We arrived back home and the house was eerily quiet. Those last few months we had felt as though we were living in a wind tunnel. That previous September, our oldest, Josh had started college in Seattle. In October, my Dad unexpectedly died. A week after his death, we had another health scare with Annika when, after complaining of vision disturbances, her Dr. ordered a MRI. We didn’t think too much of it until later that night when I received a frantic phone call from the nurse. She told me that we needed to immediately pick up the MRI films and take Annika to Seattle that night to be evaluated by a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital. After meeting with the neurosurgeon, we learned that Annika had 2 benign brain cysts that appeared to be slow growing. There was nothing to do but periodically do follow-up MRIs to check size of the cysts. These events were then followed by her cataclysmic emotional spiral of November and December. Now, here we were, returning to a house with only us and Kirsten, oh and of course our little ‘ball of hate’, our chihuahua Trini..
We took the spare leaves out to make the dining table as small as we could. It felt strange to sit there, just the 3 of us. Since our house has the master bedroom on the main floor, I could avoid going upstairs. I think it was a couple of months before I went into Annika’s room. I know it wasn’t even a minuscule fraction of what a parent must go thru when they lose a child, but for me it was still heart-wrenching. There was a constant feeling of self-doubt over the decision that we had made to put her in residential treatment. Did we do the right thing? Would she get better?
Every Sunday at church our Pastor would include Annika in the morning prayer. People would ask how she was doing. We really didn’t know how to answer. Our contact with her was limited to one 15 minute social phone call on Sunday afternoons. During those phone calls, one of the staff members would stand by Annika and listen to her so we could never really get a good read on how she was. On Tuesdays we would have a family therapy session, by phone of course. Her therapist would send us weekly written reports that told us nothing. In this blog, I have previously written about our perceptions of her time at Uinta, I won’t detail that part of it again. Bottom line, we still question if we did the right thing. We see definite progress, but was the cost too much? I’m not just talking about the financial cost, but the cost to all of us emotionally.
There was of course the related loss of financial stability. When we had moved out of our previous home, we were satisfied with the state of our finances. We owed no one, save a small mortgage payment and our basic living expenses. We purchased property with cash to build our new home on. After that purchase, we still had a nice cushion. The financial cushion first began to erode when I quit working to be at home to home school Annika. The elimination of almost 40% of our monthly income, while we were building a new home AND renting a condo, was not good on the checkbook. We reluctantly borrowed money to help us make ends meet.
Now, a year later, we were faced with extraordinary expenses. Kirsten was attending private high school. Josh was attending college at Seattle Pacific and Annika was 1,000 miles away in a residential treatment center with monthly placement fees of almost $8,000! We refinanced the house and took as much equity out as we could to pay down some of the debt we had incurred the past year. We started dialing for dollars to find sources for the treatment costs. It was an interesting time. The credit market had frozen up. After living years without ever having a problem obtaining credit, we were actually turned down for a couple of small loans. We were shocked. Finally, we were able to pull enough together thru various sources, including a generous low interest loan from dear friends. We were also blessed by anonymous donations that helped cover almost two months of placement. But now were now saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt that would be difficult to pay back. We were in a house ½ the size of our previous one, but we owed more than we had ever owed in our lives! How would we ever pay it all back? How would we balance the needs of all of our children. We didn’t want Josh and Kirsten to be deprived of their schooling and become resentful of their younger sister. They had already endured so much as our focus and attention had been so unevenly distributed at times. They had already endured living with parents whose emotions were so frayed that they often were unaware of what was going on around them. They had already endured a loss of relationship with their little sister, who was unable due to her illness to really participate in building of real relationships.
I kept reminding myself on a daily basis, that God wanted us very close to him in those days. We needed to trust in Him that he would provide for our needs. Not necessarily our wants, but always, always our needs.
to be continued...
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