from mourning to dancing

You turned my wailing into dancing;

you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,

that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.

Lord my God, I will praise you forever.

Psalm 30:11

Due to my son’s depression, he had been struggling going to school on a regular basis. It felt like once a week he asked to stay home. I fully believe in a child being able to proclaim he needs a day off (I fully believe in adults doing this occasionally, too!). But the longer time went on, the more it felt like his weekly aches, pains, or ailments had a lot more to do with his mental health than his physical health. My husband had already left for work and here we were again… in the kitchen, my oldest child telling me he was too sick for school.

No more mental health days. This was getting ridiculous. “Okay,” I told him, “but if you stay home, I’m taking you to the doctor.” He agreed more easily than I anticipated. I was able to schedule an appointment for him the same day for a time shortly after I got the other two kiddos off to school.

As a teenage boy, he no longer wanted me in the room with him. I sat in the waiting room, thinking about the symptoms he’d complained about that morning, and realized I had probably judged him too critically. Maybe he did have the flu. I had watched my husband spend a very miserable week with the swine flu many years before. I knew I should apologize to my son. About this time, he came to retrieve me from the waiting room.

“Hey, he wants to talk to you.”

“Is it the flu?” I asked. 

“He thinks it might be meningitis.” 

I stopped abruptly. “Meningitis?!” I couldn’t remember how bad meningitis was, but I knew it was bad. After a short conversation with the doctor, we were on our way to the hospital to be admitted and wait for a spinal tap. This waiting ended up taking five hours. And in those five hours, I Googled just enough to discover that meningitis is deadly—often within 24 hours. 

While waiting for the spinal tap, he was not allowed to have any sort of pain meds. The pain in his neck had been his major complaint and lying in a hospital bed did not help. At one point, my teenage boy cried, pulling at my shirt, begging me for pain relief. I have never experienced a helplessness worse than the helplessness of not being able to ease the physical pain of my child.

The other pain was the pain of the fear of losing him. While I desperately wanted the nurses to ease his physical pain or maybe even put him to sleep for a bit, I spent every minute of those five hours wondering if he would be dead the next day. Did he have meningitis? Did we get to the hospital in time? Would he get better? 

Due to a birth defect, I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals or clinics with my oldest child, but that 24 hours was by far the scariest. The next morning during doctor rounds, we were given the definitive answer that he had a wicked case of strep throat and NO meningitis! His doctor apologized all over himself for sending us to the hospital for strep, saying he probably over-reacted. And maybe we could have been resentful or at least frustrated with the bills we would later pay or the stress of those 24 hours, but in that moment, all we could do was praise God for our (relatively) healthy child who would be around for a lot more Christmases, birthdays, and fourth of July picnics. That was not cause for frustration; that was cause for celebration!