Update #135

For the first few weeks after Dave's accident, it seemed as if almost every day, there was something new to be praying for - both, on the negative, a new scary situation and, on the positive, a new step forward every time I updated the blog. For as overwhelming as that period of time was, as exhausting and emotional and uncertain, it was also incredible because the progress was obvious and the miracles abounding.

As time went on, I know we all continued to pray, but things slowed. For many of you, that meant fewer updates on Dave's progress to read, simply because there really wasn't much happening. I almost found myself feeling guilty for not having anything exciting to post. For Dave, his parents and me, it meant...well, to be perfectly honest, blah. Melancholy. Monotonous. Almost depressing.

If you walk - or leap (you'll understand that comment in a moment) - away from this post with only one thing today, I hope it will be a reminder to NEVER STOP PRAYING!

After a long spell of...well...blah, the times of almost overwhelming progress are back! For the past two and a half weeks, I have been humbled over and over again at how often I had forgotten to pray through the blah - and how powerfully God reminds us of his presence anyway.

Today, Dave walked with a walker for the first time! Ten steps, five feet or so, but moving forward without the stability of the parallel bars attached to the ground.

Potentially even more exciting, for the first time in almost six months, after hundreds of "bed baths," Dave has been cleared to take a real, hot, running water, so-amazing-I-never-want-to-get-out shower.

Finally...well, before I go here, a small disclaimer: the problem with being a perpetual optimist is that it is easy to drive people nuts with "false hope" that may blow up in their faces afterward. If you lean toward the pessimist or even realist side of things, please take the next paragraphs with the appropriate grain of salt (or pepper, as your taste may be). Please know, by the way, that even as an optimist, I'm pretty flabbergasted.

As most of you know, just after Dave's last abdominal surgery in June, he developed a hole somewhere in his digestive system that was causing secretions to leak from the side of his body. Over time, his body, in order to protect itself from infection, formed a fistula, a tube of scar tissue leading from the hole in his intestines directly out of a hole in the right side of his abdomen. In spite of meds to slow the secretions (remember Octreotide?), TPN (IV feed) to reduce the amount of food being put into his stomach and tube feed to keep the drainage as liquid as possible, the fistula has remained and has contributed to many of the complications with Dave's progress.

The plan was to wait until a minimum of six months after Dave's last surgery (December) for the scar tissue to heal, then to go back into his abdomen to repair the fistula surgically. Until then, it has been wound vacs and tube feeds and annoyances trying to handle the hole.

For a while, my prayer specifically, in spite of what the doctors said, was that the fistula would close on its own and save Dave from another major surgery. After a while, even I started to let that prayer fade, and the biggest good news we could hope for was surgery in December and not March or April.

There's a story in the Old Testament about a widow who comes to Elisha because she has no money to live on - all that she owns is a small amount of oil - and she is about to lose her sons to a creditor of her husbands. Elisha tells her to go out around her neighborhood, collect all of the jars she can find, and bring them back to him. When she comes back, Elisha uses the small amount of oil in her jar to fill all of the other jars, giving her resources to sell in order to pay the debt. The small amount of oil flows and flows to fill every jar to the top, but when the last jar is full, the supply runs out. If the widow had collected hundreds of thousands of jars, the implication is that the oil would have continued to flow until every jar was full. But God worked to match the greatness of her faith and filled only as many jars as she had collected.

Sometimes, like in the story of the widow, God allows himself to be limited to the amount of power we give him and the amount we truly believe he can accomplish. Sometimes, however, God decides to blow us away, reminding us he is a God who is, in fact, "able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine," that his power reaches far beyond the number of jars that we decide to collect.

The reason behind this mini sermon is - how do I say this? - Dave's fistula may be closed. The doctors are not convinced...yet. The nurses are rationally skeptical. Fistulas just don't close after almost six months. But in the past 72 hours, the daily amount of drainage on Dave's dressing has been less than a fourth of what is has been every day over the past six months. Not only that, putting this as delicately as possible, his digestive system seems to be working as normally and "regularly" (think fiber commercials) as yours or mine. So not only is there very little drainage coming from Dave's fistula, in spite of how much more he has been eating, but what Dave is eating is going through his system in the way that is should be.

I wish I could say that this is what I have been praying for all along (I think Dave's sister is the only one who can say that). I wish I could tell you that I had the faith to believe that it might happen. But to be completely honest, I took the "good" news of a December surgery and started placing all of my hopes there. In spite of the limitation that I placed on what God's power could do through Dave's body - kind of funny how it is possible to think that all of the "big miracles" ended in June - God may just be sending a reminder that we should never underestimate what he can do, no matter what science may say.

Dave is a miracle - have I said that recently? - whether his fistula is closed or not. But if things continue the way that they have been going for the past three days, the most recent evidence of his miracularity...miracleness...miraculaneousness (yeah, I know the real word is miraculousness) may be a whole lot closer than it was a few weeks ago. I think God is laughing at, at the very least, my lack of faith. I'm just glad his laughter is serving to heal Dave even more quickly than...well...than I could ask or imagine. :-)

His Spirit, His will, His peace, His glory...