Take Heart

Hospital Stay Survival: Spiritually and Practically

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 4 • Episode 140

Share episode

Carrie Holt discusses how to spiritually and practically navigate hospital stays with our children. Drawing from her own experiences, Carrie talks about the importance of recognizing the armor we put on in these situations, such as control, withdrawal, and cynicism, and how they can hinder our ability to trust in God. She encourages listeners to invite God into these spaces and remember that He is always with us, even during hospital stays. Carrie also offers practical advice for dealing with unplanned hospital stays and emphasizes the importance of grieving the losses that come with these experiences. She encourages listeners to know their limits, rely on scripture and prayer, and seek support from therapists and counselors during hospital stays. 

Ep.140; September 12, 2023

Key Moments:
[1:16] Spina Bifida and my coping mechanism
[5:00] Looking for Jesus in the moment
[7:43] Letting grief come
[9:29] Practical hospital survival tips
[13:43] CaringBridge: How Carrie uses it

Resources:
Ep. 101: Identity Theft (References Breath Prayers)
CaringBridge
Footprints Poem

If you enjoyed the show:

It's Carrie, and you're listening to Episode 142. This month is freestyle, allowing us to choose whatever topic God is laying in our hearts and I’ve entitled this episode, Hospital Stay Survival: Spiritually and Practically. 

Hospital stays are never on a list of things we want to do. They disrupt our lives and our plans. Oftentimes we feel like we're losing time we can't regain. Let's face it: it's difficult on many levels. Today I want to talk about some things that we can do spiritually and practically to flourish during hospital stays with our kids. 

My son's very first hospital stay was planned down to the most minute minute and detail. It was the day he was born. He was transferred to a different hospital. Before that, though, it consisted of coordinating two different surgeons' schedules in two different hospitals. My son has Myelomeningocele or Spina Bifida, and so he was literally born with an open hole in his back that required immediate surgery to close. Then he had surgery for a shunt a few days later. When I was 20 weeks pregnant, and we found out the diagnosis, life had thrown us a curveball. After I mourned deeply, I dealt with it the only way I knew how and that was control. Deep down. I think my mantra was okay, God, thanks for the curveball. I got this, I can take it from here now. Control was my armor. 

Over the past 16-plus years, we have had around 50 hospital stays: planned and unplanned. As the days approach for a planned surgery, I have found myself withdrawing from other people around me, my kids, my spouse. I can't do anything, I can't do housework. I'm protecting myself, I'm bracing myself for what's to come, so emotionally I withdraw. I will also expect all the bad things to happen. If they don't happen, then I'm not disappointed. I've been disappointed in the past. It's really important to recognize your armor; the types of armor I put on our control, withdrawal, and cynicism. The problem with those is that I'm not trusting God. Can you relate to that? We're not inviting God into these spaces with us. We're pushing him back into the back corner going, okay. It's my turn to take care of all this. 

I think sometimes, when we're advocating, processing hard information, and making life-changing or life-saving decisions, we feel like it's on our shoulders, and we have to do it all by ourselves. What kind of armor do you tend to wear when your child goes into the hospital? Not all armor is bad. God created our bodies with fight or flight for reason: survival. Sometimes, our emotions have to be shut down. I know different parts of our brain shut down in emergency situations in order to make good decisions. But one of the things that I have learned over the years is that it is important that we recognize when we're putting the armor on; eventually, it's going to have to come off. We can't continue to wear the armor of control, withdrawal, cynicism. Sometimes, we forget to take it off. We have to be careful. 

