Depression... and Hope!
I haven’t cried like that since, well, since my melanoma. At least that time I could sob in the arms of my wife. Tonight she wasn’t there, though had she known what was going to happen, she would have been there.
I was taking care of our two youngest, and had just gotten them out of the bathtub and my four year old came to me crying that she had just thrown up. All over the carpet. So I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to keep our 18 month old out of the mess and clean it up as best I could, and put the four year old in back in the tub, and keep the 18 month old happy, and out of trouble, and...
And keep a happy front up when the four year old says “I want mommy!”
I had her lie down with a bucket in case she got sick again, and put the 18 month old to bed. When I went back to check on our four year old she was asleep, with her face in the bucket. I didn’t lose it then. No, I made it out to the living room where I started to pick up so I could vacuum the shampoo off of the carpet where she had vomited. And that’s when it hit me.
I was this close to falling into a deep depression. I suppose I am not that much farther from it now. See, our four year old has been having headaches for over a month now. She has a CAT scan scheduled in about 10 days. The itinerary for the appointment came today. She’ll need an IV and sedation. Picturing that didn’t help my frame of mind. Neither did remembering that she said she threw up because of her headaches, or remembering her telling me that the doctors were going to “cut off all my hair and crack open my head to get the bump out.”
I knelt to pray. God was the only one I had to share this grief with. And I sobbed, missing my wife and not being able to call her. I was afraid. Afraid my daughter was going to die. Afraid that she, that we, our family, would all be going through some very difficult times. At the time it didn’t seem to help to know that “perfect love casts out all fear,” or that God is sovereign, or that we shouldn’t worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. All I knew was that I was afraid of losing my girl. So I cried.
Somehow I was able to calm down enough to ask God for peace, and enough faith to trust Him, and the sobbing stopped.
I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know how I’ll deal with something as intense as a brain tumor in my four year old daughter. I pray that it is something less serious. A lot less serious. The only thing I do know is that I can trust in the God who made the universe, and who made me and who made my little girl, and who loves us and has His best for us.
I guess that is where my hope is.
Update: The CAT scan returned negative, and our daughter no longer suffers from headaches. God is good!