Tea & Talkies: Best Laid Plans

Why today's video is a deeply personal note instead.

Photo by Kuu Lotus on Unsplash

The video was supposed to go here. Today was the day I’d planned (such beautiful plans) to be up the mountain and shoot live from different Idyllwild locales, chatting about our upcoming Summer Search Party (more plans), hiding books in the wild for feral readers, and mapping clues to celebrate our growing Substack community.

But this is not that day.

I’ve made it a professional boundary to never discuss my private life with readers. I can tell you a good story or two, sure, just read my Blog Books series. If I have a new grandbaby (April 27) or a kid’s wedding in my backyard on the horizon (June 20), you’re totally in the loop.

And getting you—yes, you—up the hill to Idyllwild sometime this summer is still on the agenda.

Sigh.

Although I have a very large hot cuppa with me today, I just can’t bring myself to turn on the camera and talk with you. It will become an ugly cry within minutes. If you are triggered by medical crisis, please don’t keep reading. Please. Take very good care of you.

Besides… I want to focus on the miracles.

Last Sunday, my eldest son (35) was discharged from UC San Diego Hospital (Jacobs Medical Center) with a new liver transplanted into his body. As I had stayed at his side from the beginning, I was sent home, too. The beginning being April 14th, when he finally allowed us to take him, yellow as a lemon with jaundice, terrified and drinking to the last minute, into the local emergency room.

For a young man who refused to ever see a doctor, let alone swallow a pill or allow a needle from one, voluntarily walking in on his own two feet was the first miracle.

He detoxed for three days and came home, weak as a kitten and scared straight as a post, and signed himself into out-patient therapies. A week later, he admitted to daily kidney pain and asked to go back to the ER. A week later he went again, because now his abdomen was filling with ascites. Five days later, the pain was so bad he begged to go back. He could hardly stand. I rented a wheelchair. He was admitted twice, had three paracentesis procedures, sonograms, CT scans, and lab results that only grew scarier.

On Mother’s Day, at dawn, we walked him in for the final time and the local hospital did not let us go home. They began what maintenance treatment they could and reached out to the UCSD transplant team.

Our son was dying. Fast. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

No drug, no chemo, no operation, no bypass. No amount of love or money. A lot of people got in line to offer theirs, but he could not accept a living donor’s partial liver. And, without immediate radical replacement, his liver was about to take down other organs on its way out. We didn’t even have time on our side.

During the eternal week we waited, wondering if UCSD would accept him as a candidate, our son became officially one month sober. But no amount of sobriety and good intentions would save him now. We did not share this bleak prognosis with anyone, but everyone understood. The doctors continued to be vague and insist they “didn’t know” what might happen next. “We’ll have to wait and see,” is a gut-wrenching phrase that will continue to haunt this journey.

Distractions, visits, siblings, and movie marathons blurred into a single, round-the-clock prayer. One I’ve been praying, face down on the ground, for years.

Dear God. Please. Help our boy.

So many people around the world prayed with us. Thank you. Groups and strangers and churches and friends. It was the only thing anyone could do.

I suppose I’ll never stop praying it. This journey does not have an arrival.

But it does have the answer.

There’s only ever been One power over mortality. And He answered, “yes.”

UCSD opened a bed the following Sunday. We followed the ambulance that took him away and I watched as they crammed six months of testing into three long days. That Thursday they placed him on the transplant list.

And on Sunday, the 24th of May, our son received a new birthdate. Another chance.

He healed so well and so eagerly that they sent him home on the 31st.

It will take me a long, a very long, time to unpack and process what just happened to us. My head is still spinning. My son, who alternates between grinning from the couch with delight he cannot even begin to put words to and cussing out the uncooperative bloody drains hanging out of his abdomen, is still pondering the sixty-one staples marching like a railroad track across his body.

I am learning how to feed him high-protein low-sugar meals, get him to daily follow-up appointments, chart his everything, and put the correct meds into the correct pillboxes for the correct times of days without panicking over being the weak link in an incredibly professional, multi-layered transplant team who I simply cannot thank enough, ever.

I guarantee that there are more miracles before, during, and after this story than I will be able to chronicle. More lives changed. More faith built. More.

This note is the first thing I’ve written in two months, and (though it makes me cry) it feels so good. Slowly, I’ll get back to work. For now, the plan is to post this, cuddle my cat, and touch sunshine on the patio.

To breathe.

I stand in gratitude and awe.

And if you’d like to chat in person, I plan hope to be in Idyllwild on July 25th for their annual Author Faire. It was hard to let our Summer Search Party go, but it will be waiting for us next year. Come up anyway and bring your cuppa.

We’ll celebrate life together.