The Sun came out

It was a few days ago. A day where your lips are chapped and you keep licking them because you're too tired to go digging through your purse to find the Chapstick at the bottom where the telling receipts of the day hide and keep track of all the secret places you've been.  Places like the emergency room, the hospital cafeteria, the drugstore, the grocery store, and one last place: the chiropractor's office.  Because maybe, just maybe, when you're on vacation, a random chiropractor can fix your crippled back, give you fifteen minutes of respite, and heal you and send you on your merry way so you can pick up your baby girl once again who is not such a baby girl anymore.

It was the Eve of this night, January 2, 2015, when I was driving the dark streets of Connecticut on a "holiday" that was anything but a holiday where I slammed on the brakes, because I stumbled upon this.

This was enough for me.  The peace beyond understanding rushed in and I knew things were going to be okay.  That we would all live and thrive through the hard.  That the hard was good.

I have a story to share.  About twelve days ago, we packed up our family and headed to Connecticut to celebrate Christmas.  A few weeks before we left, June had started experiencing some resistance to sleeping, and lots of waking in the night.  She had also started thrashing more during the day, seemed generally unhappy and was biting her hands a lot.  Spitting obsessively.  Playing with her spit obsessively.  She seemed considerably anxious.  We had started giving her tryptophan during the day which calmed her, but then the nights would come and she couldn't sleep.  We arrived in Connecticut and things got progressively worse.  We took her off the tryptophan and no amount of melatonin mixed with hydroxixine and essential oils diffused would touch her insomnia.  She started taking about 2-3 hours to get to bed, and if we put her in her tent, she would thrash and bang her head against the poles until she was bruised.  Once she was asleep, she would awaken around 1 am to do it all again.  Often, she would fall asleep at 4 am from sheer exhaustion.  We had to stay up with her so that her head wouldn't hit the wall and she wouldn't beat her body with her hands.  The days were hard because she was tired and cranky all day from lack of sleep.

By day 10, things had taken a toll on her, on us.  We were, essentially all suffering from her insomnia.  We were yelling more, short with our kids, short with each other.  Forget love. We were jumping through the hoops of the day, and as the darkness would approach, June would somehow sense its haunting and start whimpering as night time consumed her.   

January 1 rushed in and June seemed extremely upset.  She was crying on and off all day, not eating a whole bunch (very strange for her), and had started the same routine during the day that she was doing at night.  Thrashing, head banging, crying, and of course, she couldn't tell us what was wrong.  I gave her ibuprofen thinking that maybe she had a sickness of some sort.  She seemed a little better, but then around nightfall, everything started over again and no amount of consoling or ibuprofen would help.  At around 7 pm, I was holding her and she flew back and knocked my chin and I felt my lower back give out.  In the next hour, we made the decision to bring her to the Emergency Room.  Something must be wrong.  For four hours in the emergency room she did this:

My sister Christine and my friend Kat were taking turns holding her down because we couldn't hold her anymore because all of our backs had given out on us.  I watched helplessly and whispered to her while the doctors and nurses ruled out any real medical issue.  No offense to the medical world, but I could have done a better job examining my daughter than the first doctor.  Her recommendation was to give her benadryl. Ummmm...okay.  Next. Her supervisor thankfully was quick to see that something was quite wrong and ordered an initial dose of valium.  She didn't respond to that.  An hour and 20 minutes later it seemed obvious to give her a second dose.  By the time they got in there to administer the second dose, we had finally gotten her to sleep by all three of us patting her at the same time and pleading with God to give us some respite.  She passed out from exhaustion.  It was 1 am.  My husband arrived and we wheeled her up to the PICU where they could watch how she responded to valium for the evening.

She woke up at 4:30 am.  Although she was tired, she seemed pleasant and ate breakfast.  By noon of that day, we were out of there with an rx for Valium and a plan to get us back to Virginia.

Since we got that initial prescription, things have gotten slightly better, in that we have a heavy-duty drug on our hands which can promote sleep.  The question is, how much, when to administer, and a guessing game of sorts.  Last night she finally got to sleep sandwiched between my husband and myself, at 12 am with a second dose of medicine.

I want to thank you for praying for our sweet June bug.  Tonight, January 4, 2015 at 7:00 pm, hundreds of you across the country prayed for us.  That would have been enough. That you chose to stand with us and care so deeply.  I'd like you to know that tonight a miracle happened as you all stormed the gates of Heaven.  It was the sweetest bedtime ritual ever.  I have never seen June go down that easily....not for years.  I prayed over her as she slipped off into dreamland, hot tears rushing down my face.  The warm wind sent a chill down my spine.  I could feel God's hand on her tender body and over my heart.

                         And I could sing it from the mountaintops: