Mummy – Can you please go and pick up the mixing bowl for me.
Nathan – I can’t right now. I’m busy.
Mummy – You’re busy. Doing what?
Nathan – Doing nothing.
Mummy – That must be really hard work.
Nathan – Oh, it is.
We’re using this blog pretty much to journal as we go along, so sorry for the unnecessary detail and the lack of clarity of thoughts.
The last few days have been really hard. Nathan has hours of the day where he is very needy. He won’t touch the floor or sit on a chair or lie on the bed. He needs someone to be holding him, and holding him up off the scary things all the time. Which causes Elisha to become very jealous and want the same attention. He doesn’t understand why Nathan gets to sit on someone’s lap for breakfast and he doesn’t. So this morning I had Nathan and Tim had Elisha. Barely anything around here is getting done between them.
It’s much the same as some parents deal with everyday with their autistic or impaired children, and makes me grateful in a new way for the development of the kids I have right now. It really is hard work. Feels a bit like having a needy newborn that I didn’t expect. 🙂
He did pretty well yesterday, mainly just glimpses of fear which worsened as he got tired. Late yesterday afternoon I noticed his temperature was heading up, and his paranoia hit in then. There’s a clear difference between when he’s just needing support and protection and when he’s ‘paranoid.’ We went out onto the deck, somewhere he feels safer, and read through Psalm 91 from the kids bible which talks about protection and safety in ways that he understood very well. There were interruptions of squirming and cries, but he asked for it again a little while later.
The problem with his paranoia growing as he gets more tired means that bedtime is much harder and he will only fall asleep on someone. That’s been me for the last few afternoon naps and evenings. Which is extremely uncomfortable and makes for a terrible night of sleep. Last night in particular with his fever he was very restless, and kept putting his knees on my tummy which also feels like it has doubled in size in the last three or four days.
Fevers up near 39 degrees again this afternoon, so we’ve been dosing him up on ibuprofen, which has seemed to work more effectively than paracetamol in the last few days. This time though there hasn’t been any accompanying paranoia or talk of crocodiles, so we might be getting somewhere. Even though they didn’t find anything, it feels like he is still fighting something off.
I’ve been thinking about the spiritual element to this, which is something that’s been in my mind the whole time.
There are factors about it which don’t make any more sense to me than any of the other explanations we could have. That the things he was seeing were everywhere, including Tim and Alan and I. That our prayers seemed to have little effect, either in settling them or increasing them as the things he saw got more violent. That I didn’t pick up or feel anything for the first few hours, when the spiritual atmosphere of things is something I’m normally really sensitive to. I’m not saying that it couldn’t have been spiritual to start off with. There are lots of things that I don’t understand.
That said, after we’d been in the hospital for a few hours, every time he would start thrashing and freaking out, my fear and tension levels would spike instantly, in a way that was different to when we had first arrived and the hallucinations had been worse. It’s almost like the initial hallucinations could have been caused by something different, but then it became something to keep him in fear and to attack his little soul.
Some friends of ours wrote to us saying that they believed that what had been intended for harm would be used for good. It’s already easy to see how Nathan has responded to it positively. The first night that we were home Tim and I were both lying in bed with him and he asked us to pray. So we spent a while with him praying about lots of different things and he was very involved. Today Tim and Sian moved out, so a new room opened up. Nathan walked in, announced that it was the church and we needed music. We grabbed their instruments box and sat in the room for a while making music while Nathan made up songs. About Jesus and his family and daddy.
I believe that this will be part of moulding a kid who lives fearlessly and knows who he belongs to and the foundation that he stands upon.