Love Me a Good Roller Coaster

I love a good roller coaster.  I lived in eastern central Florida for four years, close enough to enjoy the amusement parks and their entry fees and long enough to realize you’d need to visit all the theme parks in Florida to equate to one in the midwest – Cedar Point.

Don’t blow your top.
A view of Mount St. Helens from the Hospital.

Universal Studios Island of Adventure has one or two.  Sea World has one.  Disney World has one or two.  Busch Gardens has beer… I mean, two or three good ones.  But Cedar Point is the end all, be all of roller coaster, puke-your-guts-out glory amusement.

I took a group of Coloradans to Cedar Point.  Meh, they first thought, we have Elitch Gardens!   I told them to just wait and see.  On the ride home from Cedar Point they wouldn’t shut up about how lousy Elitch Gardens had just become.  Cedar Point, HELL YEAH! became the motto for the rest of the trip.

Life presents itself in a variety of roller coasters.  Some are kiddie rides – boring, unless you’re 5 years of age when 30 feet in the air seems like 30,000.  Some are tilt-a-whirls – eat before you ride and you’ll be sure to lose your lunch.  Some are the heart-in-your-throat rides that you are glad you just had the chance to get off…until later, when you want to ride it again for the sheer thrill of it or the line is only 20-people long.  The others are like that except you don’t ride them ever again.  Cedar Point only has one of those for me.  That wooded one in the back.  The one that gave me an instant headache from the incessant shaking – like those machines that mix up paint.  I haven’t ridden that one again.  I don’t plan to, either.

I’m on one of those right now.  After 11 days in two hospitals and a doctor telling me there may be yet another week of hospital stay, I’ve got that headache that tells me I’m pretty much done with this ride.

If a lot of lava and ash was under St. Helens, what’s under the Hood? (Did you catch that one?)

Stop the ride.

I want to get off.

I’m going to vomit.

Of course, this is my own bowl of pits I’m spitting into.  This roller coaster of life hasn’t dealt me a blow like this before.

With all the serene beauty of this region and everything I’ve seen and experienced in this life, this little “kiddie ride” isn’t going to get me out of the amusement park.  There’s too much salt water taffy yet to be eaten.

My little girl is making baby step improvements.  For an impatient father, this isn’t going fast enough, indeed.  I’d like the doctors to prescribe something that propels healing into hyperdrive like the Top Thrill Drag Roller Coaster.  The ride lasts a whole 20 seconds long.  0 – 120 mph in three seconds.  ORDER UP!

What has helped keep me moderately calm are the virtual prayers, the family support of hundreds of immediate and distant relatives (hell, we’re all distant relatives, just ask Kevin Bacon), and the flashes of brilliant smiles my little girls shows here and there.

I keep thinking of the movie What About Bob? and baby steps.

Baby steps.  

Baby steps.

Cedar Point is big and the lines even bigger.  To wait sometimes 2 or more hours for a 20-second ride isn’t exactly efficiency, is it?

So, too, is life.  The thrill I’m seeking will come.  I do have to wait a bit, but I can handle it.  There are people all around me making sure I do handle it.  Holding my hand, praying, simply talking or listening.  They are all around.  Besides, Portland is a beautiful place.  Lots of great people and scenery to pass some of the hardest times, as you can see from the above photos.

Yeah, I’d like to get off this ride for its made me a little sick.  There are other ones I’d like to try.  Soon enough.

Soon enough.

(P.S. – for Portland roller coasters, simply attempt to drive the Portland area freeway system.  I understand building anything on the side of a mountain is difficult, but, holy crap, these engineers were either on acid or roller coaster freaks.)

These are the Days of Our Lives

This is getting old.  Actually, I am mentally over it.

It’s been a week.

I’m done…fried.

I can’t keep track of the adjustments of medications as they go from a drip to a bottle, back to a drip and back to a bottle again in varying amounts and consistencies.  They tell us that vomiting is okay.  Okay, but it doesn’t make it acceptable for a parent to watch it over and over again.  Darn it all to heck.

Yesterday I spent my 43rd birthday here, in a hospital room.  I also had another allergy attack that left my face drained in color and enthusiasm and hope.  Sneezing fits reminiscent of my previous post.  I’d sneeze ten to fifteen times, about 2 to 3 seconds in between.

