Grant's Progress Report

Tonight I asked Grant what he remembered about being in the hospital, and his response kind of surprised me. I have not written before about his room, or his feelings of being in the hospital, so I wanted to record it before I too, hopefully forever, forget. (Hopefully forever, because I hope he never has to be inside the walls of the hospital as a patient again.)

Before I tell you what Grant said about being in the hospital, let me describe the 9th floor and his rooms.

When you enter the 9th floor, you walk up to a desk and check-in. To the left is the door that gives you access to the rooms. Before you can go through that door, you have to clean your hands with the sanitizer that is in a container on the wall on the right hand side of the door. On the check-in desk, there is a sign that describes the symptoms of the flu. If you have any of those, you are not allowed on the floor.

After you clean your hands, and enter through the door, if you look to the right, there is the check-in desk, the door that leads to the room where the doctors gather, and a small wall that has a chart of all the rooms on the floor  listed by room number. Next to each room number are these small colored dots. If you spend any amount of time on the 9th floor, you learn what those colored dots mean. Green means that patient is doing well. Yellow, not so good. And red - really bad.  You learn that the patient in the "red" room may not make it. If you walk past the "red" patient’s room and they have a pink heart taped to the door, that means that patient is just waiting to die. Everyone hates to see those pink hearts. Pink hearts mean a parent will have to bury their child soon and that the hospital is doing everything they can to make that child as "comfortable" as possible. I have seen too many pink hearts.

Once you get past the check in desk, you can go either right or left.  The floor was a giant oval. Rooms 16, 17, 18, and 19 are in front of the desk. Grant started his treatment in room 928. He ended treatment in room 929. Most of his hospital stays were in the back hallway. Room 936 was our favorite. It had a view of the new hospital being built and overlooked the West University area.

When you entered his room, the windows to the outside world were in front of you and expanded the length of the room. The parents bed/couch was under that window. The patient’s bed was centered in the room with the head of the bed up against the wall and the foot of the bed in the center of the room. The bathroom was opposite of window. They had a built in closet, desk, sink and TV on the wall opposite of the head boards. The walls were painted white, but had a lot of bright teal, blue, pink, and purple accents.

There was a window that looked into the room from the hallway. The door to the room also had a floor to ceiling window. Thank God both of these had blinds. You could open, or close them as you saw fit. We always decorated the outside of Grant's door. No one could go past his door without knowing Grant has behind it. I would hang up pictures of him and all his art work on the door. The windows of the doors were always covered in window markers. And, we always had a theme. Sometimes it was a countdown to his last treatment. Sometimes it looked like a baseball field. On his last in-patient treatment, I decorated it to look like a jail. In big letters, the door read, "Grant is busting out of the Big House!" That was a common phrase among patients on the 9th floor. 9th floor stay = being in the "Big House - aka Jail."

As I stated earlier, I asked Grant, “What do you remember about your rooms at the hospital." Below is a list of what he said:

1. Eating oatmeal in my room
2. Nurse Judy. She had black hair and cried when she accessed my port.
3. Doing art with Daddy at night. (Any time daddy stayed with Grant, I always came back to way too much glitter in Grant's hospital bed. I never allowed the glitter, but daddy did. I am so glad he did!)
4. Where the windows and bath rooms were
5. Drawing a baseball field on his window
6. Playing with a baseball toy. (He played with this toy before he had has neurological episode. He was 3!!)
7. The doll house in the play room
8. Going upstairs to Radio Lollypop.
9. The trains
10. The fish tank on the top floor.

11. The library and the movies you could get there
12. A shot he got in his leg. (My guess is that it was the PEG shot. The older kids tell me it hurts like hell.)

That is it. That is what he remembers about his treatment. A shot and a whole lot of other fun stuff. Over 2.5 years and this is what he takes away from this. WHAT A BLESSING!!

Grant, assuming all goes as planned and as I pray it does, will go off treatment on Jan. 30th. David and I are very nervous about stopping his treatment at that point. We ask that you please continue to raise Grant up in prayers as well as all the other kids, and their families, that will have to take this journey. We thank you for your consistent prayers and wish you all a very Merry Christmas!