Wishful thinking

I know that it's never good to say, "my life will be better when..." For the last two months, I'll admit, I've been saying that line a lot, followed by "...Isaac gets out of his cast." Monday was our big day. After nine weeks in the mother of all spica casts, he was finally coming out. We took him to the hospital bright and early, and after some x-rays, he patiently held my hand as they spent the next 30 minutes sawing him out of his blue cocoon. He cried quietly, because he was scared, and then when they lifted him out, he cried louder, because it hurt.

Now I didn't think that after nine weeks on his back, he'd jump off the table, run down the hall, and we'd all live happily ever after. But I wasn't prepared for the fact that the first week out of the cast would be quite a bit harder than the last few weeks in the cast. He had adjusted pretty well to his limitations. He loved to spin, could crawl and do pushups, liked to pretend to be a dog or a caiman while eating his food, and had even figured out that he didn't need to be scared if he slept in a sleeping bag on the bedroom floor. I'd found him up as high as the third step on our staircase, and I'm pretty confident that he would have been scaling the stairs within another week. I was expecting that we'd bring him home, and within a week he'd be back at school and I could confidently leave him at the daycare at the gym. Not so, my friends, not so.

The day we brought him home, he didn't want us to touch either of his legs. Lifting him was excruciatingly painful. He was scared. We were scared that we were going to break him again. He had to start wearing clothes again, and it bugged him to take the clothes on and off to get him to the bathroom. The only good thing about the first cast-free day was his bath. Other than that, he was pretty darn miserable. Too scared to try to crawl. Too stiff to sit up. I think he felt like we had taken his security blanket away. For us as his parents, it was a pretty damn disheartening day.

Over the course of the week, things have slowly gotten better. By mid-week, he had learned to sit up again unassisted. On Thursday, he started crawling again (he's still not putting much weight on the broken leg, but it will get there). Yesterday we quit using the urinal and started forcing him to use the potty again. Today he was trying to climb down the stairs, working on that yoga pose (I think it's called the triangle), and crying while I forced him to sit by himself at the dinner table.

He still has a long way to go. We decided to pull him out of preschool for the rest of the year. The preschool made this an easy decision when we went in for a Valentine's Day party on Wednesday and asked when he could start again. They said they didn't want him back until he was walking without difficulty. Eddie and I are leaving a week from tomorrow for a long-anticipated, long-postponed tenth anniversary trip, and even though I'm leaving him with two people I trust completely and the two people who, aside from me and Eddie, probably know him best (my mom and my godmother), it's still really hard to leave him when he can't walk yet. The orthopedist said that we should expect it to take a month before he's ambulatory, and if he's not walking when we see him in March, we'll discuss physical therapy. I never imagined when he woke up with a sore leg on that October afternoon so many months ago that he still wouldn't be walking in March.

I'm sure that one day our lives will no longer revolve around Isaac's health. One day our prayers will not include the reflexive statments of "We're thankful for this day. We're thankful for our family. Please help Isaac's leg to get better." One day we'll look back on this time and realize it wasn't an eternity. But some days it feels like it. And the baby steps are so small, that it seems impossible that he'll ever be able to put one foot in front of the other again. We were watching a basketball game tonight and he said he wants to play basketball. Watching Bryce play soccer has always been just that-- watching him play soccer. When Isaac plays basketball, it will be watching a miracle.