I Will Love You Forever

by Cori Salchert

  Honestly, I have to go there. Bottom line, the worst fears in my life have to do with being disabled and death, so I process each fear as it rises. If this _____ (fill in the worst-case scenario), then God. Then God. Then God. I’m not able to flutter about, thinking, Oh, that could never happen, so don’t even worry about it.

  For me it’s not enough to trust God that it won’t happen; I have to trust Him even if it does. God is good, and He loves me despite the circumstances. Knowing this carries me through the valley of the shadow of death and helps me not to be overcome with fear of evil. To me, faith means I might not understand how God is working all things together for good and for His glory when they appear so terrible, but He is. This knowledge steadies me when my world seems to be falling apart.

  I don’t know what the future holds. What I know to be true is this: My God brings beauty from ashes. My God is faithful. He does what He pleases, and it will all be worked together for the ultimate good, whether it is in the moment or not. I can trust Him with my own life and with my children’s lives.

  I firmly believe one of the ways God redeemed my thinking and actions through Emily’s diabetes was to give me an understanding of parents who find themselves unable to continue to care for their children. It helps me put aside any pride and offer compassion to those who have made the choice to put their children in foster care or had the choice made for them.

  When I first began to deal with Emily’s diagnosis and grappled with my responsibilities, I found myself wishing I could drop her off at Children’s Hospital and let her stay there as if it were some kind of boarding school. She would be kept safe and medically cared for. I would promise to visit her, of course! Then we would marry her off to Superman when she was twenty-three years old, and he would make sure from then on that she was okay. Let someone else much better equipped handle it, because I felt totally inept and afraid.

  This fear made my child a little crazy. If I was as old as I was and so afraid of diabetes, how could she, at eleven years old, live with it without dreading each day? God, because He is faithful, has carried and kept both Emily and me through this storm, and we are not the same people today as we were back in 2012. We are more aware of and empathetic toward the suffering around us. God has continued to educate and equip us to handle the trial He has asked us to bear.

  9

  BREATH OF LIFE

  I surrender all,

  I surrender all.

  All to Thee, my blessed Savior,

  I surrender all.

  —JUDSON W. VAN DEVENTER, “I SURRENDER ALL”

  Life is not a paved, smooth road with a straight trajectory. The same is true of foster care.

  During the vetting of potential foster parents, a candidate can easily miss the mark. Here are the portions Mark and I had finished.

  Psych evaluation passed

  Education requirements completed

  Personal interviews approved

  References verified

  We found this process to be deterring at times yet also reassuring. A kiddo’s well-being and safety shouldn’t be compromised while in foster care. The agency Mark and I work with goes above and beyond to ensure success on the part of all involved. We are honored to be part of the system.

  In early 2013 we were given the final approval to become licensed medical treatment foster parents. The soul struggle over having others scrutinize my life—all our lives—was real. God had begun a good work of establishing my worth apart from my abilities, and He continued it during the season of waiting for word that the Salchert family was indeed competent to care for children.

  And then the wait began in earnest.

  One year after our licensing was completed, we finally received a call about a child who was actually going to be placed with our family. A real live baby was placed in our arms and our home.

  When he first came to us, his brows had a permanent crease. He looked like an old man with too many worries. He had been pretty miserable his first few weeks. He wasn’t terminally ill, but rather his medical challenges required our nurturing. With seven sets of open arms at our house, Baby B was held most of the time, which was helpful in soothing his anxieties. He grew into a beautiful, happy, smiling, giggling baby. He was going to be adopted by biological relatives, and we were gifted with the ability to get to know his family before he transitioned to live with them.

  We poured out our hearts, giving that baby boy tons of love and cuddling in the eight months he was with us. We treated him as though he were going to live with us forever, no matter how long his stay. No regrets.

  My fervent prayer was that I would be able to give Baby B over to his adoptive mother’s arms and do so with a smile so that the last time he saw me, my face wouldn’t be a mess because I was crying. God answered abundantly above what I requested, and Baby B grinned at me in a way that assured me he was going to be better than okay, and eventually so was I.

  I came home from the journey to give Baby B up on my birthday, September 28, 2014, resolved that I was done fostering—at least for a while. I felt as if my heart was broken even though it was a good thing that had transpired. We had done a wonderful job where our foster baby was concerned. Also, Johanna, our oldest daughter still at home, was in the process of gathering support to go live and work at an orphanage in Thailand. I wanted to make sure she had the time and energy to dedicate to that effort.

  Mark, on the other hand, had a different perspective. He told me about a week later, “You need to call the social worker. Get back in the saddle.”

  “No, I want time to heal,” I explained. “I miss the baby so badly. I wake up in the morning imagining I hear him playing in his crib and giggling, but then I realize he’s not really there.” I shook my head, not wanting to open myself up to having my heart broken—again and on purpose.

  “Nope. This is what you do. Give her a call,” was Mark’s summation of the situation.

  The following weekend Mark was driving the van, which was packed with all our kids currently living with us. I turned around in my seat so I could see all of them and asked, “What do you think about getting another baby? Dad says I should call our social worker and let her know. I have no idea how soon we would get a child. But I do know we all miss Baby B and are hurting, so if you’re not up for it yet, that’s perfectly okay.”

