by Delilah
CHAPTER 12:
A HEART THAT ENDURES
I was twenty-four when I had my firstborn son, Isaiah. His father nicknamed him Sonny when he was just a few days old, and that name stuck until he was grown and out of the house. George and I divorced when Sonny was a baby, and when he was two, his dad moved to San Francisco. He didn’t see his father except for a handful of times until he was in high school. His dad was a news reporter, a rabid sports fan, and an alcoholic, not necessarily in that order.
There’s an old song by Bobby Hebb called “Sunny.” I don’t think that was the motivation behind George choosing that nickname, but the lyrics certainly are apropos: “Sunny, thank you for the truth you let me see… and Sunny, thank you for your love from A to Z… Now the dark days are gone, and the bright days are here, my Sunny one shines so sincere. Sunny one so true, I love you…”
Sonny went from being a chubby baby boy to a long, lean child with a natural curiosity for all God’s handiwork. He was fascinated by the simple things in life; he loved to camp, to listen to me tell stories in a darkened tent, and to eat scrambled eggs cooked over an open fire. He could have cared less if he wore the same pair of sweatpants ten days in a row, and I often marvel that he was the only child I ever had who slept in on Christmas morning. He didn’t care about the presents under the tree and rarely asked for a specific gift. In fact, until he was probably seven or eight, he was far more interested in the boxes than the gifts that came in them… so I would get big packing boxes from Sears and construct forts and sailing ships and trains out of them. Sonny loved life, and he loved the people closest to him. He was, and is, a homebody. Such a homebody in fact that for a few years, while he and his wife, Riely, were getting established in the world, they lived with their four children in the last home he lived in as a teen. My grandchildren were able to enjoy the fire pit I made years ago for Sonny and his friends to roast marshmallows around. What joy it gave me to see his young family sitting around the fire singing the silly songs I sang to him as a young boy.
Even after giving birth to another daughter and adopting three siblings, I was convinced, mostly due to Sonny’s Jesus-like goodness (I’m not making that up, he was given the Most Jesus-Like award in school), that I was a terrific mom. Then came Zack.
The loud, squirming kids I once smugly observed while pushing Sonny in the cart? The kids destroying the neatly stacked displays of shiny apples? Now I was the mom trying to pick the tumbling fruit up off the floor as Zack gleefully reached for the bottom apple on the pyramid. Zack was as fearless and high-strung as Sonny was cautious and quiet.
Zack was a live wire from day one. He was generally unsettled, needed me more, followed directions less, and lived for action! Stubborn, fearless, and saw rules as lines to be crossed. In truth, he’s a lot more like me in many ways than his older brother…
But he was more than just a bundle of energy and a headstrong kid. Zack often wouldn’t eat and became frighteningly thin as a toddler. He was rarely content, didn’t bond with people well, and wasn’t meeting the expected benchmarks for development. At two, we had him evaluated and were told that he was definitely on the autistic spectrum. Thankfully, there was an early-intervention program available that allowed Zack to receive occupational and other helpful therapies. We were counseled on how to distract and redirect, how to choose our battles… We celebrated his obsession with the color green with painted bedroom walls, green pants, green shirts, green toys.
He was a study in contrasts. A boy with big eyes and an enormous and tender heart, who perceived life on an uncommonly high level, which caused him both physical and emotional pain. Zack would often come up with ingenious plans that often backfired and that, after the initial panic and commotion was over, gave us stories that you just can’t make up. Like this:
One spring day when Zack was twelve, I yelled outside for him to come to dinner. When he didn’t respond, I asked the other kids where he was, and they replied they thought he was up in the neighborhood with his buddies. When we couldn’t find him after about half an hour, I started to get nervous, calling his name louder and louder. Coming back into the house, I yelled his name at the top of my lungs, and a groggy Zack rose from the couch and asked what I wanted.
