Fourth Quarter

My football career lasted almost two months.


The excitement of being in Junior High and needing to prove my manliness in the spirit and camaraderie of the game filled not just my little frame, but that of many others.  I would imagine that several of you can admit to that.  The Lord gifted me with speed and so naturally, I was put in a position that somehow meant:

1. The ball was snapped to the Quarterback
2. Quarterback hands me the ball
3. B gets hit...

And therefore, so went my two month career and the realization that it really is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35)! Time to retire!

Life has a way of knocking us down.  And it is how we respond to when we get knocked down that shows us a lot.  It doesn't always mean that we will respond with grace.  It doesn't always mean that we won't hurt, feel discouraged, or even that everything is okay.  But, in the very essence of the moment, for us Jesus Christ who can sympathize with our weakness (Hebrews 4:15), is able to pick us up, dust us off, and we can get handed the ball again.  Does it mean we sometimes want to hang up the jersey, throw in the towel, retire?  Certainly!  And yet, building a life on a firm foundation, a Rock, we can be like the wise builder that Jesus talks about in Matthew 7 and when the rains and storms come we shall not be moved.  

Our ongoing 11 year journey has shown, maybe better, taught us a lot of this.  And part of the message that came this morning from my time in God's Word (www.ttb.org) was that we don't want our personal experience or for that matter, a person, to ever get in the way of preaching Christ.  And so it is, Princess and I have journeyed and we do pray continually that the Lord would strengthen us and that while we would love for the present circumstance to be over, we more importantly want God to be glorified.

So to borrow from the cliche', we are in the fourth quarter (at least in the hospital).  The goal for today is to begin bringing Princess off of her sedatives and our of the medically induced coma.  We anticipate this to be a long day and process.  Due to her being on a "big girl" "offensive lineman" dose of meds, we will be bringing her meds down by 1 mg per hour as she can tolerate it and the first drug will take anywhere from 10 to 12 hours. While this is good, the focus will be for Princess to not show any seizure activity.  

Neurology just left with their report...Seizures have kept at bay, though, during the night there were in fact some signs that Princess' brain is still very irritated and the potential for seizure activity is HUGE.  That said the weaning process will be interesting as the sedatives are also acting as an anti-seizure drug, and without the sedatives, Princess potentially could have a lot of seizures.  I do greatly appreciate and understand the concern by the professionals.  After further dialogue, we did decide to do a bolus dump of Princess' current medicine and hopefully that could take the "edge" off and allow her brain to "cool" down.  Liken this to an open wound that you do not want to get more inflamed or irritated.  

So, it is the fourth quarter, we might be a little behind on the scoreboard, but we are not out.  The wean of the sedatives will soon begin, and we can only pray that Princess will wake, seizures will have stayed away.

Please pray:

• Princess will remain seizure-free
• For the weaning of the sedative and the potential side effects 
• For Princess' healing.  What she went through these past three weeks, namely Monday evening/Tuesday morning was tremendous and Neurology cannot stress the severity enough