Sad Week

It has been a week with some very sad news.

James has a friend, Kendra, who had a baby, Trystan, almost 3 years ago, when she was 20.

Due to a whole variety of medical complications at birth, she was extremely ill and so was the baby. They both survived but Trystan had quite severe development disabilities. Kendra says the doctors said he had the mental ability of a 6 month old but I think even that was optimistic – he couldn’t follow movement reliably, couldn’t roll over by himself, his only way of expressing frustration was to cry or arch his back, etc.

To make a long story short, Trystan died last weekend, in his sleep and his funeral is today so I have taken the afternoon off to attend. Kendra is a very sweet young lady and none of this seems quite fair. After spending the last three years of her life with her sole focus being the baby, she has lost her child. She now needs to reinvent her life.

The second sad news was another death. One of the families at our church have 2 adult children who are about the same ages as Melissa and James. About 2 weeks ago, the kids were both feeling under the weather on Friday so they went to the clinic. Laura was prescribed some antibiotics and Jon was told he probably had a mild flu but would be fine. Jon wasn’t getting better so on Wednesday he went back – they gave some antibiotics because of his asthma but nothing further was done.

That weekend, his parents helped him move into his new apartment but on the Monday, apparently he fainted at work so they brought him home for a few days. On Wednesday, he started to be delusional so they took him to the hospital. By Friday, he was on oxygen and a ventilator but he was given drugs to make him unconscious and paralized so that his body could work on repairing his lungs. The doctors were testing for H1N1. They did diagnose Influenza A.

On Saturday, they took him off the paralytic meds to see how he would react trying to breathe on his own as opposed to forced air into his lungs. He was better for a while but then seemed uncomfortable so they put him back on the meds. He had a reaction to another drug he was given so that was stopped. On Monday, he seemed stable in the morning but the afternoon was not good. Tuesday was a reasonable day but then he died on Thursday morning.

“They” say that children should not have to bury their children – that is so right!