I hadn’t even seen him there. Zack rarely slows down enough to take a nap, and in fact, I’d never even seen him sleep on the living room couch before. I chastised him for not letting me know where he was and told him to wash up and get ready for dinner. Quietly he told me he wasn’t feeling well, that he had no appetite and he was going to go upstairs and go to bed. I started to snap at him that he still needed to eat something when I looked at his face and noticed he was white as a sheet.
When I asked him what was wrong, he took off his baseball cap and pulled his long bangs off his forehead; he had a bump larger than a goose egg, and his entire forehead was red. I asked him what happened and he said, “It’s kind of a long story, but I really don’t feel good.”
I threw him in the car and raced to the urgent care about ten minutes away. When I went to check in, they told us to have a seat and they would see him as soon as they could. I frantically said, “I think he’s got a traumatic head injury—can you please see him now?”
The woman at the front desk was trying her best to calm me when Zack bent over and began throwing up blood. She yelled for a nurse to come out, and they got him into a room. The doctor who was on call that day told me to calm down and said that they needed to get him to a hospital immediately. Zack was loaded in the back of an ambulance and I was allowed to ride with him as we were rushed to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. As soon as we got there, the doctor explained that he probably didn’t have any broken bones, but that he did have a large contusion and they were going to do some imaging.
While we waited for them to get him in to do an MRI, the story began to unfold… He’d gone up to the neighborhood to play with the kids a few weeks prior and found a dead squirrel. Zack and his friends thought that it would be best if they buried said squirrel. After a week or two passed, they decided to go find out if the squirrel had decomposed into a skeleton or remained intact.
Much to their delight when they dug up the unfortunate critter, the boys discovered it was partially decomposed, but even better, filled with maggots. (If you find their delight in this disgusting discovery strange, you haven’t spent much time around adolescent boys!)
Once the poor, maggot-infested squirrel was retrieved from its peaceful grave in the ground, they decided to be creative and use it to torment one of the girls in the neighborhood.
The boys found a strong young sapling that they decided to use as a catapult (or in this case a squirrel-a-pult). They took the top of the tree (which was about nine feet tall) and pulled it down to the ground. One boy sat on the ground holding tight to the top while the other one used a stick to lay the carcass across the branches of the tree. When they were ready, the boy seated released the tree, causing the squirrel to launch through the air and into the yard of an unsuspecting neighbor girl. Their first attempt failed miserably, and instead the squirrel was flung hard against the ground just a few feet in front of them. Using all their mathematical genius, they recalculated and recalibrated and figured out if they moved the squirrel closer to the top of the tree, the projection would be farther.
This time Zack gingerly placed the rotting squirrel on the uppermost branches. The boy holding the tree thought Zack was finished and released his hold, however, Zack had not yet moved out of the way.
The tree smacked my son right above the bridge of his nose in the middle of his forehead. He was knocked backward, and he thinks he might’ve even blacked out for a moment before he managed to stumble home and find his way to the couch.
After hearing his account of things, I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry, and I think I did both. But my laughter was quickly squelched when the doctor walked in the room and asked to see me in the hallway. He pulled out images and said, “Your son’s skull
is fractured in at least eight places where the tree struck him.” Now I was scared.
The doctor looked at me and asked how the incident happened. I said, “You’re never going to believe this… But please tell me what the dangers are now.”
He said there was great danger of the brain swelling, that Zack’s forehead might be disfigured and that he might require surgery. For the next ten to twelve hours, they were going to keep him under observation and watch for symptoms of brain bleeding or swelling, as well as closely monitor his vital signs and mental alertness. After that, they would figure out what the next step should be. He said he was going to have Zack assessed by a plastic surgeon to see what kind of surgery might be necessary to repair any disfiguration that might occur.
When I walked back in the room and told Zack the news, he broke into a broad smile, and asked, “Do I get to count this as eight broken bones or just one?”
He liked to keep track of his broken bones, because at age twelve he had already had at least seven. He considered each one a badge of honor.
