Brad called me late on Wednesday with an update. They’ve taken Katelyn off her pain medication, which included morphine, and she’s struggling with the pain and withdrawal. Brad said she cried for a 17-hour stretch. It’s good that she’s strong and healthy enough to be able to do that, but heartbreaking that she would hurt enough to do that.
Katelyn’s out of ICU!
There is lots of news on Katelyn, and almost all of it is good. Katelyn got out of ICU today. They removed all the tubes from her, except her feeding tube, which she has always had. She’s in a private room, and the doctors say she ought to be able to go home in 2-5 days!
Her lungs still have not cleared completely, but with everything else going well, the doctors are less worried about it now. She still will not eat on her own, which is why the food tube is still there, but she has never eaten on her own so that is probably understandable.
Katelyn is improving
Dave says Katelyn’s color is back to normal, they removed a breathing tube, and she’s doing much better!! The scare from Saturday was just one doctor’s opinion, not Katelyn’s doctor, based on chest xrays and nothing else. John and Karin said they’re hoping she might get to come home this week. There is still room for complications but things look a lot better now.
Dave said one of the people in the group is a nurse who used to assist in heart surgery. She said that even 10 years ago, people with Katelyn’s condition just didn’t survive.
Update on Katelyn
Dave reports slow but measurable progress on Katelyn. He also verified the spelling of her name. The doctors removed a tube yesterday relating to breathing. The last Dave heard, there’s been progress and there’ve been setbacks, but the general trend has been forward. A group from the church is going to visit Katelyn’s parents, John and Karin, tonight. Dave may join them.
A reminder from your sponsor…
Just a reminder, for those who seem to have forgotten. I produce the content on this site. I write it, edit it, and post it. I usually sink far more time into it than I should. I don’t make any money off it, other than the occasional sale through an Amazon link, which usually amounts to $15-$20 per year. But making money was never my intent.
This is a hobby. I write about what I feel like writing about, when I feel like writing about it, how I feel like writing about it.
I don’t owe you anything. Nobody is forcing you to read this. Nor have I ever solicited donations, and I don’t have any plans to start.
I’d like to think I usually produce decent-quality stuff. Some days are worse than others. It’s not easy to come up with new and insightful and interesting stuff every day, which is why sane writers take a day or two per week off. And sometimes I run out of time, so I call it done and post it, figuring whatever I can give you is better than nothing.
I guess I was wrong about that.
This is a difficult time. I don’t know what people want me to write about right now, and frankly I don’t give a rip. Yeah, I’m moody, and yeah, I’m a bit down, and I’ve got a (mostly) one-track mind. You can deal with that, or you can join that small band of readers who’ve decided to be part of the problem. Faced with having to choose between not giving a rip about my neighbor or not giving a rip about your computer problem (or not being thorough enough for your tastes), the decision will be the easiest one I ever made in my life.
I’ll be back when I bloody feel like it. And not a nanosecond sooner.
That faith thing.
I talked to Brad again last night, since Brad’s my go-between to Katie’s family, whom I hardly know (and who have absolutely zero time to be talking on the phone right now–they talk to Brad and let Brad talk to the rest of the Oakville gang, then my little tidbits go out to who-knows-where).
Dan Bowman forwarded some comments from a nurse that were encouraging. I passed those on to Brad. I read him the comments from yesterday’s post. Brad asked me if I’d print him a copy to keep. I set some sort of land-speed record hitting ctrl-p. (Mice are for wimps.)
And I got to thinking aloud about that huge plan God’s got again. He knows twelve billion people better than I’ll ever know any single human being. I’m not even certain I can tell you who I sat next to in church last Sunday. I certainly can’t tell you all the names of the people immediately in front of me and behind me. God knows all the hows and whys and therefores about them.
One summer I sat down and wrote out on paper an algorithm that I could translate into a computer language and simulate a baseball game. Alternatively, I could do the math using a calculator and some dice. Run it 162 times for each team in a league, and I could simulate a baseball season. I could tell you what 48 players might do in a single game, what 624 players might do over the course of 162 games. I was pretty proud of myself for figuring that out.
So I could figure out what might happen if the Royals were to somehow pry Rafael Palmeiro away from the Texas Rangers. But God knows what would happen. No questions about it. And He knows how it would affect quality of life, and even if it would affect operation of a stoplight across the Kansas border in Olathe for some bizarre reason.