My counselor helped me recognize this recently. We were actually headed into a particularly difficult doctor's appointment after 16 years with the same orthopedic surgeon. We were going in to meet someone new. The last orthopedic surgeon my son had had performed surgery on him every three to six months for almost 10 years. Honestly, the way he left the hospital for personal reasons, I was pretty angry about it. Some days. It's still difficult. He and I had been in the trenches together, working to keep my son's spine straight and to keep him healthy for a long time. The closer this appointment came, I was angry and grieving this abrupt loss was huge for me. Quite honestly, I was ready to run down anyone who was getting in my way. I was expecting mistakes and bad judgment, and I was ready to fight. I was processing this the day before this new appointment with a new surgeon with my counselor, and she asked me a disarming question: “When you go into your appointment tomorrow, where do you see Jesus?” I want to ask you the same question. Where do you see Jesus when you go in for a hospital stay, or an IEP meeting, or therapy or even a regular doctor's appointment? Is he standing outside? Is he in the room with you? 

Where is he? Have you forgotten him? If he is your Savior, he is not just with you. He's in you, John 7:38 and 39b (and this is Jesus speaking) says, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. Now this, he said about the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is inside of us, and he's indwelling us. We have rivers of living water flowing out of us. When I think about water or rivers, I think about what they do. They give life. They revive. They’re symbols of power and strength. That is the Holy Spirit inside of us, and we have full access to him. We have to be careful to take him with us and imagine him with us during these times. 

I want to switch gears here and talk a little bit practically about unplanned hospital stays. These are the emergency room visits that end up in an admission, the ambulance ride, surgery, sickness. These experiences are really difficult. you're scrambling to adjust a work schedule, finding childcare if you have other children, and doing your best not to have this emergency upend your entire life, even though it does anyway. Here are a few things that I've learned about this rapid turn of events in my own life. 

First of all, it is okay to live moment by moment and take things one second at a time. Often, I pray, God, give me my daily bread. His mercies are new every morning, Lord, have them pour out on me today in this moment. It's also okay to have your armor on. We talked about this a little bit earlier. During these admissions, I have often found that I cannot spend a lot of time in deep soul-connecting prayer or deep digs into the Word of God because I would completely fall apart emotionally. In order to do that, my armor would have to come down, and then I can't think, advocate, or process, and I really think that's okay. We cannot feel guilty that we cannot study deep theology during these times. I think that's why when life is calm, it's really important for us to be digging deep into God's word, seeing who God is in our lives learning more about him, and drawing close to him. I think it's also important to have scripture memorized to drawn on, or verses that you know to turn to, maybe written on a card, a list of God's promises to carry us through. It's also great to do breath prayers, as we've discussed on this podcast and I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. 

One thing to remember is eventually when you come out of that hospital stay, the armor comes off and the grief is going to come. You've experienced loss, loss of time, loss of plans. Sometimes vacations are interrupted. You've had to reschedule work projects, things that have had to be pushed off. If you are married, you have lost time with your spouse, and then you have to reconnect. It’s important to grieve those losses and to process it with a therapist, counselor, even with God to tell him about how you feel. 

Lastly, just overall during hospital stays in general. I have found these rhythms and practices have really helped me to flourish during hospital stays. 

  1. Know your limits. It is okay to have other people stay in the hospital with your child if it's allowed. I know after COVID, sometimes this is not allowed as much, but I will tell you in the early days with my son, we had people around the clock staying with him in the hospital (people from our church, even sometimes people I didn't really know because I was recovering from a C-section we had two little boys at home. Honestly, it was just really insane. I would leave a notebook in the room for people to leave notes. You could make up a card to educate visitors for people who are staying with your child about your child: what is your child's norm and when they need to push the call light and call the nurse. Reach out to the hospital chaplains or your own pastors to be there with you. Know your limits. Take an afternoon and go home and get a shower. When my youngest daughter was about nine months old, I was still breastfeeding, and Toby had a shunt issue where I ended up staying in the hospital with him for the full three days that he was there. He was only in the hospital for three days for his shunt, which was brain surgery. But that's how they do it.  I was pumping. When I got home, my daughter did not want to have anything to do with me, and I was devastated. I also hit a wall. After those three days, there was so much mail and home stuff to process. I realized that my limit was that I can't spend more than one, maybe two nights in the hospital in a row by myself. My husband's job is flexible enough that we can take turns. Maybe that's not the case with you. But choose a night when your favorite nurse is there and go home. It's okay to put your phone right by your bed in case something happens. But we have to know our limits. 


