Elijah Updates

Midnight report

I don’t have my email address book here at the hospital, so I’m posting this request to the site, in hopes that some will be up late and read and then PRAY.

Unfortunately, around 6:30pm, Eli’s anesthesia had completely worn off to the point of excruciating pain to his back.  The doctors gave him morphine through his IV which gave him some temporary relief.  He insisted I lie in the bed with him, so down I went, confined to the same grueling horizontal position as Eli.  For several hours he would be in and out of sleep, with random muscle spasms to his back that put him into an intense episode of pain.  It absolutely amazed me at how brave he was being.  He would do this sort of “lamaze” type breathing until the pain subsided (with absolutely no coaching by me- he must have picked it up when I was pushing him out of my womb just five years prior).  By then he was terrified that someone was going to touch the bed, move, or breath close to him and that it was going to hurt his back.  Finally, with much persistence, we found a new cocktail of medication to hopefully stop the spasms.  After holding the laptop in a uniquely awkward fashion so he could watch a Caillou for a while, I finally decided I had to get up.  So after five hours of the horizontal hell, Ray and I switched places and I emptied my bladder and put on my PJ’s.  Now Ray is snoring so loudly that the cocktail must be working, because Eli is snoozing soundly.

So, if you get this in the night, please pray that the pain would subside and that Eli would get restful, continous, uninterrupted sleep.  Pray that the nurses will be carefully attentive to his pain management and that we will be discerning in how to comfort Eli and gracious as to how to communicate with the hospital staff.

One more thing….during one of Eli’s spasms, as he was breathing deeply, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said “Everyone is praying for me, right?”  I thought I was going to completely lose it.  But I said, “absolutely” and then started praying louder over him.  It comforted him.

Love,

Angela