And He knows about the things that really do matter. I can simulate something as trivial and, as much as it pains me to say it, unimportant as a baseball game. It stretches my little brain to its limits, but I can describe it mathematically. I can’t even begin to do that with a human life.
Knowledge is power. He’s got the monopoly on both of them. Good thing He’s on my side. Yours too.
So why do I find myself not trusting Him all the time? It doesn’t make any sense.
I guess if I ever needed any proof that I’m human, I just got it.
Another update.
1/2/02, 7:00 pm. Katie/Katelyn/Kaitlyn (I still don’t know how they spell it) has been out of surgery for about four hours. She survived the surgery and it didn’t last as long as they expected. She’s breathing on her own, and they were able to take the oxygen level down from 100% to 41%, which is good news. Her color is good, which is good news. The bad news is she has more fluid on the lungs than she should have.
More on Katie…
Brad called me last night. I was about 3/4 asleep, but he woke me up pretty fast. Katie (her real name is Katelyn, but I’m not sure how she spells it so I cheat) had tests yesterday. There wasn’t anything good that came of them. She’s sick, with a virus. Illness and surgery aren’t a good combination. That’s just common sense. There’s more hardening around her heart than they expected, which will make the surgery harder. And there’s a growth around her heart, so they’ll have to go in again in six months to a year. And (I’m getting sick of that word) the part of her heart that needs to function for anesthesia to work normally doesn’t. I’m getting this third-hand, so I don’t know if that makes any sense or not.
The odds are stacked way too heavily against her.
Brad was pretty down about it. A lot of people are. I am too.
“Maybe the surgery isn’t supposed to happen tomorrow,” I said at some point. Hey, I don’t know.
Brad asked if stuff like this makes me question my faith. Absolutely it does. Then I got philosophical. What else was there to do? Besides pray, that is. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
From the dawn of civilization to today, more than twelve billion people have lived. Twelve billion people! And God knows all of their names. Not only that, He knows everything about those people, down to how many hairs are/were on their head. God knows when they lived, and He knows why. And He can run all the possible scenarios in His head. Someday I can ask God, “What if I’d lived in Israel during the time of Jesus? Would I have followed Him?” and God will know the answer!
It’s pretty easy to determine when we’ll die. The instant we’re worth more to God dead than alive, it’s over. We’re gone.
Brad and I can imagine scenarios where Katelyn is worth a whole lot more to God alive than dead. What if she went in and beat all those odds, then 15 years from now, stood in front of a group of people and told her story?
God knows the answer to that what-if. He knows who would be there, and who would react in what way. God also knows what would happen if He miraculously healed her, instead of letting her go into surgery. And God knows exactly how much pain and grief He would save her by pulling her out of the game and taking her home at any given point.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to get over that bit about God knowing more than 12 billion names. I do well to remember five. Not five billion. Five. So I need to trust Him.
I told Brad about a surgery I never had. I was in second grade. I had a bad case of tonsilitis. Not as bad as my sister had about the same time, but bad enough I was missing school. The day before I was scheduled to go into surgery, my doctor checked me up one last time. He looked in my throat, and where he’d previously seen walnuts, he saw two normal tonsils. “They look good to me,” he said. “Let’s just leave them there and see what happens.”
What happened was nothing. It’s 20 years later, and I’ve still got ’em. I missed a few days of school since then, but never on account of a sore throat.
Miracle? Who knows? And why was God doing me any favors? Who knows? Am I worth that much more with my tonsils intact? Only God knows. He knew that 20 years later, I’d need some reason to trust Him. For all I know, that’s the only reason.
God can do for Katelyn’s heart what He did for my tonsils. Or He can do something else.
Please excuse me while I go talk to Him.
Happy New Year!
The way the ‘Net oughta be. I finally broke down and bought a VCR yesterday. It’s hard to do video work without one, and you want to give people drafts on VHS. When it comes to consumer video, there are two companies I trust: Hitachi and Hitachi. So I went looking for a Hitachi VCR. Their low-end model, a no-frills stereo 4-head model, ran $70 at Circuit City. I ordered it online, along with 5 tapes. Total cost: 80 bucks. For “delivery,” you’ve got two options: delivery, or local pickup. I did local pickup at the store five miles from where I live. You avoid the extended warranty pitch and trying to convince someone in the store to help you, and you just walk into the store, hand the paperwork to customer service, sign for it, then go pick it up. Suddenly consumer electronics shopping is like Chinese or pizza take-out. I love it.