  2. Secondly, consider the question, what do I need at this moment to care for myself to keep going? Practice grounding, going outside for a walk, deep breathing, and doing little things for yourself. I know this is going to sound really silly but drink a lot of water. The hospital is so dry, the air is so dry, we get dehydrated, and we get sick in the hospital. We need to take care of ourselves. We were probably about 20 hospital stays into our journey when I realized that some small ways that I could care for myself were to have comfortable things for me. Do you know how when they call you for surgery, and they say your child can bring a comfort item? These were my comfort items: my pillow, a foam mattress topper if we were going to be in the hospital for more than a few days, a cotton quilt that I loved, and also my own towels and wash class. Sometimes, it can be really practical to have a to-go suitcase packed, just like when you're expecting your baby, packed with things that you might need during a hospital stay. 

  3. Thirdly, process information by keeping a journal about your stay. Nothing exhausts us more than having to respond to all the text messages and emails about what is going on, especially if you're open to sharing and maybe you're not. I was always better to verbally process things with other people. I use the website www.caringbridge.com to keep family and friends up to date, especially during those first nine years when things were really crazy. Some people might use Facebook or Instagram. One really cool thing about CaringBridge is I was able to download it a few years ago and now I have a printed copy with journal entries of all of those things. It's really interesting to go back and read what we went through and see how God was there. It is a testimony to God's grace. Then I didn't have to update everyone. There were also times when things were really crazy when I would give a trusted friend my password and she would update the CaringBridge site for me. You can keep your journal entries more private so that people who only have the link can look at it if you don't want everyone to know. It also helped me process information. Sift through what the doctors were telling me to then be able to tell other people and explain what was going on. Honestly, I felt like it made me a better advocate for my child because I had to understand what the doctors were telling me before I could teach it to other people. 

  4. Lastly, consider how others can help. More than likely, you're going to hear the question, what do you need? What can I do for you? Think about this when life is calm, so when people ask you, you can tell them. Give them your list. Because of this episode, I've actually created a free download for you entitled Hospital Stay Survival. It includes several of the practical things we've talked about, with printable scripture cards that have been really encouraging to me when we've had a hospital stay, a list of things that you can pack in that to-go back, and a card that you can hand to people with ideas of how they can help. It also has some blank notes for hospital communication. It'll be in a link in our show notes. 

Lastly, I want to leave you with this encouragement, even when it doesn't feel like it. God is there. He's with you. I told you just a minute ago that I was reading through some of the journal entries I had printed from the early days of our journey from my CaringBridge. We had three boys, three and under, when Toby entered the world, and he spent almost the first three months of his life in the hospital, a month of that in the ICU. There are times that I will share a little bit of our story with people who didn't know us and verbally speak about what was happening. Sometimes I look back, and I think I don't know how we survived. I really do not know how we lived through what we lived through. What stuck out to me reading each of those journal entries was each of the times I quoted a quick scripture or wrote a reminder that I knew God was with us and sustaining us. I'm sure when I typed that out on CaringBridge, I was trying to reassure myself as much as others who were reading it. I know some of you might be familiar with the Footprints poem, and it's probably kind of not in style anymore. I thought about this poem as I was writing this episode. Reading CaringBridge reminded me of this. Keep a journal so you can remember how God has carried you, and I'm going to close it with this.

One night, I dreamed a dream as I was walking along the beach with my Lord, across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life. For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to me and one to my Lord. After the last scene of my life flashed before me, I looked back at the footprints in the sand. I noticed that at many times along the path of my life, especially at the very lowest and saddest times, there was only one set of footprints. This really troubled me. So I asked the Lord about it. Lord, you said once I decided to follow you, you'd walk with me all the way. But I noticed that during the saddest and most troubled times of my life, there was only one set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed you the most, you would leave me. He whispered. My precious child. I love you and will never leave you. Never ever. During your trials and testings, when you saw only one set of footprints; it was then that I carried you. May God continue to show you how he carries you through.