Even Diana Prince Can’t do it all.

bonus points if you know who Diana Prince is without having to click this link. (It’s just to wikipedia i promise.)

*Insert loud dramatic sigh here*

you guys – this is hard. Really really really hard.

and the next time I think I’m Wonder Woman, I want someone to slap me really really really hard.

Because I’m not.

I’m exhausted and I ache all over and I’m shaky from either lack of real food or lack of sleep or just overall running on sheer adrenaline for…like a month.

I know you are all SO HAPPY for us to be home, and believe me, I am equally as happy that we made it home. But like I have referenced before, getting home is usually the start of the real battle. Discharging from the ICU is not a preferred course of action for a good reason. Most notably that I am only one person, and in the ICU we at least have two persons – one for the day and one for the night. Because running medications on 5 different Iv pumps overnight requires the ability to be awake and cognizant.

I wish I had a bunch of cute pictures of how happy she was to be in her own room, to see her sisters and our neighbor friends who came to say hi. But I don’t. Because that only lasted for about 20 minutes before the stress of the long drive, of having to be upright for that long, of all the excitement after laying mostly still for 3 weeks and still being pretty gosh darn  sick – all of that hit at once. And our courier from the pharmacy was not here with the magical medications we needed to bring her relief. And my older three kids were excitedly telling me everything about their last few days and i wanted to hear them, i wanted to sit and hold them endlessly and just soak them all in again, but I couldn’t. I had a screaming baby and medical supplies literally all over and about four loads of laundry dumped by the washing machine and NO MEDS to help stop the pained screaming and Ben left for his business trip in the middle of this chaos and it just made me want to curl up in a corner sucking my thumb and rocking myself to sleep.

But I couldn’t do that because children needed showers and help with homework and mommy time and Kendall needed all new IV lines set up for when the medications did come and she was too cold and too hot and wanted ice packs here and blankets there and this movie on no that movie on and then her nurse accidentally threw out a major part to making her oxygen concentrator work last week so we were trying to jerry-rig that and then the medications FINALLY CAME and we have pumps and IV lines all over the place because there isn’t enough room on her IV pole for all the pumps and all the bags of medicines so we are taping things to walls and using lamps as makeshift IV poles and we finally finally finally got Kendall some relief at 9pm and I got a few minutes of snuggles in with the big girls and then the nurse and I had to go over all of the new medications and all the new paperwork that needs to be filled out. So I got my nice hot pressurized shower at about 11:15 and then had to stay up to run meds at midnight.

Got to see the beautiful full moon as it started it’s arc behind Venus. It was ALIVE last night did you see it?? I just sat and stared and tried to soak up the quiet amazing beauty of that glowing moon and sat in awe at a God who could put on such a fabulous show in the middle of the dark night. And was reminded that that is when He shines the best…when things seem the hardest, the darkest…that’s when you know you are truly held.
So I set my alarms for 2 am and 4 am and 5 am to run Kendall’s other meds and I got in bed for a couple hour nap and I got up to reset her heartrate alarms and to untangle lines that were causing occlusion alarms and to run the right meds on the right pumps hanging off lamps and taped to dressers and I prayed that my hands would be guided and that I would not make any mistakes in my overly sleep-deprived state. (Did I mention that the last night in the hospital I only slept from 5:45 am til 7:15 am because we were working all night to keep Kendall’s pain under control???)

So here we are this morning and I am definitely feeling FAR less than wonder woman-ish and I am trying to organize the chaos of paperwork and new medications and charts for the nurses in the few hours I have before her next set of medications needs to run. But we survived the first night. That is huge. Today is another day and we can hope that maybe today is the day her pain lessens and i can run a few less meds tonight. I got the big girls on the bus and i shakily made my way back home with a list on my mind of all the things I needed to do and I looked up and there was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen in my life – the Dunkin Donut Fairy with a large coffee and a pumpkin muffin and I just hugged her and tried to stay upright because I just NEEDED that…..I needed it in a way beyond just craving sugar and caffeine I just needed to know that the strength I needed was going to come minute by minute and hour by hour but when i needed it the most it was going to come. (thank you miss B – you are truly beautiful inside and out – even without coffee in your hand for me! <3 )

I do not know what possessed me to think I could replace our fabulous nurses and amazing care from West5 at home by myself. I honestly have no idea. I realize now that I cannot and will not ever be able to do what those people do for my daughter without MAJOR major headaches and issues. I cannot thank them enough for ALL of their care and love and concern for my daughter. The ones who get to work for shift assignments and fight over who gets Kendall that day or night, the ones who lose the fight and still pop in to say hi to us, the ones who win the fight and provide outstanding care day after day, night after night. the doctors, the techs, the HUC’s, the discharge planners who love my last minute requests…..You guys are our home away from home and oh how I was torn last night as I wanted to plop on the floor and cry because I couldn’t make her pain go away and she was doing her fever thing again and I just wanted to be home here and i wanted to be home there and i just wanted this all to be not my real life right at that moment. but I know any one of you up there would have told me to get off the floor and stop crying and do what needed to be done for kendall so I did.

And we will get through.

your prayers, all of you, near and far – they will get us through. The food you are signing up to bring us, the cards you are sending, the love you put into my inbox and my phone via texts and the hugs I get when I see you in the store – these are how we will survive. how I will survive. And If I survive, we’re all surviving.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, we are surviving.
now I’m going to do my best to channel my inner Diana Prince, original Warrior Princess, and get shit stuff done around here.

See you on the flip side.

T-crest out.