I took my laptop to the hospital.
I don’t really know what I was thinking. When I’d packed it in my tote bag, I figured there’d be lots of sitting and waiting—and there was. But did I really think I’d do anything but stand next to my son’s hospital bed? Because that’s what I did for roughly seventy hours.
The surgery was a huge success. I found out a week later that the surgical team met to discuss the case and when they looked at pre and post-op x-rays of my son’s spine, they cheered and celebrated what had been a massively successful correction. That’s excellent news, of course. But when I sat in the surgery waiting room after nearly nine hours, all I wanted to know was if he could move his feet. “He woke up a bit upset,” the surgeon told us. “Typical for teenage boys and anesthesia, for some reason. Everyone assured me, he has moved both feet!” Spinal cord injury is the biggest risk with a scoliosis correction surgery. I’d prayed for wiggly toes for weeks beforehand.
A couple hours later when I leaned over his bed and watched his eyes try to focus on my face after an entire day of anesthesia, Isaiah’s first words were “Hey, Mom,” whispered, because he’d been intubated all day. “I made it?” his hoarse voice wobbled. “You made it,” I responded, throat tight. Tears welled up in his eyes and dripped down the sides of his face as he lay on a back that has been fully reconstructed with rods, screws, and bone grafts from someone who had marked “yes” in the blank next to the words organ donor before they passed away. “God healed my back,” he gasped, gripping my hand. “He did, Son. God healed your back.”
Pain management has been the hardest part of this. You try standing at an angle for fourteen years and then have your body rebuilt to force you to stand straight for the first time ever. Nerves, muscles, bones. They all hurt. Not to mention the three osteotomies—vertebrae surgically broken to help with correction. The nine days since surgery haven’t been easy, physically or emotionally. But, my son is walking slow, steady laps through the house many times a day, and though I can’t imagine a day where he can put on his own shoes again, I know that day is coming.
After the first night in the ICU, we were moved to a regular room. Why are hospital rooms so tiny? We could barely open the chair designed to pull out into a makeshift bed. There wasn’t room for me or the chair or the nurses coming in for regular checks. It was obvious only one of us could stay, so I told my husband to go rest at the hotel. We’d be fine. But, fine is a relative term, and I stood next to the hospital bed and helped the nurses turn my son all night long. I held his hand and coached him through deep breathing when the pain was unbearable but he’d had all the drugs they could give him. By morning, we were spent. Seventy hours I’d been awake, to the best of my hazy calculations. When my husband walked in with coffee and a rested face, I burst into tears. He pressed the coffee cup into my hand and sent me to the hotel to shower and take a nap, which I did. And he sent me back to the hotel that night and kissed my temple before saying, “Don’t feel guilty for sleeping.” But I did. He took the night shift, and I drove to the hotel feeling anxious and strange.
When I got there, I put on my pajamas and brushed my teeth, looked around room 415 at the Hampton. My son’s Nikes were still by the bed where he’d kicked them off the night before surgery. I knew he’d be fine with his dad and the nurses. But, I’m his mom. And shouldn’t I be there? Torn, I wondered if I could sleep. A wave of fatigue washed over me. My phone buzzed with a text. It was my dad, who has purposefully sent me Scriptures and prayers and encouragements through this whole thing. He wrote:
“Sometimes I wonder how the disciples would have been had they laid down in the boat and just slept with Jesus. He was right there with them in the middle of the storm. I pray that you get a much needed night of sleep. Jesus is sleeping in the boat near you.”
Tears ran down my cheeks. I could barely see the words on my phone. “Jesus is in the boat.”
I turned off the light, closed my eyes, asked the Savior who was with me to care for my son, and slept.
Eight hours later, I woke.
My phone buzzed with a text from my mom, “How was your night, Nina?” I smiled because no matter how old I get, my family will always call me by my nickname. “I slept 8 hours without moving,” I wrote back. Those three dots bubbled on the screen and I waited. “Your dad says that’s because Jesus was in the boat with you.”
I don’t need to tell you that I started sobbing immediately.
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Five years ago, I wrote a book about God’s promise to be with His people at all times. I traced the theme of God’s love expressed through His presence from Genesis to Revelation. And I wrote of all the painful circumstances in my life when nothing proved truer or more comforting than God’s unbreakable promise to be with me. He doesn’t always remove us from our hard circumstances. He doesn’t always pluck us up out of pain. He doesn’t always give us the thing we ask for. But He’s always, always with us. He doesn’t leave or forsake us. He is, as my dad says, in the boat with us. And He is in control. So we can rest in His love because nothing can separate us from it.
In the first difficult week after my son’s surgery, the promise of God’s presence has been a continual comfort. There was a night in the hospital when we couldn’t get any more morphine without a surgeon’s consent. My son looked at me, his eyes glazed with pain, and said, “I know God is with me, Mom. That’s the only way I can get through this.” He has repeated that phrase to me over and over since then. He said it to me five minutes ago when I paused in writing this post because he needed help standing up. “God is with me, God is with me, God is with me,” he panted as he pulled himself to a standing position with the help of a walker that I leaned against with my body weight so it wouldn’t move. You can be comforted by that at fourteen and you can be comforted by that at forty-one. I tucked him into bed at home the other night, trying to arrange the pillows in a way that alleviated some of his pain. We were a week post-op and he asked me, “Mom, why was I born with scoliosis?”
I swallowed. We haven’t slept since coming home. He can’t make it longer than an hour or so before needing to be moved, rotated, medicated, walked. And here we are with questions so big I don’t know how to answer them in such an under-rested state.
“I don’t know exactly, Isaiah,” I began. “Our bodies break and get sick and grow crooked on this earth. Mine broke a long time ago. I couldn’t have children. My body just can’t do it. I asked God all the time, ‘Why did You make me like this?’ And I don’t really have an answer but I do know that if my body had worked, I wouldn’t have adopted you.” It was the muscle-relaxers talking, mostly, but Isaiah’s eyes filled with tears and he whispered, “Then I wouldn’t be here, Mama.” Exhausted but thankful, we hugged as awkwardly as you can with a new spine built of steel. “One day,” I told him, “one day you’ll see God working good from your scoliosis. Who can say how He will use this for good in your life? He’s really good at using hard things for our good.”
I kissed his forehead and pulled a blanket up over his body—a couple inches taller now after the fusion. “If you can’t sleep, think about this. One day there will be no scoliosis. In heaven, we won’t have backs that bend and need surgery. No pain, no medication, no tears, no sadness. We can rest on that promise tonight.”
Sleep, my son. Jesus is in the boat with you.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.