Today I felt great, considering the allergy fits from the day before.

Still… I want out.  I want to leave this place with my wife, a healthy Sophie Ann, and our cat and do what we were doing before this all seemingly collapsed.

The impatience in me is getting the better of me.  Just a few moments ago my wife was in the hospital bathroom shower getting cleaned up.  The predictable happened.  My little girl had a fit that I couldn’t console.  After my wife was done, she did the job.  Again.

You just feel so completely helpless and useless all at the same time.  I feel my own breathing is only making the air filters need to be cleaned more frequently.  I try to be strong.  I’m just beat.  I’m frustrated.  I want out of this place.

I am trying to recall the passage the Pastor who visited us on Thursday read to us before prayer.  I can’t remember it.  I can’t find it.  I need it back.  Something about the worry and anxiety of today…

In each of us there is a line that is drawn.  For some the line is miles and miles away, the ability to endure is great.  For others, like myself, while I can endure physical pain the pain of seeing my child in discomfort is overpowering.

My greatest frustration is trying to live into the role I’ve feel I’ve been given.  Pastor.  There is something about that word that insinuates strength in the time of weakness.  I know, it’s more stereotypical than a reality.

Rob Bell wrote, “We plot. We plan. We assume things are going to go a certain way. And when they don’t, we find ourselves in a new place-a place we haven’t been before, a place we never would have imagined on our own.  It is the difficult and the unexpected, and maybe even the tragic, that opens us up and frees us to see things in new ways.  Many of the most significant moments in our lives come not because it all went right but because it all fell apart.  Suffering does that. It hurts, but it also creates”

I need to read that book again, but I don’t have it with me.  I get it.  I am struggling to exercise it.

What I am supposed to see in new ways?  What is this hospital situation creating?  (both of these questions are rhetorical)  The suffering part is more than in the open.  Both my wife and I have had our breakdowns.  Our little girl has had her share of discomfort.  More than some, less than others in this place.

Many have asked the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  Several more have tried to answer this question.  A few have answered it with shallow theology leading to statements like a Westboro Baptist Church protest.  A few others have said what I typically say… I don’t know.

I don’t know why my little, sweet, innocent babe is suffering so.  I’ll never have that answer other than, at the moment, a potential milk protein allergy.  As I’ve said before  #%*$@!

There is no real answer for suffering.  It happens.  It happens to the best of people and it happens to the worst.  Really, I’m not defending the arrested suspect of the Boston Marathon bombing, but what suffering, if any, had he endured to lead to such action?  I know in my current suffering I want to throw this laptop clear through the window and watch it smash on the pavement below.  I know that if another person rudely accosted me for doing so that person would get more than an earful from me.  It may not be very intelligible, but it’s be more than an earful.

And that’s not pastoral at all.

There are a few things that I have to come to grips with.  Others must to.

First, I am human first, called and ordained into ministry second.  Without my wits in a stressful situation I’m prone to be less pastoral and more human – meaning, less able to control my emotions than I’d prefer.  I’m not going to go “postal” or anything, but the rage certainly boils occasionally beneath my skin.

Second, these are the days of our lives.  Everybody walks these hospital hallways at one time or another.  Weather we’re in the room with joy or across the hall with grief and frustration, we all walk these halls.

Lastly, I’m not in control and I wish, more than anything today, that I was.

I’ve used this blog to vent before.  I’m using it now.  Perhaps this is the constructive manner of “seeing things in new ways” that Bell was getting at.  I still don’t know for sure.

I do know this:  One thing I do see differently is the fragility of life in my daughter.  I know she’s absolutely helpless as an infant, totally dependent on her parents, as all newborns are.  Yet she was as healthy as a horse up to two weeks ago Thursday, when this all began.  At this same age I had spinal meningitis.  I know my own circumstances then placed my parents in a similar context.  They’re here in Portland for support, nearly reliving the same thing they went through 43 years ago.  I know Sophie doesn’t have spinal meningitis and, so far, no life-threatening diagnosis has been made.  But I feel for them as I do their granddaughter.

No one wants to see their child, grandchild, great-granchild, etcetera, suffer.

And no one should.  This hurts.  I wish it didn’t, but it does.  This is another day of my life.  Tomorrow I can hope and pray for better.  Better for my daughter, the victims of all our national and global tragedies, and all those who walk these hallways.