Amy's Hospital Trip

I was going to write about the unexpected snowfall today, but something else caught my attention, and so I will write about that instead.  If you're wondering what on earth could make me change my focus, let me give you a photograph that will illustrate my concerns right now:

This is Amy.  She is my thirteen year old sister... and if the photo is too small or too blurry for you to understand what is going on, she is in a hospital bed with an IV in her wrist and a contrast dye drink in her hands.  Yuck.  But I'll start from the very beginning...

We drove to church this morning all stuffed into my dad's pick up because it's our only vehicle with 4 wheel drive.  Amy was complaining of a tummy ache, but everyone pretty much said, "Sorry, that's not a good enough excuse not to go to church."  After church, we went out to eat at a Mexican food place.  On our way home, Amy made us stop the car, and she went outside and threw up.  After that, her stomach continued to hurt, until my parents drove her into town to visit the doctor and make sure everything was okay.

I called my mom to talk to her about something else that's going on, and I suddenly hear loud voices in the background, and she said, "Oh no, I gotta go help.  Bye!" and hung up the phone.  I stared at the blank screen, stunned.  I texted my mother, asking what was going on, and she simply replied, "The surgeon is here."  After that, nothing. 

About half an hour later, my mother called me and said that Amy has an extremely high WBC count of about 18,000 (white blood cell count), and they were admitting her into the hospital overnight for testing.  A high WBC count is indicative of either an infection of some sort or appendicitis. 

Luke (my brother), my dad, and I gathered Amy's stuff together and went back up to the hospital to visit her.  I gotta admit, it was a strange feeling, seeing my sister looking frail and ashen in her hospital bed, curled up into a ball to fight off the stomach pain.  But then the nurse came in and told her she had to drink a special contrast dye so that they could see what's going on in the CT scan, and she didn't look so feeble and weak anymore... she seemed loud enough to me... loud enough to throw a fit and make the nurses and everyone else beg her to drink the nasty thing.  Sigh...

The suddenness of this hospitalization was startling.  We were going through our normal day.  Church, food, shopping, nap time... bam, you gotta go to the hospital.  What's scariest is that nobody knows what is wrong.  Hopefully they will find what is going on in my sister's body and fix it... soon. 

This all reminds me of a Bible verse:

James 4:14-15
Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.  What is your life?  You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that."

We honestly do not know what is going to happen in our lives.  Whether you're spending a family Sunday together and someone ends up in the hospital, or you're arguing in the car with someone and you get into an accident that will change your life forever... we don't know what is going to happen.  Only God knows that.  That's why it's pointless to put your trust in anyone but Him.  The doctors can't say for sure what will happen.  The weatherman can't say for sure what will happen.  Only God can.

I'm going to keep my heart and my eyes open, to see what He has in store for us.  I trust Him fully.