Grace, Eleven Ways

It is a beautiful spring day. (That is what I most remember about the way this all started.)

The blue sky is dotted with clouds and the death of winter is just starting to turn over to green grass. I take my two young sons to the park. We throw stones in the pond and look for frogs at the water’s edge, and Sawyer, my five-year-old, lags behind. His normal pace is constant motion, so I flag this abnormality immediately. He starts complaining of pain in his leg and soon begins to limp behind us. I think back to the night before when he showed us his swollen knee.

“Probably bursitis,” my husband, Jake—our literal in-house doctor—had said nonchalantly.

By the time we get home, he has a fever and won’t move from the living room chair.

Jake tells me he needs to go to urgent care, so I cancel our regularly-scheduled Wednesday evening and get Sawyer ready to go. Thanks to the warm spring temperature, I’m able to put him in shorts, so the doctor can more easily get to his knee

Jake is scheduled to work a night shift at the hospital, so I send an SOS text to my three sister-in-laws. I drop my other kids off with one of them on my way to urgent care. When our night is extended with a trip to the emergency department, another picks my kids up, takes them back to my house, and gets them all ready for bed. When Sawyer and I return home around 11 p.m.—bloodwork and a kid-sized dose of hydrocodone behind us—the third sister-in-law meets us at the door. All the kids have long been asleep, and the house is quiet. The needs of my other kids were met quickly and without hesitation. I never had to worry.

Sawyer wakes me in the middle of the night, though he himself is not awake.

One glance at him startles me because I think he is foaming at the mouth. I move to him immediately and realize he is vomiting while fully asleep. I try to wake him, but when he opens his eyes, they are glazed and not fully present. I carry him to the bathroom, clean him up, and put him back in my bed.

Panic pulses through me.

I call Jake, who rarely answers his phone while at work. Tonight—thank God—he picks up. He explains the possible side effects of the pain medication they gave Sawyer at the hospital. He tells me when I should worry and what specific things to pay attention to, and he promises to keep his phone close by and answer if he can.

I am calmed enough to lay back down though I stay on high alert.

My mom’s flight lands at 10 a.m. the next morning. She booked the ticket a month ago, so she could be here for our oldest daughter’s piano recital.

Sawyer sleeps almost the entire day. I carry him to the bathroom each time he needs to go because he won’t put pressure on his knee, and put him to bed early. After the other kids are tucked in their rooms, I collapse into my mom in the kitchen.

Sawyer’s knee is not improving, and Jake is back at the hospital for another night shift. I’m terrified to face another night alone with all the uncertainty.

My mom rubs my back and strokes my hair and prays. She mothers me in the depths of my own mothering.

She booked that flight weeks before. This fact does not escape my notice.

The next morning, I carry Sawyer to the van and drive to the pediatrician for a follow-up appointment. The doctor takes one look at his knee—still swollen with a red rash spreading up and down his leg—and sends us straight back to the hospital. I anticipate the words before she says them. She is apologetic in her instructions, and her warm smile and my own adrenaline propel me forward. All I can think to pray on our way across town is, help us. In the back seat, Sawyer holds his green dinosaur, Dynomite, to his chest.

The emergency department rooms us almost immediately and sends us a superhero—a child life specialist—to help Sawyer get ready for his IV. I hold him on my lap in the hospital bed while she explains the procedure and shows him how to put an IV in Dynomite’s arm. When the nurses come in, she stays with us. She talks Sawyer through it, and I wipe silent tears from my cheeks while he is distracted by a Spiderman video on her tablet.

One of my friends happens to be giving a lecture at the hospital. She brings me an iced vanilla latte sometime in the early afternoon and arrives just in time to walk with me while they transfer Sawyer to a different floor. He needs an MRI to see if the infection has spread to his bones.

I have been on my own with Sawyer for the entirety of this day, but right now, I am not.

“The infection hasn’t spread to his bone,” the doctor tells me some time later—after Sawyer has woken up and they’ve moved us back to our emergency room. “We need to admit him for antibiotics and observation, but the infection isn’t in the bone. That’s good news.”

Jake arrives just a few minutes before they transfer us to our new room—dressed in scrubs for another night shift. He leads the way, and I exhale deeply for the first time all day.

“I’m sorry you had to do all this alone,” he says at some point.

He situates Sawyer and orders him dinner. I open a bag he packed me from home. All I could think to ask for was my toothbrush, deodorant, and a new pair of black joggers, but right on top is the new book I had just ordered—a happy, mindless love story which is exactly right for this moment in time.

He couldn’t have known how much I’d want this book—I didn’t even know—and yet here it is in my hands.

Day three in the hospital is Mother’s Day, and sometime that morning, a nurse brings in a grocery bag with our name on it. Together, Sawyer and I pull out chocolate snacks, a giant Rice Krispie bar, and a plant. A friend drove 17 miles to drop it off for us. Seventeen miles just to run in and out of the hospital lobby. The gift makes us both smile.

In total, we spend four and a half days in the hospital. We pass the time with daily blood draws and movies and IV antibiotics and toys brought to us by a kind hospital volunteer. We watch my daughter’s piano recital on FaceTime and Jake comes to relieve me for the last two nights, armed with Nerf guns.

On Tuesday morning, we’re given discharge papers. Sawyer limps out of the hospital into another blue day and then continues to limp around all week. There’s a follow-up appointment with his pediatrician and a follow-up ultrasound, and both Jake and I are prepared for readmittance to the hospital. But there’s no need. The limp goes away, and a week later, he’s back on the soccer field, keeping easy pace with the rest of his team.

Months later, our sweet boy who cried so many tears about pain and pinches during that hospital stay tells us he wants to go back. “They had the best food there,” he says. “And I got to spend a lot of time with you.”

That is how he remembers the story.

Molly Flinkman is a freelance writer from central Iowa where she lives with her husband, Jake, and their four kids. A lover of houseplants, neutral colors, and good books, she loves to write about how her faith intersects the very ordinary aspects of her life and hopes her words will encourage and support other women along the way. You can connect with Molly on Instagram or through her monthly newsletter, Twenty Somethings.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.