Free at last, free at last....

...Tomorrow at 9:15 in the morning, Isaac will be free at last. Or at least his arm will be. The pediatrician called today to say that after consulting with his friend in infectious diseases, he's decided that it would probably be best for Isaac to stop taking the IV antibiotics. His immune system is becoming more and more compromised each week (and yeah, Annie has a hacking cough-- we're trying to quarantine her), so they think that it's more important to keep some of his white blood cells alive than to continue the drugs. I'm glad. He's been on the meds for more than six weeks. Tomorrow he's getting the PICC line pulled and I'm going to come home and run him a big bubble bath. Six weeks is a very long time for a three-year-old to go without a bath. Since baths and PICC lines aren't compatible, we've developed sort of a middle ages approach toward bathing around here. His hands and face get washed occasionally, we wash the hair before church on Sunday, but most of his body has not had a good scrubbing since before Halloween. I don't think he smells. But maybe I'm just so used to his funk that it doesn't bother me anymore.

Getting my head in the game

Those of you without older kids might not recognize the High School Musical reference in my title, but we've been listening to HSM and HSM2 for months around here, so I have the dorky songs in my head more often than not. Anyway, I think I've got my head back in the running game. Isaac's illness threw my training for a loop, but I'm back on track. I did 15 miles two Saturdays ago, 20 last Saturday, and twelve today. I have another 20 planned for next Saturday and 15 for the next Saturday, and then I'll be just two weeks away from the race. How did it get here so quickly? The funny thing is that twelve miles now feels like a short run. I can hardly believe that one month today I'll be slapping that 26.2 sticker on the back of my van and driving it with pride.

Book #63: New England White

Title: New England White
Author: Stephen L. Carter

While I was reading New England White, Maren picked up the book and dropped the corner of it right on my big toe. It bled, and a week later it's still bruised. It's a big, deep, heavy, satisfying book. I guess it would be classified as a mystery, since the mystery of who killed economics professor Kellen Zant runs throughout the novel, but it's also an exploration of upper-middle and upper-class African American culture, the saga of the Carlyle family, and a weather log (the book starts with the first snowfall in November and wraps up with the spring thaw, and it snows more in this book than I ever saw in 18 years of living in New England).

Readers at amazon.com complained that the novel was too long. It is long. But it's more than just a mystery. I expect that if Carter cut 200 pages (what several reviewers felt should be done), we would have lost much of the cultural backdrop. I loved the story, but I really felt like I got an education in how a whole group of people lives and thinks in America, warts and all (the positive and negative aspects of African American social clubs were especially interesting). What I liked best about the novel was the story of Julia and Lemaster and their children, especially as Julia gains a backbone through her investigation of Zant's murder. Definitely worth reading and persisting.

Book #62: The Devil's Feather

Title: The Devil's Feather
Author: Minette Walters

Connie Burns is a woman who has seen it all. As a child, she and her white family were run off their farm in Africa when the government took it over. As an adult, she has been a war correspondent in Sierra Leone, war-torn Asia, and Iraq. In Iraq, she meets a man from her past, who she thinks may be a serial killer. Shortly after beginning to research the man (she's looking into him despite his assurances that he'll kill her if she does), he kidnaps her, makes it look like a politically-motivated killing, and rapes and tortures her for three days. Upon her release, she makes a break for a deserted old house in the English countryside. A house with a past. A house without DSL or cell phone service. The perfect place to soothe your frayed nerves when a deranged man who has already raped you and now wants to kill you is on the loose.

Despite the "girl in peril" idiocy Burns showed (it reminded me a little bit of those dumb girls in horror movies who go into darkened rooms when they know a killer is on the loose), I really enjoyed The Devil's Feather. It was quick-paced, kept me reading late into the night, and resulted in a very messy home. It also has some good girl-power scenes where Connie and her neighbor reenact some Thelma and Louise style buttkicking.

Book #61: The Life of Pi

Title: The Life of Pi
Author: Yann Martel

We read this book for the November meeting of our book club. Unfortunately, I wasn't done with it in time to attend, but Eddie and his mom and I had an impromptu discussion of the book at home instead. Eddie's mom said that she loved the first half of the book, where Pi Patel is living in India and exploring different religions. He was raised Hindu, but also adopts Christianity and Islam, and finds no contradiction in actively practicing all three at once. The first part of the novel seems like sort of a traditional bildungsroman, where the young protagonist comes of age. In this case, he grows up the son of a zookeeper, who like many Indians in the 1970s, decides to emigrate to Canada, which is where the book gets really interesting.

On the ship to Canada, his family and the contents of his father's zoo on board, Pi survives a shipwreck. For nearly a year, he lives on a lifeboat. At the beginning of his time on the lifeboat, he's living with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a large male tiger named Richard Parker. The hyena, zebra and orangutan quickly meet their ends, and Pi and Richard Parker must learn to survive with each other. Eddie loved this part of the book. I'm not surprised-- it was sort of like Survivor on steroids. Survivor with a tiger, of course.