The VCR’s not much to look at and the $149 models are more rugged-looking and have more metal in them, but this model is made in Korea so it ought to be OK, and the playback’s great on my 17-year-old Commodore 1702 (relabeled JVC) composite monitor. For what I’ll be asking it to do, it’s fine. In my stash of Amiga cables I found an RCA y-adapter that mixes two audio outputs, which I used to connect to the monitor’s mono input.
Desktop Linux. Here are my current recommendations for people trying to replace Windows with Linux.
Web browser: Galeon. Very lightweight. Fabulous tabbed interface. I hate browsing in Windows now.
Minimalist browser: Dillo. Well under a meg in size, and if it’ll render a site, it’ll render it faster than anything else you’ll find.
FTP client: GFTP. Graphical FTP client, saves hosts and username/password combinations for you.
PDF viewer: XPDF. Smaller and faster than Acrobat Reader, though that’s available for Linux too.
Mail client/PIM: Evolution. What Outlook should have been.
Lightweight mail client: Sylpheed. Super-fast and small, reasonably featured.
File manager: Nautilus. Gorgeous and easy to use, though slow on old PCs. Since I use the command line 90% of the time, it’s fine.
Graphics viewer: GTK-See. A convincing clone of ACDSee. Easy-to-use graphics viewer with a great interface.
News reader: Pan. Automatically threads subject headers for you, and it’ll automatically decode and display uuencoded picture attachments as part of the body. Invaluable for browsing the graphics newsgroups.
File compression/decompression: I use the command-line tools. If you want something like WinZip, there’s a program out there called LnxZip. It’s available in RPM or source form; I couldn’t find a Debian package for it.
Desktop publishing: Yes, desktop publishing on Linux! Scribus isn’t as powerful as QuarkXPress, but it gives a powerful enough subset of what QuarkXPress 3.x offered that I think I would be able to duplicate everything I did in my magazine design class way back when, in 1996. It’s more than powerful enough already to serve a small business’ DTP needs. Keep a close eye on this one. I’ll be using it to meet my professional DTP needs at work, because I’m already convinced I can do more with it than with Microsoft Publisher, and more quickly.
Window manager: IceWM. Fast, lightweight, integrates nicely with GNOME, Windows-like interface.
Office suite: Tough call. KOffice is absolutely good enough for casual use. StarOffice 6/OpenOffice looks to be good enough for professional use when released next year. WordPerfect Office 2000 is more than adequate for professional use if you’re looking for a commercial package.
Does God have to heal?
Strong religious content again. I make no apologies. People who are offended by this kind of stuff are probably long gone anyway.
My friend and co-worker Charles Sebold helped inspire this one. Charlie’s page is worth a read. He writes with considerably more brevity than I do, but if you like the kind of content I produce, you’ll probably like Charlie too.
Charlie pointed out an alternative reading of Genesis 3:16 on Saturday that dovetails nicely with the interview I conducted Sunday night. Genesis 3:16 is a verse that feminists hate, mostly because they read it incorrectly. True, it’s been misapplied over the years. Here’s how it reads:
Then God said to the woman, “You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though your desire will be for your husband (or: And though you will desire to control your husband), he will be your master.”
Some men wrongly use this verse to lord over women. Charlie raised an interesting question. Keep in mind that when Jesus spoke, He used parables that people would understand. Doesn’t it stand to reason that He learned the technique from God the Father? Also keep in mind that we, God’s people, are referred to as the Bride of Christ. And keep in mind that Adam and Eve sinned because they wanted to be like God. Pure power trip.
So let’s paraphrase it in light of that:
Then God said to the woman, “You will bear children with intense pain and suffering. And though humanity will desire to control Me, I will be your master.”
Eve undoubtedly already knew the desire to control Adam. Undoubtedly if she desired to control God, she also desired to control Him. I’m sure she got the metaphor instantly. I’m sure Adam got it too–he understood control.