I spent the night in an uncomfortable chair next to my son’s hospital bed, praying that he wouldn’t have brain damage or any long-term issues. I thought about his handsome face and any surgery he might require. I thought about what might have happened if he had remained asleep on the couch and I hadn’t screamed to wake him…
The next day another doctor took more images and came into the room in shock. Each little piece of bone that had been broken and pushed inward had moved back into perfect placement. There didn’t appear to be any swelling to the brain, and the surgeon they had requested was on standby but wouldn’t be coming in to see me.
Instead, an expert in traumatic head injuries came to visit and talk with me. “No jumping, no running, no video games for two weeks, and plenty of rest,” she said, handed me her card, and left. Children’s Hospital kept him one more night for observations and sent him home.
God healed him completely with no necessary medical intervention. A few years later Zack didn’t even have a scar from the experience, but our family would groan each time we saw roadkill, and we’d always ask Zacky if he wanted to try to use it on a catapult…
My Zacky loved music and memorized lyrics like I do, but let’s just say his favorite genres were a wee bit different than adult contemporary. Zack excelled at some subjects, but the linear timeline of school, homework, and testing never worked for him well, so school was a struggle. That said, he was still super bright and extremely witty.
Life with Zack was a magical mystery tour, to be sure, but I think God gave me my Zack Attack to teach me to love deeper, practice patience, and to know I’d never have the final say in things.
Our lives are like that—Zack story after Zack story. The stuff of great legend and side-splitting hilarity. His one little heart was involved in some very big miracles.
I am not the only one who grieves and has trouble coping with the day to day. Zachariah and Shaylah are the two biological children I share with their father, Doug Ortega. Shaylah learned the day after her twenty-third birthday, the day before her little brother took his life, that she was pregnant. Her world, as mine, will never be the same. Her siblings, her dad, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins; the waves of grief wash over us all in ever-widening circles. Shaylah, my baby now having a baby, and her heart in shreds…
For as strong and unbreakable and healthy that Sonny was, Shaylah was quite the opposite. From birth Sonny was fat and healthy. He never broke a bone or caught a cold. He didn’t get sick when he was teething or when cold and flu season came around. He didn’t fuss or cry when it was time to take a nap and he loved to sleep, curled up in my arms, all night long.
His little sister, Shaylah, ten years younger, was a chubby, sweet newborn, but when she was just a few weeks old, she started throwing up when she would nurse. She got a fever and runny nose when her teeth started coming in. Her left eye was weak, and when she was tired it would cross slightly. She was treated for the flu or a cold every other week, it seemed.
My life was in complete turmoil during my pregnancy with Shay and in the first few years of her young life. The radio station I was on in Philly, WMGK, fired me when I was seven months pregnant. Getting fired was nothing new, getting fired when I was pregnant was… We had to pack up our life and move back to Boston right after Shay was born. Lucky for me I had held onto the house I owned there.
When WMGK fired me, I thought my world was going to implode. But God was there to see me through. The station manager, Tyler, arranged to let me go prior to my contract being up. And they agreed to pay me a large bonus I had earned, based on my ratings, at the end of my contract, which meant I would still be on payroll through Shaylah’s birth and into the holidays. What a blessing I didn’t have to worry about my pregnancy and delivery being covered by insurance!
When Shay was two, she had a cold that turned into a fever and she couldn’t breathe, so I called 911 and an ambulance took her to Swedish Hospital in Seattle. They diagnosed her with respiratory syncytial virus and after two days sent us home. Two months later, while I was in downtown Seattle in my studio on the air, my friend Jill was babysitting her and Sonny. Jill called my hotline and said, “You need to come home, Shaylah is running a high fever.” I taped out my show, got in the car, and raced home. When I got there, Shay was indeed running a fever, and she was coughing constantly. I ran a tepid bath and got in with her, holding her burning little body to mine, and then I started to run cold water to cool her down. She coughed and then stopped breathing. I screamed to Jill to call 911 as I tried to revive her, trying to remember the CPR instructions I had learned years before in my Red Cross training course. Shaylah’s lips turned blue, and her eyes rolled back into her head.