  I wanted to accurately evaluate their responses. Everyone in the van nodded yes, from Charity, Johanna, Emily, and Andrew. Mary Elisabeth, who was seventeen at the time, told me flat out, “Uh, Mom, what if some kid needs us and you’re just sitting over here with a broken heart?”

  I turned back around, facing the front window. I smiled and thought, Okay, fine. I’ll call Faith.

  I called the next morning. And not too many days after that we were asked if we would take a four-month-old boy named Charlie who was in the ICU at Children’s Hospital. Faith told us he had a tracheostomy (breathing tube), and we didn’t know much more than that.

  Johanna, Charity, and I drove to the hospital to meet the little one.

  People with dreamy smiles have asked me this question, “Oh, did you just fall in love with him right away?”

  Nope, I didn’t.

  He was a sorry sight when we arrived in the room. He was upset and posturing, which means his head was arched backward, his body stiff. With his blotchy, red skin, honestly, he was one of the most unattractive babies I had ever seen.

  I washed my hands and asked if I could hold him in my arms and close to me so it would be easier to look him over. My desire to look him over closely was in no way to evaluate his cuteness factor and decide if we wanted him or not. The decision had already been made sight unseen. I was fact finding, not fault finding.

  I pulled up one of the hospital recliners next to his bed, and the nurse detangled the tubes and wires that monitored his heart rate and his oxygen saturations. The long blue tubing delivering humidified air to his tracheostomy had to be juggled to get him into my lap.

  My hear
t quailed inside me at the sight of all this equipment attached to him. He needed all that just to keeping him going! Wow.

  When he was settled in my lap, as much as a stiff, unhappy child could be, I realized his eyes were rolled back in his head. The heaviness of that moment bowled over me like a semitruck. I thought, There is a baby underneath all this equipment. Don’t forget that, Salchert.

  “He is profoundly brain-damaged,” I said flatly to the nurse. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, he is.”

  My breath caught in my chest, and I consciously exhaled, absorbing the shock.

  In seconds I processed the great responsibility we were taking on. The decision to care for this child had not been made lightly, and that resolve stabilized me. Charlie reminded me so much of my little sister, Amie. While Amie hadn’t had an artificial airway, the way they both had seizures and spasticity—eyes rolled back in their heads, unseeing—brought my childhood memories to the forefront.

  I gave myself an internal pep talk: You always wanted to be able to do more for Amie. You’re an adult now. You have nursing skills. You couldn’t do very much for your sister, but you could make a difference for this baby.

  I made a decision to act based on how I wanted to feel. I didn’t have a rush of adoring love for him initially, but compassion? Oh, you betcha.

  It was also Johanna’s twenty-first birthday, so we regrouped at The Cheesecake Factory a couple of miles from the hospital. I was quiet during lunch, reflecting on all we had seen in Charlie’s hospital room and how much we were expected to learn in a short time frame.

  The rule was that two people over the age of eighteen years old had to be able to completely take care of all of his needs. Charity was in nursing school and the natural choice for the position, but she had schedule restraints, as did Mark, who was still working full-time.

  Johanna became my go-to, the second caregiver required to bring Charlie home. She was planning to go back to Thailand permanently as a missionary but had to raise support in the States to pay for her room and board. Those funds hadn’t come in yet, so she was at home and willing to step up and help for the short term.

  Johanna and I stayed the night close to the hospital—one lousy, awful, noisy night in an inexpensive hotel. The room was dirty even though, for some odd reason, the staff ran the vacuum cleaner up and down the halls at 3:00 a.m.!

  The next day as we sat in Charlie’s room in the ICU, I shook my head in some confusion and said, “I don’t know how we’re going to spend six weeks down here to learn how to competently care for this baby.”

  Could we travel back and forth a couple of hours every day? We couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel night after night, and with my dietary restrictions, food was another crazy hurdle. As the impossibilities loomed large, I asked myself, Did we miss it? This is not doable. Physically, I can’t fall apart in the process of trying to take care of this baby. I was a little confused at how hard the process was turning out to be.

  My phone rang. A staff member of the Ronald McDonald House was on the line. The house was across the street from the hospital and provided lodging for families whose children were in the hospital or receiving long-term outpatient treatment. She said they had a room for us that night if we wanted it and for as long as we might need it. Johanna urged me to go ahead and take it. We got settled in and found the impossibilities that faced us were lifted in one fell swoop.

  We would come back in the evenings after spending hours with Charlie, famished and tired, not just physically but on every front. Most of the time a meal had been lovingly prepared for us. The food was nourishing, not just for our bodies but also for our souls, making us feel cherished.

  Our home-away-from-home at the Ronald McDonald House was a safe haven in the midst of the storm. I felt nurtured and cared for by the kindhearted, benevolent efforts of others who had no idea who we were but gave generously anyway. That kindness had a way of getting paid forward to the people who came across my path, especially our foster son.

