The season of Advent- growth in waiting.

Although being hit with the news of Brady's Down syndrome diagnosis wasn't something we expected, the next conversation was harder for me, personally.  The lead pediatrician from the hospital where he was born came in to talk with us, presumably about the DS.  He told us that they were going to perform an Echocardiogram, which is an image scan of the heart (kind of like an ultrasound), on Brady that afternoon.  He said that many babies with DS also have heart issues and so they wanted to rule out any abnormalities before they could send us home.  I wasn't too concerned, after all, my OB-GYN hadn't heard anything alarming during my pre-natal visits, and the delivering pediatrician hadn't heard anything after Brady was born.  So, they took Brady, I got to nap, and we got him back an hour later.

The pediatrician came back in the room a few hours later to tell us that he needed to talk with us alone (we had a pretty big crowd that had to come to welcome Brady!).  He told us that it appeared that Brady had an atrial septic disorder (ASD), which put simply meant he has a hole in his heart between the top two chambers.  This disrupts the amount of oxygenated blood that could go through his body.  They were going to be transporting Brady to Lurie Children's Hospital where their team of neonatal cardiologists could better diagnose and care for him.

Now that scared me.  Brad and I sent our friends home while they wheeled Brady to ICU, then we prayed and called our parents.  There wasn't anything else we could do- nothing else we knew to do.  So we prayed and we waited.

We were at Lurie Children's for ten days where a wonderful team of doctors and nurses taught us more about what was going on with Brady - they confirmed the ASD and told us that he also has pulmonary hypertension- and we waited.  They showed us how to care for him, what warning signs to look for, how to start therapy services for him- and we waited.  We learned what it meant to rely on each other and God as we just wanted our baby to be well enough to come home and begin our life- that was worth waiting for!

In this season of Advent, we are taught about waiting for the Christ- child, and waiting on His return.  When I hear about things like the elementary school shooting in Connecticut, I cry out, just pleading that Christ would come again soon and heal this broken world.  The waiting is the worst part, and yet it's the part that teaches us the most about who we are called to be.  For Brad and I, the waiting in the hospital (and now the waiting on Brady's heart surgery to fix the problem) has been the most agonizing part- and the most beneficial.  We have learned how to care for a baby with special needs, and how even though all these things are going on, he's still just our baby that we need to grow into a man of God.  There is growth and healing in waiting, we just have to step back and see things through the eyes of what God is doing.