by Todd Burpo
exploded.
Sonja began shaking her head and tears, which had hovered just
beneath the surface, spil ed onto her cheeks.
“Are you sure it’s not appendicitis?” I asked the doctor.
“There’s a family history.”
Again he said no. “That’s not what the blood tests show.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
FIVE
SHADOW OF DEATH
That was Monday, March 3. Nurses placed Colton in a room and inserted
an IV. Two bags dangled from the top of a stainless steel pole, one for
hydration and one with antibiotics of some kind. Sonja and I prayed
together for Colton. Norma stopped by with Colton’s favorite toy, his
Spider-Man action figure. Normal y, his eyes would’ve lit up at the sight of
either Norma or Spider-Man, but Colton didn’t react at al . Later, our friend
Terri brought Colton’s best little buddy, her son Hunter, to visit. Again,
Colton was unresponsive, almost lifeless.
Sitting in a side chair near Colton’s bed, Norma looked at Sonja grimly.
“I think you should take him to Children’s Hospital in Denver.”
But at that point, we were trusting in the doctors, confident that
everything was being done that could be done. Besides, Colton was in no
condition to travel al the way back to Colorado.
Colton continued to throw up. Sonja held down the fort, comforting him,
catching his vomit, while I drove home to check in on the rest of our lives.
On the way, I stopped by the church to make sure the place hadn’t burned
down. I checked in with my garage-door guys, returned some phone cal s
from new customers, and went out to do a door repair job. The entire time I
was away from the hospital, I sent up prayers. Even during my
conversations with others, my prayers ascended, a kind of mental
background music that would’ve been in the foreground—the only ground
—if only life didn’t have an annoying way of rol ing on.
Sonja spent Monday night at the hospital, and I stayed home with
Cassie. On Tuesday morning, I took her to school. During the rest of the
day, between church and company responsibilities, I popped in and out of
the hospital as often as I could, hoping for some improvement. Instead,
each time I walked into Colton’s room, I saw my little boy slipping deeper
into the grip of whatever mysterious monster held him. Not only was he not
getting better; he was getting worse faster.
By the second afternoon, I saw something that terrified me: the shadow
of death.
I recognized it instantly. As a pastor, you sometimes find yourself on a
deathwatch. In a hospital. A nursing home. A hospice. There are tel tale
signs: the skin loses its pinkness and fades to a jaundiced yel ow.
Breathing is labored. The eyes are open but the person is not present. And
most tel ing of al , a sinking and darkening around the eyes. I had seen this
look many times, but in a context where you might expect it, in a patient
suffering from terminal cancer or in the final phases of old age. You know
that person’s life on earth has come down to days, then hours, then
minutes. I would be there to comfort the family, to pray with them prayers
like, God, please take her soon. Please take away her pain.
This time, though, I was seeing the shadow of death again— and I was
seeing it on my son. My not-quite-four-year-old son. The sight hit me like a
bul et.
A voice screamed inside my head, We’re not doing anything!
I’m a pacer. I wore ruts in the floor of Colton’s room, crossing the tiny
space again and again like a caged lion. My stomach churned. Inside my
chest, an invisible vise squeezed my heart. He’s getting worse, God! What
do we do?
While I paced, Sonja channeled her anxiety into the role of busy
caretaker. She fluffed Colton’s pil ow, arranged his blankets, made sure he
was stil drinking. It was a role she was fil ing to keep from exploding. Each
time I looked at her, I could see the agitation growing in her eyes. Our son
was slipping away and, like me, she wanted to know: What. Was. Wrong?
The doctors would bring back test results, test results, test results. But no
answers, only useless observations. “He doesn’t seem to be responding to
the medication. I don’t know . . . I wish the surgeon was here.”
Sonja and I wrestled with trust. We weren’t doctors. We had no medical
experience. I’m a pastor; she’s a teacher. We wanted to trust. We wanted
to believe the medical professionals were doing everything that could be
done. We kept thinking, Next time the doctor walks in, he’ll have new test
results; he’ll change the medication; he’ll do something to get that look of
death off our son.
But he didn’t. And there came a point when we had to draw the line.