The last chapter is where both parts of the book come together. The reader must decide if Pi is telling the truth about living with Richard Parker, or if he's made a myth, styled after religious myths, in order to help him make sense of his experience on the boat. Am I, as an active believer of the LDS faith allowed to admit that I believe that myth is an important part of Christian (and even Mormon) religious history? Myth helps us understand and process truth in a way that's accessible to us. Alone on a boat, Pi may have died or gone insane. With Richard Parker, real or imagined, he was able to live to tell his story.

Book #60: The Poe Shadow

Title: The Poe Shadow
Author: Matthew Pearl

In The Poe Shadow, Quentin Clark, a young lawyer living in Baltimore, gives up love and livelihood in an obsessive search to lift Edgar Allan Poe's name out of the gutter after he died in embarrassing circumstances. Clark's travels take him to Paris, where he finds not one, but two men who consider themselves the inspiration for Poe's famous detective, Dupin. Clark and the two Dupin's work against each other to solve the mystery surrounding Poe's death.

Pearl's novel The Dante Club was released to high acclaim several years ago. I haven't read it, but picked up The Poe Shadow based on its reputation. His second novel was pretty good, but it was a slow read. Pearl did such a great job of tapping into the loquaciousness of the 19th century novel, where writers were paid by the word (Huck Finn or Great Expectations, anyone?) that it seemed hard for me to believe at times that The Poe Shadow was written in the 21st-century. Overall, the story satisfied-- it even ended in a relatively predictable scene of Victorian-era domestic bliss, but the pace seemed more suited to a horse-drawn carriage than a modern minivan.

Book #59: The lost book

I was reading something when Isaac got sick. Something I finished while he was in the hospital. Something that I can't remember at all right now. Should I remember it in the future, I'll post about it.

Mama

Maren started saying "Mama" about a week ago. Before you start in with the "how sweet" and the "aah"s, I must add that the only time she ever says "Mama" is when she's upset, and the word comes out more as a whine as she seeks refuge from whatever evil her older brothers and sister are trying to inflict on her.

For Maren, Mama is refuge. I'm the person she seeks out when she needs something, when she's hungry, when she's tired, when she wants a snuggle. Dada is much more fun to play with, and he sneaks her grape juice. Her big sister Annie will tote her around when she needs to get somewhere, But for this eleven month-old, Mama is where it's at.

I don't mean to sound conceited, but Maren isn't the only one who feels this way. When Isaac was in the hospital, he wanted me with him, the big kids wanted me at home with them, and Maren would have surgically attached herself to my hip had it been possible. On Halloween night, for example, I ran home to trick or treat with Bryce, Annie and Maren while Isaac was in surgery. I wanted to be back by the time he woke up. I spent the whole time I was home with at least two kids touching me. Annie started sobbing and angrily giving me the 3rd degree when it was time for me to go back. Isaac was awake and asking for me when I arrived at the recovery area. I felt like I was being pulled in a million different directions. Or at least four.

A couple of weeks ago, we took my mother-in-law on a drive to the beach. Our van seats seven, and I gave up shotgun so she didn't have to sit between Bryce and Annie in the way back. For most of the trip, each of them had their heads on my shoulders and their hands all over me. In order to get comfortable, I put my legs up on the armrests of the captain chairs in the middle row. Immediately, Isaac and Maren reached their hands out and grabbed my feet. No one told me that I became a magnet when I became a mother, but it's true.

All this love--it does something to you. It's a pretty heady thing to be the center of four, no, actually five people's universes. It's also kind of suffocating. Yesterday, when I got done with a 20-mile run, Maren was on my hip, begging to drink from my oh-so-sweaty breast, before I even had a chance to grab a drink myself. Right now she's pulling on my toes, trying to drag me away from the computer desk.

But it's also very temporary. These kids, before I know it, are going to grow up, and I'm not going to be their one and only anymore. I love my mom-- she's my best friend now that I'm an adult, but we live more than a thousand miles from each other, and when I look at her, it's not with the adoring gaze I get from Isaac. I'm not telling her every ten seconds how beautiful she is or that she's my very best friend in the entire universe like Annie does to me at least ten times a day. I know that ten years from now, I'll be lucky to have Annie recognize my existence. It's a good thing Eddie will always adore me, because it's going to be a big change to go from idol to pariah in the eyes of my children.

Which brings me to the question of what I'm going to do when I'm not so needed anymore. I just don't know. I always thought I'd go back to school and go back to work as soon as my fourth baby was in preschool. I'm not sure that's the right choice anymore. Life feels too full to add a PhD to the mix anytime in the near future. Should I have another baby and prolong the love-fest? Sometimes I think that's the easy way out, because it keeps me in the phase of life that I'm in now-- a phase that's comfortable and familiar, but not necessarily one that's best for the rest of my family in the long run. I want to live a life filled with purpose-- but I can't see what the guiding purpose will be after the next few years pass.

