The Story Continues: Hospital Stay ~ Flowers Arrive

Pss. 96:6 "Honour and majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his sanctuary."

The Story Continues...The Hospital Stay

The aftermath wasn’t so bad, in the beginning. I woke after the operation back in my room and my husband and son looking over me with pale faces. I could see the worry and stress dripping from their eyes. His mother was in the waiting room as I had requested because I just wanted my first loves to be what I saw when I woke.

Today I’m going to write a bit about my hospital stay. The second or third day (remember, I lost all sense of time) flowers started coming in. My son had told my niece about me being in the hospital and she being the sweetheart that she is, put a post on her/my (blood)family FB page. My two long-lost brothers sent flowers and balloons, my mother and sister sent flowers as well as two of my nieces. I do remember having to wait to tell my mother what happened to me because she kept ringing my phone incessant with worry, causing me undue stress in the process. Finally, my son had to call and tell her I was in the hospital. I only used my phone for hubby and son. I couldn’t move anyway so the phone was just a comfort artifact for a couple days. This post may seem choppy but I'm trying to get it all out there.

My husbands' mom gave me flowers in a beautiful deer coffee mug and the cutest softest dog ever! My niece posted a link to the gift shop at the hospital. My sister sent up from the gift shop a precious stuffed dog. And I received two angels too! And balloons, I received balloons attached to stuff, just what, I have no idea. I now have two stuffed dogs that I named Riley and Sassy! 

My husband, well he brought me a ton of stuff, a cross necklace, a single cross that in the center crystal stone when looked at in the sun, the serenity prayer is written! No kidding, it’s pretty awesome! A coffee mug that says ‘Good morning, Punkin’ with a small pumpkin in the cup. Halloween was nearing (I had no idea) and ‘punkin’ was one of his pet names for me. Over the ten days he had to bring tons of stuff from home and the store, so no I can’t list it all, but this man really came through for me, his broken woman and the confused man that he had become. He also brought the beautiful prayer quilt that my mother-in-law’s church had made for me and prayed over every stitch as it was being made. 

My son, he brought to me White Roses, in a vase. Not real ones he said because they die. He also gave me a Squirrel and a bluebird since I couldn’t sit and look at my birds and squirrels at the feeder at home. He also gave me a plaque, a wooden wall hanging that had two ‘wings’ (angel wings?) and the words ‘Believe you can’! He arranged everything so nicely at the window for me, and my husband draped the quilt over the back of the sofa.  All of the nurses (and docs) commented on the beauty of ‘love’ that I was receiving! 

My room was being filled with treasures and I was essentially just lying there staring at them, immobile, in pain and every shred of vanity and dignity tossed out the window. By the second or third day, I was getting more comfortable in the place. I’m not sure if it took that long for the drugs to wear off but the days seemed endless.

The bright room was a nice size all for myself and the usual monitoring machines. There was a studio style sofa in front of the window whose cushions unfolded into a bed for a family member if needing or wanting to stay. Steven stayed all ten days. He’d go home, take a shower, grab a bite to eat and bring essentials back to the hospital for me. He missed too many days of work for me and the poor fella was run as ragged as a war-torn handkerchief. His mind to me, looked like a jigsaw puzzle scattered on the floor as he tried finding all the pieces to go in the proper place as we went along on this journey. It was tough on all three of us. This wasn’t just a journey for Joni to learn and GROW.

For the next ten days, I was miss popular as were my bowel movements and my birthday! Those were the questions asked daily, the birthday one was asked with every nurse visiting the room. I was also known as little miss toxic. If a nurse helped me with the bedpan they had to gown up and double glove. If they handled my oral chemo pills they had to wear gloves. Funny how I was not told of the toxicity of these pills they handed me. I handled them like they were aspirin. My room was labeled outside with the skeleton and crossbones, listing me as a toxic commodity? 

With each nurse and or doctor that entered the room, I made them leave with a smile. In only ten days I had built relationships with the nurses, x-ray people, the radiation men and women, doctors, even the women who mopped the floor and emptied garbage pails. Not one person left my room without a smile on their face. 

The doctor who did my surgery, whom if you remember, held my heel for an hour before getting my leg to straighten out, it turned out he was from Colorado and would be returning home at the end of the week. He told me that he would be leaving Nebraska a different man than the one who came. He visited me daily and on the last day, handing him a rose, I told him to, “Always smile!” He stopped by before leaving for Colo. bidding me goodbye. He didn’t have to stop by but I’m assuming as a changed man, he wanted to. 

After bantering back and forth with the oncologist about the toxic port kind of chemo (who was the colleague onc. I missed at the office), we finally saw eye to eye when my tests, x-rays and my response to the oral poison was in my favor. Everything with the oral chemo was working. Tumor was shrinking, lymph nodes physically smaller than before. I was eating normal, bowels normal, skin normal, all in all I was a model patient. He had no argument seeing I surely didn’t look or act like a Stage 4 cancer patient! 

Talk of putting me in a nursing home/rehab came up at the end of my 'welcome' and I didn’t want to go but the insurance was not going to allow me much longer in the hospital. I don’t know why I couldn’t rehab in the hospital but then I guess the journey would have been pointless. When Portia came in and told me (as I’m eating my delicious lunch meal) that they found me a spot in the nursing home/rehab and I’d be transferred at three o’clock that day. My face drained of all blood. I suddenly wasn’t hungry. More tears puddled the sheets and filled the wastebasket with kleenex. Change. That week I think I could’ve built an ark to float away on all of those tears I shed. I closed my eyes and silently prayed. Portia was sitting right in front of me and my husband to my left. She gets a call, “Oh. Uh huh, Uh huh,” She looks at me and says, the room won’t be ready until tomorrow. Talk about prayers being answered! I kicked once again into the ‘accepting whatever God turns my way’ woman. 

With each doctor, nurse, Physical therapist, palliative nurse, or janitor that came through the door that day they received a carnation, daisy, or a rose to brighten their day and as a token of remembrance of me. While they expressed how sad they were to see me go, they smiled and thanked me for my kind gesture. Only one grumpy nurse (she was young too) turned down my gesture with “I have no place for a flower.” I knew she needed prayer the most.

Nurses have so much to contend with on a daily basis, that I wanted them to know that there is one person that appreciates all that they did for me. While my three vases thinned out of flowers, I sat in reflection of the ten days I was there. The room emptied for a few moments and I was alone in silent tears. I gazed out the window, a monarch butterfly passed by, all the way up on the third floor. Must’ve seen my flowers in the window. Thank you, Jesus, I whispered. At that moment a feather, a white feather, floated by. I knew I was being watched closely and guided by everything spiritual and Godsent! The only birds I had seen during my visit were two pigeons off on a roof two or three streets over.

I came into the hospital a pure nutrition-filled body enhanced by vitamins and a strict healthy protocol and I left a drug addict, having been on Morphine, using oxy something, Percocet, oral chemo drugs, a bone-strengthening drug shot into me once a month, and a lost healthy diet. Gone. A year and a half of health ~~~ lost to this. And we wonder why the nation has an opioid crisis? The doctors made it this way, not the people!

1 John 4:18 “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”

The story continues…