It only took the fire truck about three minutes to reach my house—the fire station was a few blocks away. The firemen and paramedics that arrived took her from me and continued to perform CPR, strapped her to a small gurney and got her into the ambulance. I threw on some jeans and a sweatshirt and rode in the back with her. I had never prayed so hard in all my life as I did in that ambulance. It raced screaming through the night to Seattle Children’s Hospital. When we arrived they rushed her into the ER and made me stay behind while they worked to save her life. Her heart stopped at one point, and they had to restart it. They finally stabilized her, and she was intubated to force air in and out of her lungs.
When the crisis had subsided, the doctor who saved Shaylah came to speak to me and explain what had happened. Her first question to me was, “How long has your daughter suffered with asthma?”
Asthma? “She doesn’t have asthma,” I said. “She had RSV a few times, but I don’t know what you mean by asthma.”
“Your daughter was in a full-blown asthma attack. Her airways were completely shut down. Her oxygen levels were in the sixties before we got her intubated. She technically died once, but we were able to get her heart restarted. How long has your daughter had asthma?”
I stood in stunned silence, trying to grasp what this young doctor was saying. My daughter had something called asthma. She had technically died. She was on a machine to keep her alive. And I had no clue what asthma was outside of being told my firstborn sometimes had a hard time breathing when he ran too hard in sports, and one doctor had suggested he had exercise-induced asthma.
The next day I was asked to attend a class that Children’s Hospital put on for parents of asthmatic children. There were two other parents in the class, and all three of us sat in numbed silence for the first half hour, trying to grasp what was going on in our children’s bodies.
The fevers, the hundreds of times Shay would start coughing in the middle of the night, the multiple trips to urgent care, and the last trip to the ER. The many diagnoses of flu, colds, RSV. The struggle to keep weight on her after she learned to crawl and the blue tint her hands and lips would often get… and now I was told my daughter had pneumonia, that her right lung was almost half filled with fluid and t
hat she had reactive airways and severe asthma.
Although she was stable, it took two days to wean her off the ventilator and begin our new normal of life with a medically fragile child.
I couldn’t let Shaylah cry, because crying would cause her throat to close down and her windpipe to swell, and after a few minutes of crying she would be choking for air, unable to breathe. As a result I would jump through hoops to keep her from coughing, crying, or getting emotionally distraught. She was tested for allergies in a macabre exam that involved a grid being drawn on her back, followed by between fifty and one hundred pinpricks. To help her endure this torture I took off my shirt and held her to my chest as the nurse pricked her tender flesh over and over and over. After her skin was assaulted, the nurse swabbed on a multitude of common allergens—tree nuts, ground nuts, wheat, egg, grass, pollen—and then they observed the grid for a reaction. Within minutes her soft white flesh was red, swollen, and angry. The results? She was basically allergic to life. Mold, dust, certain plastics, cleaning fluids, all nuts, soy, dust mites, cats, dogs, bird feathers… the list was immense.
Nut allergies were the most dangerous, followed closely by mold and dust mites. The hospital offered a class for parents of allergy-prone/asthmatic kids. Thank God! It was Breathing 101 for me.
I went home and ripped out all the carpet in our tiny house. Then I went down to the basement and evaluated the mold situation. I had owned the house for seventeen years at that point, and it was a little old shack when I bought it. I knew there was little I could do about the moldy basement, nor could I remove the neighbor’s trees that towered overhead and spread thick pollen in the spring.
A few weeks later I found a house on the same street, just seven doors down, that had a dry basement, a treeless yard, and hardwood floors. It was not as old as the tiny cottage I had purchased at twenty-one, and was more than twice the size of my thousand-square-foot home.
