One day, or night, at a time.

Today was a pretty good day. If the last hour is any indication of the rest of the night, though, it’s going to be another tough night.

He had a lot of visitors today, got a lot of special gifts, and his pain was managed well. He was pretty tired much of the day and got a good nap this afternoon.

It seems, though, that maybe nights are just going to be the hard part. Maybe it’s because there’s not much to distract him from the pain, or maybe it’s because he’s worried that the pain is going to wake him up. Maybe it’s because they’re starting to vary his medicine a bit getting him ready to switch off the epidural, or maybe it’s just cause he’s really tired and more emotional being so tired. Or, maybe it just hurts more at night? Who knows.

As I write this, he’s crying and telling us he can’t take it…over and over and over again. There are a lot more really sad things he’s saying that I won’t repeat here. You can probably guess the types of things. We’re waiting for the Valium to kick in, but the nurse just gave it to him about 10 minutes ago, and she said it’d take about an hour to kick in. Julia is calling the nurse in to talk to her about it. We’ll see what she says.

No matter what, I think this is just a glimpse of our new reality. The pain is not going away any time soon and there’s nothing we can do about it, but give him lots of medicine, and pray. We’re trying to get his mind off of it, but it’s not working. He just wants to go home, and wishes this day never happened.

It begs the question: how much worse will it get before it gets better? I don’t know, but they’ve been warning us that tomorrow is likely going to be worse since he’ll be off the epidural. I guess that means we probably haven’t hit the bottom yet. Yikes.

Please continue to pray for him, for us, and for the family and staff helping us through this. This really is a team effort, but unfortunately, Elijah has to bear most of the burden himself.