We still have control issues today. It tends to fall into one of two extremes. One extreme denies that God is in control, whether it’s by choice or ineptitude, and believes that God won’t reach down and help us. An awful lot of mainline denominations fall into that trap, wittingly or unwittingly. Many fundamentalists hit the other extreme, teaching that if we say or believe the right things, God is obligated to perform a miracle. St. Louis Rams superstar Isaac Bruce falls into that category. During the Rams’ Super Bowl season, Bruce totaled his car. He threw his hands off the wheel, cried out, “God, save me!” and believed God was obligated to save him. Bruce walked away from the accident. When asked why the same thing didn’t happen to Payne Stewart when his plane went down, Bruce said Stewart didn’t say the words. Now, while it’s very admirable that Bruce’s gut reaction was to say “God, save me!” instead of one or a series of four-letter words your mama didn’t teach you, it’s wrong for Bruce to believe that God is obligated to do anything, and it’s wrong for Bruce to judge people whose lives God chooses not to preserve.
What Isaac Bruce forgets is that God’s priority is to get as many people into heaven as possible. Yes, God loves us and cares about us and cares about what happens to us. He cares when I lose my keys and how many stoplights I have to sit through on my way home late on Friday nights. But if for some bizarre reason me sitting through 10 lights for five minutes apiece could help someone else get to heaven, it’s gonna take me an hour to get home. Every time.
So, when my work is done, I’m finished, no matter what age I am or what condition I’m in. The reason for that is really simple. Those of you who are married will understand this. Being alive and on this Earth is like being engaged. When you’re engaged, you can spend a fair bit of time together, but not as much as when you’re married. Your desire to spend more time with one another, and to do things you can’t do when you’re not married, are what drive you to get married. And whether you’re willing to admit it or not, you long for that day. Some people lie to themselves and try to tell themselves there’s something better than that day, and their lifestyle reflects it, but in reality by living that way, they’re in their own way longing for that day.
God has that same longing for us. He longs for us to cross over and be in Heaven, where He can spend more time with us, and higher-quality time with us. God looks forward to our deathbed like we look forward to a wedding day.
So, yes, God wants to heal us, because He doesn’t like watching us suffer. But that’s secondary. God wants us to want Him to heal the people we love. Somewhere I read a very interesting study titled, “Why God Needs a Human.” Interestingly, Jesus’ hands were tied when He went back to His hometown, because in His hometown, the people had no faith in Him. He tried to perform miracles there, but they weren’t as spectacular nor as numerous as anywhere else. So our unbelief in what God can or will do does seem to hinder His work.
So yes, we are supposed to want God to perform miracles on the people we love. Intensely. And when He does, the results are often spectacular. My friend Emily totaled her car a few months ago. She didn’t walk away from the accident like Isaac Bruce did. So some might say Emily didn’t have as much faith as Isaac Bruce did. To that I say, well, you don’t know Emily, and I don’t know Isaac Bruce, and it’s not my place to say anything about anyone else’s faith. But Emily should not be alive today. She says the only thing she remembers about her accident is an angel coming and getting her. And Emily was found laying in the road, where there was danger of her being run over. I would argue she was there for good reason–the dangerous place is also the place you’re most likely to be found quickly. And the same angel who could take her out of the car can just as easily be there to protect her. Potentially there was more than one.
When Emily tells that story, people get goosebumps. When Emily talks about her comeback, people get inspired. I didn’t know Emily very well before her accident–we met about a month before it happened–but at the very least, this incident in her life gave her another tool in her arsenal. And thanks to that, God may get another engagement or three He wouldn’t have had otherwise.
God knows–and only God knows–when it makes sense to heal. Our job is to be concerned on behalf of our brothers and sisters. But in those cases when God decides it’s time to call someone home, it’s not up to us to question the timing.
—
That’s much easier said than done. I wrote that bit about 4 pm on Sunday, in preparation for an interview for my documentary. Well, it’s not my documentary. I deliberately separated myself from the story, so I’d go in knowing just the very basics–a young couple from our church, named John and Karin, had twins in early September. Tommy, the boy, is completely healthy. Katie, the girl, has a heart condition. You can instantly tell when you see Katie that all’s not well with her. Don’t get me wrong–she looks fine. But when Katie and Tommy are in the room, you can’t hear Tommy breathing unless you listen for it. You can hear Katie. They’re short, desperate breaths. Tommy breathes about 60 times a minute, Karin said. Katie breathes 100 times.
