More Complaining, Part 1

On July 5, Nathan turned 10 months old.  And for the most part, it had been a pretty brutal 10 months.

Nathan's stay in the hospital for the G-Tube surgery was his 7th different stay in the hospital and brought his total time in the hospital to 181 days, or in simpler terms, 6 months.  That meant that his time out of the hospital was 4 months, or 123 days.

With each hospitalization, we kept trying to be hopeful and optimistic that it would be the last one, and that we could enjoy more than just a few days or weeks with Nathan at home.  Up to this point, the longest consecutive time that he had spent at home was 36 days, which mark he had reached twice.  In particular, it was extremely frustrating that we weren't making any progress.  In the 2 1/2 months since I had started counting "days in" the hospital versus "days out" of the hospital, the days in were still 2 months more than the days out.  In other words, we weren't gaining any time.

So as much as we tried to have hope and believe that each hospital stay would be the last, with each subsequent hospitalization, it was becoming harder and harder to hold on to that hope.  Specifically, it was hard because we felt like we had to do it all on our own.

When Nathan was first born, we had made the decision to spend most of Sundays at home so that we could attend our local congregation, instead of attending the services at the hospital.  My initial thought behind that was so that we could benefit from the support and fellowship from the other members of the congregation.

But 10 months later, I was regretting that decision.

We attend a church with a lay ministry.  All of the leadership and teaching positions are filled by members of the local congregation.  Every so often, the positions are rotated through, so that one person doesn't have the burden of responsibility for their whole life and to give others the opportunity to serve as well.

So, since those who serve in leadership positions are your neighbors (or at least live generally in close proximity), it is commonly believed and accepted that they will be interested in the happenings of your life.  And during particularly hard and worrisome times, it is expected that they will be especially mindful of you and your situation and do what they can to comfort and help you.

So in my head, maybe I had envisioned or idealized things happening entirely different than they actually did.  And that's probably the reason it caused me so much stress and anger.