SIX
NORTH PLATTE
On Wednesday, we broke the news to the Imperial hospital staff that we
were taking Colton to the Great Plains Regional Medical Center in North
Platte. We considered Norma’s suggestion of Children’s in Denver, but felt
it would be better to stay closer to our base of support. It took a while to get
Colton checked out, as it does anytime you leave a hospital, but to us it
seemed an eternity. Final y, a nurse came in with the discharge papers, a
copy of Colton’s test results, and a large, flat brown envelope containing
his Xrays. Sonja cal ed ahead to the office of pediatrician Dr. Del
Shepherd to let his staff know we were coming.
At 10:30 a.m., I picked Colton up out of the hospital bed and was
shocked at the limpness of his body. He felt like a rag in my arms. It
would’ve been a great time to panic, but I tried to keep my cool. At least we
were doing something now. We were taking action.
Colton’s car seat was strapped into the backseat of our SUV. Gently, I
laid him in, wondering as I buckled him in how fast I could make the ninety-
minute trip to North Platte. Sonja climbed into the backseat with Colton,
armed with a pink plastic hospital dish for catching vomit.
The day was sunny but cold. As I steered the SUV onto Highway 61, I
twisted the rearview mirror so that I could see Colton. Several miles
passed in silence; then I heard him retching into the bowl. When he was
finished, I pul ed over so that Sonja could empty it onto the side of the road.
Back on the highway, I glanced in the mirror and saw Sonja slip the Xray
film from the brown envelope and hold it up in the streaming sunlight.
Slowly, she began shaking her head, and tears fil ed her eyes.
“We screwed up,” she said, her voice breaking over the images she
would later tel me were burned in her mind forever.
I turned my head back enough to see the three smal explosions she was
staring at. The misshapen blotches seemed huge in the ghostly image of
Colton’s tiny torso. Why did they seem so much bigger now?
“You’re right. We should’ve known,” I said.
“But the doctor . . .”
“I know. We shouldn’t have listened.”
There wasn’t any finger-pointing, no blaming each other. But we were
both r
eal y upset with ourselves. We had tried to do the right thing at each
step. The doctor said Xrays; we did Xrays. The doctor said IVs; we did
IVs. The doctor said blood tests; we did blood tests. He was the doctor,
right? He knew what he was doing . . . right? At each turning point, we had
tried to make the right cal , but we had made the wrong ones, and now
Colton was paying for it. A helpless child was suffering the consequences
of our mistakes.
Behind me, Colton slumped lifelessly in his car seat, and his silence was
louder than any sound I had ever heard.
There is a story in the Bible about King David of Israel. David had
committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of David’s
trusted soldiers. Then, in an effort to cover up his sin, David sent Uriah to
the front lines, where David knew he would be kil ed. Later, the prophet
Nathan came to David and said, basical y, “Look, God knows what you
did, and here are the consequences of your sin: the child that you and
Bathsheba have conceived wil not live.”1
David tore his clothes and cried and prayed and pleaded with God. He
was so grief-stricken that when the baby died, his servants were afraid to
come and tel him. But David figured it out, and when he did, he got up,
washed himself, ate, and calmly took care of the funeral. His behavior
confused his servants, who said, “Hey, wait a minute: weren’t you just
freaking out a few minutes ago? Weren’t you just pleading and crying
before God? Now you’re so calm . . . what’s the deal?”
David explained, “I was hoping God would change his mind. But he
didn’t.”2
In his mind, David had been doing what he could while there was stil
something he could do.
When I think back on that drive to North Platte, that’s how I felt. Yes, the
X-rays looked bad, and my son’s face was covered in death.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
Now was not the time to quit and mourn. Now was the time for prayer
and action. God, let us get there. Let us help our son.
As a father, I felt I had blown it. But maybe there was stil something I
could do to redeem myself. That hope was probably the only thing that kept
me from fal ing apart.
We crossed the North Platte line at about noon and made a beeline for
the pediatrician’s office. I hustled out of the SUV and bundled Colton in a
blanket, carrying him in my arms like a fireman. Sonja gathered up our
gear and fol owed me in, stil carrying the hospital bowl.
