Writing Samples: "Your Son Has Meningitis"

You live in a rural area, and you sense that it would take longer for the paramedics to arrive at your house on this snowy, hazardous night and then transport Mike, Jr. to the hospital than it will take to drive him into town yourself. So, you go with your instincts, carry his bundled, limp body out to the car and place him into your wife's arms, where she is waiting in the back seat. Your other son, Tony, whom you have often called a man trapped inside of a child's body, joins you in the front seat. He reminds everyone to buckle our seat belts. All three are wondering if Mike is alive or if he will at least live until he gets to the hospital.

This was our scene in December of 1982, when Mike was only ten and Tony was eleven. Mike was ill on Friday, went Christmas shopping with us on Saturday and became seriously worse Sunday. We kept in contact with our doctor by telephone throughout the day. He advised us as he best could, given the layperson's information we gave him. Then, about seven o'clock, when Mike was totally unresponsive and stiffening into a fetal position, our doctor told us to call for help and get him to the hospital - at once. Along the way Tony helped navigate us through the city, and I blew the car horn at everyone who happened to be in or come into our traffic lane. I believe to this day that I made it to St. Mary's Hospital in Madison, WI, faster than if we would have waited for others in our small town to assemble and make their way to us and then to the hospital. The slush I drove through, the beating of the wiper blades and the eerie sullenness of our family are echoes I recall even 18 years later.

At the hospital, they literally took our son away from us. We yielded complete physical control to the marvelous staff at St. Mary's. At the same time, we surrendered our son to God. Mike was His to do with whatsoever He decided. We three experienced a spiritual peace we cannot describe by tongue or by pen. Please let it suffice to say that it had to be God's peace, for it was not only indescribable, it was, also, unmatchable.

Everyone we knew, who was aware of our situation as parents of a son who could die at any moment, felt great compassion for us. They could not comprehend how we could daily face this overwhelming challenge. It was a challenge to our hope for Mike's recovery, to our faith in a loving God and for each of us to carry on with Tony's schooling, and my wife's job and mine. Though we spent almost all of our waking hours with Mike, these other areas continued to demand our attention. It was this episode in our four lives that caused me to recognize and learn a new fact of life. "It is often more difficult to be the one watching a loved one go through a difficult life experience than it is to be the one living the ordeal," is a phrase I have espoused since that December in 1982.

It was tough enough for Mike, who miraculously became healed by God, to struggle with the many hours of therapy, which brought him back to 99% of his old self. But at least he knew what level of pain or other problem he was undergoing. Those of us standing by and watching him perhaps at times considered a worse state of being than he was experiencing. (Mike, whom the medical staff at first thought would not live and then modified their prediction to expecting some degree of hearing loss or paralysis from the meningitis, came out of his coma in four days and walked out of the hospital on the17th day. He rejoined his brother and classmates and made the honor roll, again, that semester.)

The message I hope you will gather from my recounting of an intensive time in our family's life is that people can and do sometimes recover from a serious illness. Hopefully you or your loved one will, if you must ever experience such a time of testing and, also, that if you are the one who must undergo an illness, accident or disease, will try to adopt an attitude which will convey hope and courage to your loved ones, who might be helpless curing you or otherwise improving your situation. If I had allowed myself to be bitter about having Parkinson's, it would only have made my daily adjustments and difficulties worse, it would be harder for my loved ones, as well.

In the next book in the Silent Echoes Series, I have included a poem "Your Illness Gives You Chance". It suggests that when we suffer a setback in life, or are born with an infirmity, we have an opportunity to illustrate how one can bare up with our particular malady. All the more, it awards us the chance to show that we still believe in and trust in a loving God. Keep eternity in mind and know that this, too, shall pass.

The end