Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

by Todd Burpo; Sonja Burpo; Lynn Vincent; Colton Burpo

  That’s when it hit me. We waited too long. I might never see my son alive again.

  Tears of rage flooded my eyes, spilled onto my cheeks. “After the leg, the kidney stones, the mastectomy, this is how you’re going to let me celebrate the end of my time of testing?” I yelled at God. “You’re going to take my son?”

  NINE

  MINUTES LIKE GLACIERS

  Fifteen minutes later, maybe more, I emerged from that room dry-eyed. It had been the first time I’d really been alone since the whole ordeal began. I had wanted to be strong for Sonja, a husband strong for his wife. I found her in the waiting room, using her last drops of cell phone battery to call friends and family. I hugged her and held her as she cried into my shirt until it stuck to my chest. I used what little battery was left on my cell phone to call Terri, my secretary, who would in turn activate the prayer chain at church. This was not a ritual call. I was desperate for prayer, desperate that other believers would bang on the gates of heaven and beg for the life of our son.

  Pastors are supposed to be unshakable pillars of faith, right? But at that moment, my faith was hanging by a tattered thread and fraying fast. I thought of the times where the Scripture says that God answered the prayers, not of the sick or dying, but of the friends of the sick or dying—the paralytic, for example. It was when Jesus saw the faith of the man’s friends that he told the paralytic, “Get up, take your mat and go home.”1 At that moment, I needed to borrow the strength and faith of some other believers. After I hung up with Terri, Sonja and I sat together and prayed, afraid to hope and afraid not to.

  Time dragged, the minutes moving at the speed of glaciers. Between muted conversations and small talk, the waiting room ticked with a pregnant silence.

  Ninety minutes later, a female nurse in purple scrubs, a surgical mask dangling from her neck, stepped into the waiting room. “Is Colton’s father here?”

  The tone of her voice, and the fact that it was a nurse and not Dr. O’Holleran, sent a surge of hope through my body.

  Maybe God is being gracious despite our stupidity. Maybe he’s going to give us another day, another chance.

  I stood. “I’m Colton’s dad.”

  “Mr. Burpo, can you come back? Colton’s out of surgery, but we can’t calm him down. He’s still screaming, and he’s screaming for you.”

  When they were wheeling Colton away, I couldn’t bear his screams. Now, suddenly, I wanted to hear his screams more than I’d ever wanted to hear anything in my life. To me, they would be a beautiful sound.

  Sonja and I gathered up our things and followed the nurse back through the wide double doors that led to the surgical ward. We didn’t make it to the recovery room but met a pair of nurses wheeling Colton through the hallway on a gurney. He was alert, and I could tell he’d been looking for me. My first reaction was to try to get as close as I could to him; I think I would’ve climbed on the gurney with him if I hadn’t thought the nurses might feel a little put out.

  The nurses stopped long enough for Sonja and I each to plant a kiss on Colton’s little face, which still looked pale and drawn. “Hey, buddy, how you doin’?” I said.

  “Hi, Mommy. Hi, Daddy.” The ghost of a smile warmed his face.

  The nurses got the gurney under way again, and a few minutes and an elevator ride later, Colton was settled into a narrow hospital room at the end of a long corridor. Sonja stepped out of the room for a moment to take care of some paperwork at the nurse’s station, and I stayed behind, sitting next to Colton’s bed in one of those mesh-covered rockers, drinking in my son’s aliveness.

  A small child looks even smaller in a hospital bed built for grown-ups. At under forty pounds, Colton’s body barely raised the sheet. His feet reached no more than a third of the way down the bed. Dark rings still circled his eyes, but it seemed to me that the blue of his eyes shone brighter than two hours before.

  “Daddy?” Colton looked at me earnestly.

  “What?”

  He gazed at me and didn’t move his eyes from mine.

  “Daddy, you know I almost died.”

  Fear gripped me. Where did he hear that?

  Had he overheard the medical staff talking? Had he heard something the surgical team said, despite the anesthesia? Because we certainly hadn’t said anything about his being close to death in front of him. Sonja and I had feared he was at the brink, had known it after we learned his appendix had been leaking poison into his system for five days. But we’d been very careful not to say anything in front of Colton that would scare him.

  My throat closed, the first sign of tears. Some people freak out when their teenagers want to talk about sex. If you think that’s tough, try talking to your preschooler about dying. Colton had been with me in nursing homes, places where people gave their loved ones permission to let go of life. I wasn’t about to give my son permission to quit. We weren’t out of the woods yet, and I didn’t want him to think that death was an option.

  I willed my voice to remain steady and smiled at my son. “You just think about getting better, okay, buddy?”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  “We’re here with you all the way. We’re praying for you.” I changed the subject. “Now, what can we bring you? Do you want your action figures from home?”

  We hadn’t been in the room long when three members of our church board arrived at the hospital. We were so grateful for that. Sometimes I wonder, what do people do when they have no extended family and no church? In times of crisis, where does their support come from? Cassie stayed with Norma and Bryan in Imperial until my mother, Kay, could drive up from Ulysses, Kansas. Bryan’s extended family lives in North Platte, and they came to help us too. Our church gathering around us in the eye of the storm would change the way Sonja and I approached pastoral visitation in times of trial and grief. We were faithful about it before; now we’re militant.