In the meantime-- I'll take adoration.

A whole new normal

After eleven nights, two surgeries, five tanks of gas, one walker, six kids meals from Chick Fil-A, three bees and a mosquito from McDonalds, twentysomething trips to see the trains, a whole parade of doctors and nurses, and about ten viewings of the Lion King, we're finally home. Isaac is doing pretty well. He's still not using his leg much and doesn't have the greatest appetite in the world, but he's much, much better than he was. I don't think I even realized just how sick he really was until he got better and I had something to compare it with.

Starting today, I'll be nursing Maren five times a day (I might have weaned her if I had known that we'd be in the hospital so long, which required a LOT of transporting her back and forth-- she now cries whenever she comes near her carseat), and giving Isaac IV antibiotics three times a day. Of course, Maren's feedings and Isaac's infusions (?) don't match up time-wise, so it will be a lot like having a newborn around here for a while. Or else twins-- both on the verge of walking (I'm pretty sure he'll be toddling along after Maren rather than the other way around). I've traded in my former schedule of going to the gym, schlepping Isaac to swimming, and dropping him off at preschool (you know, the mom who is in the car all day long) for driving to doctor's appointments and making sure he gets his medicine. The next week will tell us a lot about how grueling this schedule may be in comparison with the old normal, but I think we'll be able to handle it. We got through the first eleven days-- how hard can the next two months be?

finally, an update....

In our last installment of the family saga, Isaac was in the hospital, recovering from surgery necessitated by a rare illness. This week, the soap opera of our lives continues. Last Thurday, Annie got a mosquito bite, which, being a kid, she scratched. It got infected. On Saturday, Eddie put her on antibiotics and lanced it to relieve some of the pressure. On Monday morning, my mom took her to the pediatrician, who told her to take Annie to the hospital. She arrived at the hospital at 11am, expecting quick outpatient surgery. She finally got into the ER at 10:30pm. That might not seem like such a big deal, but she couldn't eat or drink anything for all that time, and if you know Annie even a little bit, you can be sure that she got her drama queen thing working and milked it for all it was worth. The upside of already having one kid in the hospital was that we could wait in Isaac's room and didn't have to sit in the waiting room for 12 hours. It was a very quick procedure. I sent her off to the operating room, ran across to the next building to pick up some McDonald's for Eddie and me, and by the time I brought the food to Isaac's room, the surgeon was roaming the halls to let us know how it had gone. He said that his new slogan should be "Dr. M-- faster than McDonald's." Anyway, he said that he's pretty positive she also had MRSA and that there was no way that Eddie could have gotten all of the pus out because it had gone really deep. She's well on the mend-- she has to take a nasty antibiotic three times a day and she needs to bathe frequently, but she went back to school today with a great story to tell.

Isaac has been getting better, but very, very slowly. He stopped spiking fevers, stopped sweating profusely, and started being able to eat normally. His bloodwork is slowly returning to normal. Yesterday he had another MRI to see if the doctors had gotten all of the pus in his femur with the first surgery, and unfortunately there was a reaccumulation (I think it's because the antibiotics weren't working full-force yet, so this was pus that got there after the first surgery) so he had another surgery last night. Fortunately, the surgeon was able to use the same incisions and the same hole in the bone. Today, Isaac stretched his leg straight for the first time in nine days, which doesn't seem like a big deal, but it made my day. I think the surgeons are hoping that he'll gain a little bit more range of motion in that leg before they send us home, but it should be just a matter of days now. Best case scenario would be tomorrow, but I think it's likely that we'll stick around until Monday.

So what do the next few months look like for us? He'll have physical therapy, but I'm not sure how often. We were able to coordinate with our regular pediatrician to do the follow up visits. We'll have a home health nurse at our house at least once a week. Eddie and I will be giving Isaac IV antibiotics three times a day until Christmas. We're not quite sure how long it will take for him to get mobile again, but we're confident that it will happen.

Our family and our ward and the community have all been great. Our neighbor has been taking the kids to and from school. My visiting teachers are driving Maren to and from the hospital so she doesn't have to spend all of her waking hours crawling on the floor of Isaac's hospital room (she took her first steps there today!). Isaac's preschool teachers totally overwhelmed us with hugs and love when I went in on Friday to pull him out of school. My mom and godmother both extended their trips and Eddie's mom is coming to take her shift next week. My sister-in-law in Alaska sent me a beautiful box of chocolate (how did she know I've been practically dying of my chocolate cravings while in the hospital?). Bryce and Annie's teachers made gift bags for all of our kids. It's been hard on the other kids. Maren has been stuck to me like glue, and Annie has perfected the art of the major guilt trip. Bryce has been hanging in there, but I know it's hard on him too. Pretty soon though, Isaac will come home and life will start to get back to normal. Until then, I won't be around so much, but I really appreciate all of your prayers and well-wishes. But you probably wouldn't want to be hanging around me much anyway-- we seem to be under a black cloud and you might get struck with some lightning intended for me or something.