At the reception desk, a pleasant woman greeted us.
“We’re the Burpos,” I said. “We cal ed ahead from Imperial about our
son.”
“The doctor has gone to lunch.”
Gone to lunch?!
“But we cal ed ahead,” I said. “He knew we were coming.”
“Please have a seat,” the receptionist said. “The doctor wil be back in
ten or fifteen minutes.”
Her routine manner told me she did not feel our urgency, and inside me,
a rocket of anger went off. On the outside, though, I kept my cool. I could’ve
screamed and hol ered, but it wouldn’t have done any good. Also, I’m a
pastor. We don’t have the luxury of publicly losing it.
Sonja and I found a seat in the waiting area, and fifteen minutes later, the
doctor arrived. He had the soothing appearance of maturity—silver hair,
glasses, a trim moustache. The nursing staff ushered us back to an exam
room, and Sonja handed him the packet of tests we’d brought, along with
the Xrays. He examined Colton so briefly that it occurred to me he might
be making up for lost time.
“I’m going to order a CT scan,” he said. “You’l need to head across the
street to the hospital.”
He meant the Great Plains Regional Medical Center. Ten minutes later,
we found ourselves in the imaging clinic in perhaps the most important
argument of our lives.
SEVEN
"I THINK THIS IS IT"
“Noooo!”
“But Colton, you have to drink it!”
“Noooo! It’s yuh-keeeee!”
Colton’s screams of protest echoed through the clinic. He was so
exhausted, so frail, so tired of throwing up his guts, and now we were trying
to make him drink a thick, gritty, cherry-red solution that a sane adult
wouldn’t drink voluntarily in a mil ion years. Final y, Colton took a little sip,
but then immediately heaved it up again. Sonja swooped in to catch it in
the bowl.
“He’s throwing up al the time,” I told the imaging technician. “How’s he
going to drink it?”
“I’m sorry, sir . . . he has to drink it so we can get the best images.”
“Ple-e-ease! Please don’t make me drink it, Daddy!”
We tried everything. We played good cop/bad cop, Sonja coaxing while
I threatened. But the firmer I got, the more Colton clamped his teeth
together and refused the sticky liquid.
I tried reasoning: “Colton, if you can just get this down, the doctors can
do this test and we can get you feeling better. Don’t you want to feel
better?”
Sniffles. “Yeah.”
“Wel , here then, take a drink.”
“Noooooo! Don’t make meeee!”
We were desperate. If he didn’t drink the fluid, they couldn’t do the CT
scan. Without the CT scan, they couldn’t diagnose. Without a diagnosis,
they couldn’t treat our son. The battle raged for nearly an hour until, final y, a
technician came out and had mercy on us. “Let’s go ahead and take him
in. We’l just do the best we can.”
Inside the imaging room, Sonja stood with the tech behind the radiation
shield while I stood beside a listless Colton as the moving table slid him
into a big, scary tube. Showing tenderness and compassion, the tech
stopped the table before it slid Colton ful y into the machine, al owing him
to keep his head out so that he could see me. The machine whirred to life,
and Colton stared at me through eyes pinched with pain.
Just like that, the test was over. The technician scanned the pictures,
then escorted us out of the lab. He did not take us back to the main waiting
room, but to an isolated hal way where a few chairs lined the wal .
The technician looked at me somberly. “You need to wait here,” he said.
At the time, I didn’t even notice that he had not asked Colton to get
dressed.
The three of us sat in the cold, narrow hal way, Sonja cradling Colton, his
head against her shoulder. She was crying pretty steadily now. Looking in
her eyes, I could see that her hope had drained away. This wasn’t the
normal place where you would wait. The tech had separated us out. He
had seen the picture and knew it was something bad.
Sonja looked down at Colton, lying in her arms, and I could see the
wheels turning in her head. She and Colton did everything together. This
was her little boy, her pal. More than that, this little blond-haired, blue-eyed
firebal was a heavenly blessing, a healing gift after the baby we had lost.
Five years earlier, Sonja had been pregnant with our second child. We
were over the moon about it, seeing this new life as the round
ing out of our
family. When it was just the two of us, we were a couple. When Cassie was