I think were gonna need a really BIG flashlight.

We found ourselves in some very deep and very dark woods, but we were not alone.  Jesus was there to comfort us and help us find our way out.

Scientists tell us that body language, tone, and inflection tell us more about what another person is trying to communicate to us than the actual words do.  It's amazing but true.  How a person says something is more telling than what they actually say. 

When our surgeon came to talk to us in the surgical waiting area, his body language was screaming that something was terribly wrong.  Had the worst happened?  Was Christopher still alive?  The mom inside me knew that he was, but the surgeon's demeanor scared me.  It was obvious that he had some very serious things to discuss with us.

Mike and Christopher in the "woods" of Maui.

His face mask was hanging by the ties around his neck, and he still had the paper covers over his shoes.  As he sat down in one of the waiting room chairs, he began to tell us what had happened in the operating room.  His words mirrored his body language.  He began the conversation with..."when we opened him up, we were very surprised."  He continued with..."we were not expecting to find"..."and we hope it all goes back right."

He lost me at "we were very surprised."  He was very surprised?  He knew Christopher had an infection.  Why would he be surprised?  My mind was already off down a rabbit trail all its' own.  I must have looked confused and surprised too because the surgeon began again.  He told us that he had found an infectious abscess in Christopher's abdomen, and that he had removed it. What he wasn't expecting to find was that the loops of Christopher's intestines were all stuck together.  Mike and I were both surprised now.  How did that happen?  The surgeon had been inside Christopher's abdomen many times before.  Seems to me like that would be something impossible to miss.

Self explanatory!

I asked the obvious question...what?  How did they get that way?  How long have they been that way?  Christopher just had surgery 9 months ago.  Why didn't you notice this problem then?  He hadn't noticed the problem 9 months ago because they weren't all stuck together back then.  As for how they got that way, the answer was scar tissue.  Just like when you get a skinned knee and your body forms a scar over the cut, the body can form scar tissue on the inside of the body after surgery.  Christopher's scar tissue was extreme.  It actually resulted in gluing all the loops of his small intestine together.  Instead of the loops operating independently from one another, they were working as one big mass.  Clearly, this would not allow for healthy digestion.

My next question...were you able to fix it?  The answer was yes, I hope so.  I didn't need to analyze any of his body language to understand that this was a scary answer to my question.  What do you mean you hope so?!?  He explained that in order to "unglue" the loops of bowel, he had to remove them from Christopher's body and set them on the operating table.  Then the painstaking process of carefully cutting them apart began.  He explained that he had tried to be as careful as possible, but that there was a chance that a piece of bowel may have become nicked in the process.  I knew what that meant.  Christopher had a hole in his small intestine once when the feeding tube punctured it.  That was the night he nearly died of a massive internal infection.  The surgeon's demeanor was making perfect sense now.  There was real reason for concern.

However, a hole was not the only concern.  The doctor continued to explain the operation to us.  After he sliced all the loops of bowel apart, he carefully put Christopher's bowels back inside his abdomen.  There was no way to determine exactly how they should go back in, so the hope was that the bowels would just settle back into their natural position on their own.  If they didn't, they could become twisted and cause a bowel obstruction which would require, wait for it...emergency surgery. 

A dark, heavy feeling settled over the little waiting room.  It felt like my heart was in my shoes, and my jaw was on the floor.  I felt my shoulders slump to my knees.  I was heartsick and dejected.  I'm not even sure how I remained upright.  I heard that old saying, "if it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all" playing inside my head.   Maybe I misunderstood him.  Maybe there was something wrong with my ears or my brain.  Surely, he wasn't really saying that...but he was saying it.  He was saying that Christopher was in dire straits.

I heard myself ask...now what?  After a big sigh, the doctor told us that we would just have to wait and see, wait and see if an infection or an obstruction declared itself.  It would take a few days before he was out of the woods.  He was in some very deep and very dark woods.  In the mean time the doctor had given him an epidural to control his pain, and antibiotics to kill off the infection.  There was nothing more that could be done.  Believe me, you don't ever want to hear your child's doctor say those words.

If you have never accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you can pray like this:

More tomorrow...