What to Remember When Yesterday and Tomorrow Don't Look That Great.
"Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin." - St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta
How many times do we anguish about the past? Or worry about things to come? I know I have more times than I care to admit. This quote became one of my favorites last year. I turned to Mother Teresa's works and reading testimonies from her life because it brought me peace in a time of great heartache. You see my then two year old daughter was dying of liver failure and waiting for a transplant everyone worried she would not get. To understand how she got to that point, we have to rewind the clock further.
At nine months old, Bee choked on a packing peanut and eventually swallowed it. I worried about what else she had put in her mouth, so I brought her to the Emergency Department at Phoenix Children's. They did an x-ray and told us she was constipated. Prune juice-- that's what was recommended. I turned off my phone after I got back and just enjoyed being with my family. Three emergent voice-mails were left. They were instructing me to come back into the ED immediately.
They had seen something.
Cancer. A tumor larger than a grapefruit. Four rounds of chemotherapy and we were told it was inoperable. We sought a second opinion at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. There was a surgeon that could and would take her case. Friday, February 13, 2015, my baby entered the operating room for her first surgery. It was the first time she came so close to Jesus that He could kiss her.
By the grace of God, we were sent to a devout Catholic surgeon with remarkable skill and faith that God is in control. In 30 years, he had never seen anyone clot like that, let alone live to tell the tale. She was a miracle. Our first long hospital stay was three months there. She had five total operations, removing most of her small intestine, her pancreas, part of her stomach, part of her liver and her spleen. She was sick, unable to eat and therefore on IV nutrition--but she was alive. Every day we questioned our past mistakes. "Why didn't we just come here to begin with?" "Why did we agree to the surgery?" Our heads filled with "why?" over and over and over again, beating ourselves up.
It didn't get better. In fact, she only got sicker. The IV nutrition keeping her alive was also killing her liver slowly. We relocated again from Phoenix to Philadelphia for more advanced medical care for her. It was an excruciating, yet necessary move. We left our home. A city that we loved.
Our motto became "Thy will be done." All the while, hoping for the best, and emotionally preparing for the worst.
We moved into the hospital in Philadelphia for six months before they transferred us to Georgetown. She was in end stage liver disease at this point. We had chosen to seek transplant and she was listed in DC for a multi-visceral transplant (liver, small bowel, pancreas and stomach) and to wait above the list at status 1B she needed to be living in the hospital.
She only got sicker. Liver failure is hard to watch, especially in your baby. We looked to the future, wondering how we could survive the loss of our child. Wondering when we'd become part of a group of parents we didn't want to join. My husband and I talked about burial plots, burial dresses, funerals to prepare ourselves for that potential tomorrow that could have been any day.
By the grace of God, she received her second chance at life, her gift, and miraculously, she survived the operation on June 16th, 2016. Something we were told would probably not happen.
We take every day and strive to live exactly as God wants us to. Is it perfect? Far from it. But it is more joyful than not. Life is beautiful no matter the stage.
Mother Teresa's wisdom helped me through those dark days. The sicker Bee got, the more we needed to focus on that day, that moment with her. The sicker she got, the more we recognized God's will in it all. Today is all you're guaranteed by God. And I don't say that in a "you only live once so do whatever" kind of way. Today is beautiful in all its imperfection. What you didn't like about yesterday fades away when you focus on what's in front of you. When you worry about tomorrow, you don't see the memories you're making today.
So let us begin. Let us begin to realize that God is great no matter what and each day possesses the capacity for great joy, beauty and love.