I had John and Karin tell me the story, more or less from the beginning. Twins, a boy and a girl. Wonderful. Then Karin notices a yellow sticky-note where they were keeping Katie. The nurse wouldn’t give a straight answer. Heart murmur. That’s OK though. A lot of babies have what looks like a heart murmur and it goes away. Katie’s didn’t go away. Enlarged heart. OK, so you wait for the baby to reach 11 pounds, then you do surgery. Katie wasn’t growing.
I saw Katie and Tommy’s baptism, through the camera eye. I filmed the entire service. One of the church members wanted John and Karin to tell their story on video. John and Karin were very open to the idea. I agreed to the project, assuming certain resources would be available to me. It took about 45 minutes one Tuesday afternoon for all those resources to come together. OK, God’s pretty clearly behind this one–all the doors are wide open and the sun’s shining in and I do believe I left my sunglasses in the car. Alright alright, Dave can take a hint or twelve.
Pastor broke down while he was baptizing Katie. I caught the whole episode on tape. You can tell a lot about a Pastor from the way he handles infant baptisms. I’ve seen Pastor baptize dozens and dozens of babies. One has cried. Exactly one. Pastor has cried once, and that was with Katie. He loves her like his own daughter. So do a lot of people in the congregation.
Well, come late November, Katie had a growth spurt. Here she is now, the end of December, 10 pounds. That’s not much for four months, I know–I was born 10 pounds. But 10 pounds is close enough. Her surgery is Wednesday. It’s going to be a 10-hour ordeal. There’s little question that the surgery will make her a normal baby. The question mark is whether she’ll survive the surgery. Many don’t.
John and Karin sat down and talked with me for about 30 minutes, telling me their story. Everyone involved in the project knew what they wanted John and Karin to say–they knew John and Karin and they’d heard them talk. What they didn’t know was how to coax them into saying the good stuff. After a couple of conversations with people who knew them, I knew, mostly instinctively, what questions to ask to bring the story out. Four years of journalism school proved useful after all.
So I rolled the camera, played with the lights to get John and Karin to look good, and started asking questions. They answered the questions I meant to ask, rather than the questions I actually asked. Easiest interview I’ve ever done, far and away. After 20 minutes, Karin had to leave with Katie–she was uncomfortable in the lights. Karin apologized. I told her not to. At that point, John said there were three things he wanted to say. I told him I had plenty of tape. So he poured his heart out. Some of it I can’t use. But some of it was among the best stuff to come out of the interview.
The gist of it: They know God has a plan. They don’t know what it is, they don’t understand everything. But they trust Him. They trust Him more than I do.
By that time, Pastor was there, along with some of John and Karin’s friends. They wanted to pray for the whole family and annoint Katie with oil, as James 5:16 says to do. I caught that on tape too, along with some of the chemistry of the group. Pastor wanted me to emphasize the importance of small groups with the video, so I wanted to capture the essence of the group. The group was an awful lot like mine. That’s good. John and Karin said without the small group’s support and concern, they wouldn’t be what they are right now. I know. Without my small group, I wouldn’t be either. And I thought I had the coolest small group in the world, but this group is just as good. Same love, different people, that’s all.
There must have been 15 people in that room who’d have given their hearts to Katie if it would help. Katie didn’t understand what was going on. She looked over at her dad and her brother, then up at her mom and stopped crying. A room full of people confessed their sins to one another, as James 5:16 says to do. That’s awkward, but none of that stuff will leave the room. I’ll destroy the audio portion of the tape if it turned out–I was having problems with the microphones at that point. A room full of people prayed with intensity. And pastor pulled out a vial of oil, annointed Katie, and prayed for strength for her. John and Karin were holding their twins, sitting in front of an altar, Pastor standing right behind them. It was a beautiful picture–John and Karin sitting there. Pastor’s got their back. And God’s right behind all of them. Meanwhile, they were all surrounded by a tight circle of friends, hands outstretched.
By the time it was over, I think everyone except Tommy and Katie was crying.
I took tape home last night, but I didn’t take any equipment. Right now I don’t need to be editing video. I need to be praying that Katie makes it through Wednesday and sees Thursday. And the next Thursday. And let’s see… There are 52 Thursdays in a year, so about 4,000 Thursdays after that.
The tape can wait.