got a supply of dressings, which I'd be changing, and Don slowly got his clothes on. And then he was made to sit in a wheelchair, much to his disgust, and I wheeled him downstairs.

And then I took him home, just in time for Christmas.

Read Chapter 11 here.