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 all 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 calls 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 rolling 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 telltale signs: the skin loses its pinkness and fades to a jaundiced yellow. Breathing is labored. The eyes are open but the person is not present. And most telling of all, 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 bullet.
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 pillow, arranged his blankets, made sure he was still drinking. It was a role she was filling 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. Finally, 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 called ahead to the office of pediatrician Dr. Dell 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 pulled 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 filled her eyes.
“We screwed up,” she said, her voice breaking over the images she would later tell me were burned in her mind forever.
I turned my head back enough to see the three small 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 really 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 call, 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 killed. Later, the prophet Nathan came to David and said, basically, “Look, God knows what you did, and here are the consequences of your sin: the child that you and Bathsheba have conceived will 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 tell 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 still 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 still something I could do to redeem myself. That hope was probably the only thing that kept me from falling 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 followed me in, still carrying the hospital bowl.
At the reception desk, a pleasant woman greeted us.<
br />
“We’re the Burpos,” I said. “We called ahead from Imperial about our son.”
“The doctor has gone to lunch.”
Gone to lunch?!
“But we called ahead,” I said. “He knew we were coming.”
“Please have a seat,” the receptionist said. “The doctor will 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 hollered, 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’ll 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 million years. Finally, 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 all 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.”
“Well, 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, finally, a technician came out and had mercy on us. “Let’s go ahead and take him in. We’ll 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 fully into the machine, allowing 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 hallway where a few chairs lined the wall.
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 hallway, 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 fireball 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 rounding out of our family. When it was just the two of us, we were a couple. When Cassie was born, we became a family. With a second child on the way, we could begin to see the outlines of the future—family portraits, a house filled with the joyful noise of childhood, two kids checking their stockings on Christmas morning. Then two months into the pregnancy, Sonja lost the baby, and our misty-edged dreams popped like soap bubbles. Grief consumed Sonja. The reality of a child lost, one we would never know. An empty space where there wasn’t one before.
We were eager to try again, but we worried about whether we would be able to have another child, multiplying our misery. A few months later, Sonja became pregnant again. Her early prenatal checkups revealed a healthy, growing baby. Still, we hung on a bit loosely, a little afraid to fall in love with this new child as we had the one we had lost. But forty weeks later, on May 19, 1999, Colton Todd Burpo arrived and we fell head over heels. For Sonja, this little boy was an even more special gift directly from the hand of a loving, heavenly Father.
Now, as I watched her face above Colton’s pale form, I could see terrible questions forming in her mind: What are you doing, God? Are you going to take this child too?
Colton’s face appeared pinched and pale, his face a tiny moon in the stark hallway. The shadows around his eyes had deepened into dark, purple hollows. He wasn’t screaming anymore, or even crying. He was just . . . still.
Again it reminded me of those dying patients I had seen hovering on the threshold between earth and eternity. Tears filled my eyes, blurring the image of my son like rain on a windowpane. Sonja looked up at me, her own tears streaming. “I think this is it,” she said.
EIGHT
RAGING AT GOD
Five minutes later, a white-coated man emerged from the imaging lab. I don’t remember his name, but I remember that his name tag said “Radiologist.”
“Your son has a ruptured appendix,” he said. “He needs emergency surgery. They’re ready for you in surgical prep now. Follow me.”
Astonished, Sonja and I fell in behind him. Heat surged in my temples. A burst appendix? Hadn’t the doctor in Imperial ruled that out?
In the surgical prep room, Sonja laid Colton on a gurney, kissed his forehead, and stepped away as a nurse closed in with an IV bag and a needle. Immediately, Colton began to scream and thrash. I stood at my son’s head and held his shoulders down, trying to soothe him with my voice. Sonja returned to Colton’s side, crying openly as she kept trying to brace his left arm and leg with her body.
When I looked up, the prep room was crowded with men and women in white coats and scrubs. “The surgeon is here,” one of them said, gently. “If you’ll step out and talk with him, we’ll take over in here.”
Reluctantly, we stepped through the curtain, Colton screaming, “Pleeease, Daddy! Don’t go!”
In the hallway, Dr. Timothy O’Holleran waited for us. Dr. O’Holleran was the doctor who had performed the mastectomy on me four months earlier. Now his features were set in grim horizontal lines.
He didn’t waste words. “Colton’s appendix has ruptured. He’s not in good shape. We’re going to go in and try to clean him out.”
On the other side of the curtain, Colton was still screaming. “Daddy! Daaadd-eeee!”
Gritting my teeth, I shut out the sound and tried to focus on the doctor.
“We asked about a burst appendix in Imperial,” Sonja said. “They ruled it out.”
My brain skipped over the past and looked toward the future, angling for hope. “How do you think he’ll do?” I said.
“We’ve got to go in and clean him out. We’ll kn
ow more when we open him up.”
The spaces between his words rang in my ears like alarm bells as Colton’s screams rang down the halls. In response to a direct question, the doctor had specifically not given us any assurances. In fact, the only thing he had said about Colton was that he was in bad shape. My mind flashed back to the moment Sonja called me in Greeley from Imperial to tell me Colton’s fever had broken, and that they were on their way. What had seemed like the end of a stomach flu had more likely been the first sign of a ruptured appendix. That meant poison had been filling our little boy’s belly for five days. That tally explained the shadow of death we saw on him now. And it explained why Dr. O’Holleran had not offered us any hope.
The doctor nodded toward the noise spilling from the prep room. “I think it’ll work better if we take him back to surgery and sedate him, then put in the IV.”
He stepped over to the curtain and I heard him give the order. A few moments later, two nurses wheeled the gurney through the curtain, and I saw Colton writhing. He twisted his tiny form, turning his head until he locked onto me with his sunken eyes. “Daddy! Don’t let them take meeee!”
Remember when I said pastors don’t have the luxury of losing it? I was about to lose it, and I had to get away. After talking to the doctor and then scribbling my name on what seemed to be hundreds of insurance forms, nearly running, I found a small room with a door, ducked in, and slammed it shut behind me. My heart raced. I couldn’t get my breath. Desperation, anger, and frustration washed over me in waves that seemed to squeeze away my breath.
When everybody’s freaking out, they all look to Dad— especially when Dad’s a pastor. Now I was finally in a room where no one was looking at me, and I began raging at God.
“Where are you? Is this how you treat your pastors?! Is it even worth it to serve you?”
Back and forth, I paced the room, which seemed to close in on me, shrinking as surely as Colton’s options were shrinking. Over and over a single image assaulted me: Colton being wheeled away, his arms stretched out, screaming for me to save him.
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Page 4