An anniversary I didn’t want to remember…

“Would you be willing to do a video for the anniversary tomorrow?”

As his words echoed through my ears, my heart beat was recognized as the echo I was hearing.  I’m not sure what, if anything, Mike said after those words, because I wasn’t present in the moment anymore. I was replaying everything about what this day held 1 year ago…and I didn’t want to remember.

I remember the smell of the hospital as we walked in. The freshly, Clorox-mopped floors and the sun gleaming through the small blocks of white concrete at the top of the steps. I remember passing the nurses station and thinking, “Why are there so many people just sitting here when there are sick children right inside these doors?.” I remember walking through the wooden, glass-paned door, feeling hopeful, excited to see how our precious Frantzky had done through the night. However, those feelings vanished quickly. It was in that moment when anticipation and emotions clashed with reality and the next 6 hours were as if I had stepped into a nightmare and wasn’t able to wake up. 

As we walked through the door, we saw Frantzky over in a dark corner all by himself. No one around him, no one checking on him, no one anywhere. There were 3 to 4 other children on the other side of the room and only one of them was being cared for by a nurse.

As we approached Frantzky’s bed, we could see he was struggling to breathe. We then noticed his IV wasn’t working and realized it was the same IV that had been started in the ER the night before. Rhonda and I looked at each other in complete confusion and began to heap LoLo (Frantzky’s Grandma) with questions. “How long has his IV not been working?