That Day Part I

To know anything about me, you would have to know what my family and I have been through in the last six months. I have four kids aged 13, 10, 8 and 5. At the end of summer 2007 I went to work after being a stay at home mom (my dream job) for 12 1/2 years. My older three were all in school and my youngest, 4 years old at the time, went to preschool 4 days a week. I did not want to work, but financially we no longer had a choice. I was busy working and trying to get my non-traditional teaching license. The kids were busy doing their things. In early March, I began to feel so sad. I couldn't explain why. I thought it was because I was having trouble balancing home and work. I felt like we were just surviving, not really spending any real time together. I would lay in bed at night and just cry. My intuition was trying to tell me something, but my intuition has never really been something I can trust, so I just kept marching on.

About March 14th or 15th Georgia, my baby, was in the local fair pageant. The following night she was an escort for her 13 year old sister Adrian. She felt awful that night - very intense headache. She made it through the night, but vomited the whole next day. She also had the strange purple spots all over her tummy. She felt better the next day and spring break began. Apparently my husband was also feeling a strange sense of urgency to spend time with the kids, because he spent the whole break with them. We even went camping that week in Ozark. Now of course I look back and it hurts, oh it hurts to remember the signs. We took our bikes to go camping as we always do. Georgia would beg for me to go for a ride with her constantly. When I finally would take her she would get tired. I would say, "Georgia, if you can't keep up I'm not going to take you for another ride." Oh that hurts. A couple of nights she went to bed early for no apparent reason. This was very unusual for her especially considering her cousins were there to play. Again I just assumed she had some little virus, but my nighttime fears and crying continued.

We came home that Sunday, it was Easter, and Georgia wore a dress. It was hard not to notice the bruises all over her legs. Still I prayed this was just from the bike rides. But as I lay in bed that night I could barely catch my breath. I was so scared and at this point I was starting to have a suspicion of what the fear was about. The next day I made a doctor's appointment for the same day. I had let my 8 year old son Caiden stay home that day, so the 3 of us took off to the doctor. My heart was heavy and even though Georgia knew nothing of my fears, she was scared she did not want to go to the doctor. She kept saying, "there's nothing wrong with me!"

The doctor looked Georgia over and declared that the purple spots were likely from low platelets. He felt that since she looked and felt pretty good that it was not likely to be anything more serious. He sent us to another clinic to have her finger pricked. She was terrified and angry. We went to Walmart to wait for them to call us and tell us if we needed to go to the hospital for platelets. Not long after we got there, my cell phone rang. A nurse told me we needed to get back to the clinic. "That doesn' t sound good," I laughed nervously. She didn't say anything. We headed back there with Georgia crying, "They called too fast, I know we are going to have to go the hospital, they called too fast." If she only knew, but yes they called too fast.

To be continued...