  Charlie required surgery not too long after we became his foster family. A feeding tube, called a G-J, was placed in his abdomen and routed nourishment through his stomach into his small intestine. Before this, like Emmalynn, he had been fed through a small tube that entered his nose.

  His recovery period after the surgery was rough. He wasn’t bothering to breathe on his own, and a ventilator was brought to his aid.

  This change in Charlie’s health status, combined with the pressure of learning how to use a new piece of vital and complicated equipment, knocked me for a loop. Charlie wasn’t initially considered terminal, though his prognosis was poor. He occasionally didn’t have respiratory drive when he fell asleep, and so his oxygen saturations would drop. He couldn’t stay awake all the time, and expecting someone to watch him like a hawk should he stop breathing was just as unrealistic—and yet we tried it. At first we thought if we were holding him, we would certainly notice if his breathing stopped. But he didn’t wave his hands in the air and announce, “I will now stop breathing.” No, the little dude would be lying in our arms, his skin color sweet and pink one minute, and the next we would look down and he would be gray. This would happen without any fanfare or warning. There was no discernible cause for this other than the oxygen shortages he had experienced in the womb and at birth (called hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy).

  This was my first rodeo with a child this medically fragile. Charlie was what is called a “full code.” (Resuscitation measures are a gift for most people, and for some, in my opinion, they are not.) Everything must be done to save his life, including introducing air into his lungs via a respiratory bag or ventilator and applying compressions of his sternum and ribcage to pump blood through his heart. These compressions could certainly result in his sternum cracking or his ribs being broken, which would cause him great pain. “Full code” also includes using a defibrillator and injecting cardiac meds in his veins or via the space inside his bones should IV access not be available. All this was hanging over him—and us. He was oblivious to the potential outcomes, but we were not. It was a heavy, almost suffocating, burden to bear on his behalf.

  One evening I went back to the Ronald McDonald House and went to the dining room on the third floor. I sat on a chair in the corner of the room. I was trying to get some supper because it had been hours since my last meal, and I couldn’t seem to pull myself together. I called my husband and wept over the phone.

  The room was empty except for Elsie, one of the cleaning ladies. I was focused on the phone call and not paying attention to her as she worked. I questioned Mark. “I don’t know if we’re supposed to do this. It’s so hard. Did we miss it? Do I want the redemption of the loss I felt over Amie so badly that I have taken on something I should not be doing?”

  Mark wasn’t experiencing any doubts in that moment and said, “I don’t think God changed His mind about all of this just because it’s tougher than we realized it was going to be. We believed it was what we should do a few weeks ago. He hasn’t decided we shouldn’t do it now and forgot to send the memo.”

  Elsie came over to my table. She placed a tissue box, a couple of granola bars, and a bottle of water in front of me. Without a word, she gently reached out, placed her hand on my shoulder, and gave it a little squeeze. I looked up, and she nodded her head in my direction with a wink, as if to say, “You’ve got this.” Then she moved away without saying anything and went back to her work.

  At one of the care conferences, which is a meeting to evaluate our readiness for taking Charlie home, one of the nurse practitioners said, “Oh, you’re so cute. Look at how scared you are.” I didn’t necessarily feel cute at all. It was one thing to care for Charlie in the hospital where there was a call light. If it went off, at a moment’s notice, nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, care partners, and/or equipment maintenance people would come running. At home we were it. All those jobs wrapped up in two shaky humans who cared a lot but could make a mistake and kill this
child as a result.

  I had never liked working with NICU babies. The hospice ones, yes—my ability to make a difference (and not cause harm) was pretty much guaranteed. I felt confident in that arena. Charlie, however, was not supposed to come home and die. We had to do our best to prevent mistakes. I tried my best to be educated and competent to care for any baby in the nursery while I worked on the labor and delivery floor, but situations with babies in critical need where I was the one primarily in charge were not ones I relished or enjoyed. Now I had a choice to master the skills to care well for Charlie and not let fear have its way, or I could leave him at the hospital and say, “Nope, I’m not going there.”

  We had been told our “deer in the headlights” look would vanish after a while and we would pack up his Go-bag, a term used for the bag that kids with a tracheostomy who are on ventilators have with them 24/7 with all the tracheostomy supplies and the resuscitation bag. I also had to manage his diaper bag, the wheelchair, ventilator, and pulse oximeter, not to mention the boy himself. They said it would become so routine that we would wonder what we were ever so fearful about. The transition from acute fear to “pfft, whatever” took a long time with many, many bumps in the road.

  Caitlin, one of the nurses in the ICU, took on the bulk of the responsibility to teach Johanna and me how to do what was called “Charlie’s cares.”

  One of my first bumps was on the morning I needed to do his first trach tube change. All the supplies were carefully laid out on the bedside table. I had read the procedure steps a number of times. I had watched it being done. I had practiced on a little red Sesame Street Elmo doll.

  As I stood at Charlie’s bedside, his tiny new trach in my shaking gloved hand, I felt my knees go weak. Caitlin was on the other side of the bed and said, “Are you okay? I’m right here. I know what to do if he gets into trouble. You’re not alone. I’ll walk you through step by step.”