We happened on this song by pure chance one day as we were driving my oldest daughter home. It turned out the only station on the radio that came through that day was a country station. Usually, we listen to Aternative and Classic Rock, but we occasionally enjoy country. God must’ve been paying attention.
In the midst of 1 1/2 years of chemo hell for our youngest daughter, we were driving along, totally unsuspecting of how hard we were about to sob. Both my husband and I. I don’t know if our oldest heard the song, but we were grateful the youngest wasn’t in the car.
We tried to forget it after that, but one of the lyrics stayed with me and every time I mentioned the song to someone, I didn’t know all of it, who sang it or anything. Well, tonight, I asked my dh to find the lyrics to Streets of Heaven. I should have warned him it was *that* song.
See, November 29, 2003, my husband and I took our daughter to the local hospital to find out why her left arm was shaking so terribly. We’d finally gotten an MRI scheduled where she could be sedated. The first time, we’d mistakenly thought she could handle the loud machine. Now we know better.
But on that winter day, the day after Thanksgiving, at 5 in the morning, we woke, dressed and made it to the hospital. My husband was thinking he’d be late to work, depending how long the test took. I was thinking about how it was the day after Thanksgiving–meaning the day we set up for Christmas and decorate our tree with 1800 lights so we could enjoy the way it glowed for an entire month, mellowing our mood, refreshing our spirits and preparing for the next year. Our Tree of Giving, where we love to pile presents to spoil everyone we know and love.
We were trying hard not to think of how her left arm was shaking, her fingers wouldn’t move well and her left leg was dragging. We were trying to ignore the worry that had built for 3 months as we waited weeks for doctors appts. and scheduled tests watching her shake and limp grow more pronounced and hearing doctors’ calming platitudes that weren’t making us feel better.
We tried not to think that morning, so we wouldn’t break from the strain we’d been under all year. We weren’t thinking about the fact Craig was sick for 6 months, until his surgery in July of 2003. Of the financial stress we’d endured as he missed work most of those months. Or of how I’d fallen and broken my ankle on the day he returned to work. Of how I’d become confined to a wheelchair for 3 months and had just gotten permission to put weight on my still-booted right ankle.
We soothed our eight-year-old baby, trying to help her ignore her hunger and thirst and be brave as the pediatric nurse put numbing cream on her arm. (And do you know medical insurances do not consider numbing cream a *necessary* ointment for children dealing with weekly, if not daily, pokes?)
But that day we didn’t know anything. It was all new and horrible and terrifying and soul wrenching. I saw my precious child with cream and a clear plastic seal on the inside of her elbow. She was afraid, no matter how we tried to distract her with toys, TV, stories, playing. She’s not stupid. She knew something was up.
Somehow, we got her through the installation of her first IV. Then the sedation. Watching her fall suddenly, eerily to sleep. Her tiny body limp as her dad lifted her from the gurney in the hallway (she’s still too terrified to stand in the hallway with the MRI door open, even if it’s not her day for a test) and carried her into the MRI room. There he laid her on the bed that goes into the MRI machine, and we watched as all the tubes and monitoring machines were attached to her sleeping body.
I couldn’t go in. Still can’t, not even to hold her toes as she sleeps. See, I’ve done several MRIs in my life, part of living with Friedreich’s Ataxia. I could’ve handled being in that room as long as I was needed. But my ankle had broken, in both bones, so severely, I’d had two plates and 8 screws installed to hold it together. With that much metal, I’d destroy me and the machine. So I watched from the doorway as my husband, who already hated hospitals so incredibly much, held her toes until the tubes and monitors were set.
Then we sat in the waiting room for 45 minutes. Me with my cross-stitch and him with a book, and the TV on some talk show we tried to ignore as he thought about work and schedules and trying to make up for 6 months and I tried to keep my hands busy and my head working on how I wanted the house decorated for Christmas. We’d already missed decorating for Halloween and Thanksgiving. The year had sucked enough. I wanted some holiday cheer.
The clock ticked slowly by. One of those clocks that shows the seconds going by until even so little as a second seemed an eternity. Finally they called us back, warned us the sedation med would cause her to wake up grumpy and said within 20 minutes or so, she’d be awake. So we stood by her bedside, Craig brushing her hair away from her face and me reaching from my wheelchair for the only thing I could grab, her toes.
Twenty minutes, then we could leave. We could take her home and set up for Christmas and Craig could work and then we’d enjoy our weekend. Maybe do some shopping and present wrapping. And maybe get an answer about her shaking that wasn’t too bad. Something easily cured. Please, God.
But it didn’t happen that way.
A minute, maybe two, after we’d been left to wait, some guy walked up, flipping pages on his clipboard and said, “So, I guess you heard. We found something.”
If you consider a tumor the size of an egg in the middle of the right side of my baby’s brain ’something’.
We didn’t go home that day. Or that weekend. Or, actually, most of the next month. Instead, we were admitted as one of the first few families in the new Oncology ward of the brand spankin’ new Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital. Room 304.
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/austin-sherrie/streets-of-heaven-1101.html
Dark and mysterious, beautifully glossy, it shows the TOR books coming out January 2007 - August 2007 and I’m on it! This is so cool. Like tangible proof I’m about to be published. 
