NOVEMBER 23, 2015

The Worry. I picture “worry” like the Mucinex character in the commercials. Gunky, annoying, gross and a pest. It is something that doesn’t go away on its own. It won’t just sit still somewhere. It is that annoying voice in your head that won’t shut up. (And I know you all just heard the Mucinex voice tell you something) I have tried time and time again to get The Worry out of my head. I have tried to get it out of my heart and out of my soul. But it seems, sometimes…. many times, that it just won’t go away. It is stuck to me like goo. And when you wipe it away, there is always some kind of remnance. The smell of worry lingers.

And today… the day after World Prematurity Day… I am reminiscent of all the worry I have had this past year… There were so many more downs than ups… there were so many more bad news than good… there were so many more odds against us than good… I think maybe I am being a little sentimental because I was thinking of how much Matthew and our family has overcome. I can’t help but acknowledge everything else. And for me … The Worry was the biggest monster.

I am a mother of a chronically/critically-ill baby who was diagnosed with a deadly disease in utero who had a 3% chance of survival during pregnancy, a 1% chance of surviving birth, an 8% chance of surviving the first 24 hours, a 13% chance of surviving the first 72 hours and then a 23% chance of surviving the first 10 days. Even now, with zero % kidney function, and other things that are going with his little body, we still linger with some sort of negative percentage of survival past 2. Where doctors came up with these numbers, I have no idea. But Thank God they’re wrong.

From 17 weeks of pregnancy to 4 months old…. our son was expected to die. So you can imagine The Worry that crept into my heart and made itself a home. The Worry wasn’t in my head. It came straight to my heart. There were days where it made my heart feel like it wasn’t beating. Days where it made my heart break… so much so that I swore up and down that my heart was literally… LITERALLY… break-ing!!! Pieces of it cracking and falling to the ground. The pain of my heart breaking was so intense that it froze my insides. I became numb. I remember feeling like a zombie because I had no heart, no tears, no emotions, no anything. The Worry took over me and my heart succumbed to its power. The Worry was overwhelming. The Worry was suffocating. The Worry was, simply put, the worst.

But this was where the relationship I had with God grew. My Faith in Him became everything to me. I could barely go a few minutes without praying, without talking to God. He was the one and only thing that mattered to me. He was the only thing that was getting me through life. Every day was such a battle for me; mentally, physically, emotionally. It was beyond hard. And it was beyond anything that I could imagine. I had no idea that this journey God has me on was going to be like this. There was NO way I could have ever predicted my life would take such a turn like this.

I was never really the type that worried about much. Whatever happens, happens. It is what it is. Accept what is. And that’s that. I never knew WORRY the way I have come to know it. Through Faith I have been able to “control” my worry. I have learned to stare it straight in the face and smile as it comes close. I have learned to give it to God when it begins to surface or creep back into my heart. The only thing I haven’t been able to do is forget it. The memory of all that worry is still there. The thought of how it consumed me so much, is still there. The feeling of the pain in my heart that it caused is still very real and I am still healing from those wounds. And although I don’t worry about my son too much anymore. He is in God’s Hands and I have absolutely no control of his health. But the thought of worry…. the memories… they unfortunately feel like a recent memory, like it just happened yesterday. I hope and pray that one day it will be gone completely. The thought… the memories…. The Worry.