  Soon, Sonja came back into the room and not long after that, Dr. O’Holleran joined us. Colton lay quietly as the surgeon pulled back the sheet to show us the incision site, a horizontal line across the right side of his tiny belly. The wound was packed with blood-tinged gauze, and as he began to remove it, Colton whimpered a bit in fear. I don’t think he could feel it yet, since he was still under the effects of the local anesthesia the surgical team had applied to the incision site.

  Colton’s insides were so contaminated with the poison of the ruptured appendix that Dr. O’Holleran had decided it was best to leave his incision open so it could continue to drain.

  Now the doctor spread the wound slightly.

  “See that gray tissue?” he said. “That’s what happens to internal organs when there’s an infection. Colton’s not going to be able to leave the hospital until everything that’s gray in there turns pink.”

  A length of plastic tubing protruded from each side of Colton’s abdomen. At the end of each tube was what the doctor called a “grenade.” Clear plastic in color, they did look a little like grenades, but they were actually manual squeeze pumps. The next morning, Dr. O’Holleran showed us how to squeeze the grenades to drain pus from Colton’s abdomen and then pack the opening with fresh gauze. For the next few days, Dr. O’Holleran would arrive each morning to check the wound and pack the dressing. Colton screamed bloody murder during those visits and began to associate the doctor with everything bad that was happening to him.

  In the evenings, when the doctor wasn’t there, I had to drain the incision. Prior to the surgery, Sonja had been on puke patrol for nearly a week and since the surgery, at Colton’s bedside every minute. But draining the pus was gory work and, for her, a bridge too far. Besides, it took at least three adults to hold Colton down. So while I squeezed the grenades, Sonja helped two nurses hold him, Sonja whispering soothing words while Colton screamed and screamed.

  TEN

  PRAYERS OF A MOST UNUSUAL KIND

  For another week after the emergency appendectomy, Colton continued to throw up, and we continued to pump poison out of his body tw
ice a day using Dr. O’Holleran’s rigging of plastic tubing and grenades. Slowly, gradually, Colton took a turn for the better. The upchucking stopped, his color returned, and he began to eat a little. We knew he was on the mend when he began to sit up and chat with us, play with the video game console the nurses had stationed at his bed, and even take an interest in the brand-new stuffed lion that Cassie had brought him several days before. Finally, seven days after we checked in to the hospital in North Platte, the medical team said we could take our son home.

  Like soldiers after a long but victorious fight, Sonja and I were both exhausted and overjoyed. On March 13, we packed up all the debris of a lengthy hospital stay in a hodgepodge of shopping bags, duffel bags, and plastic bags and headed for the elevators, me pushing Colton in a wheelchair and Sonja holding a thick bouquet of going-home balloons.

  The elevator doors had begun sliding shut when Dr. O’Holleran appeared in the hallway and literally yelled for us to stop. “You can’t go! You can’t go!” His voice echoed in the tile corridor as he waved a sheaf of paper in our direction. “We’ve still got problems!”

  A last-minute blood test had revealed a radical spike in Colton’s white cell count, Dr. O’Holleran told us when he caught up to us at the elevator. “It’s probably another abscess,” he said. “We may have to operate again.”

  I thought Sonja was going to pass out right there. Both of us were walking zombies by then and had nearly reached our limit. Colton burst into tears.

  Another CT scan revealed new pockets of infection in Colton’s abdomen. That afternoon, Dr. O’Holleran and his surgical team had to open up our little boy a second time and clean him out again. This time, Sonja and I weren’t terrified; the shadow of death had long since passed from Colton’s face. But now we had a new worry: Colton hadn’t eaten for something like ten days. He had weighed only about forty pounds to begin with, and now he had melted away so that his elbows and knees appeared abnormally large, his face thin like a hungry orphan.

  After the surgery, I brought our concerns to Dr. O’Holleran. “He hasn’t eaten more than a little Jell-O or broth in almost two weeks,” I said. “How long can a kid go without eating?”

  Dr. O’Holleran placed Colton in the intensive care unit and ordered extra nutrition for him, administered through a feeding tube. But the ICU bed was as much for us as for Colton, I suspect. We hadn’t slept for nearly as long as Colton hadn’t eaten, and we were absolutely ragged. Putting Colton in ICU was the only way the doctor could get us to go get some rest.

  “Colton will be fine tonight,” he told us. “He’ll have his own nurse at all times, and if anything happens, someone will be right there to take care of him.”

  I have to admit, those words sounded like an oasis in a desert of exhaustion.

  We were afraid to leave Colton alone, but we knew Dr. O’Holleran was right. That night was the first night since leaving the Harrises’ home in Greeley that Sonja and I spent together. We talked. We cried. We encouraged each other. But mostly, we slept like shipwreck survivors on their first warm, dry night.

  After a night in the ICU, Colton was moved to yet another hospital room, and the wait-and-see cycle began all over again. When can Colton get out of here? When can we go home and be normal again? Now, though, Colton’s bowels seemed to have stopped working. He couldn’t use the bathroom, and hour by hour, he grew more miserable.

  “Daddy, my tummy hurts,” he moaned, lying in bed. The doctor said that even if Colton could pass gas, that would be a good sign. We tried walking him up and down the halls to shake things loose, but Colton could only shuffle along slowly, hunched over in pain. Nothing seemed to help. By the fourth day after the second surgery, he could only lie on the bed, writhing as constipation set in. That afternoon, Dr. O’Holleran came with more bad news.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but I think we’ve done everything for Colton we can do here. We’re thinking maybe it would be best to transfer him to a children’s hospital. Either the one in Omaha or the one in Denver.”

  Between us, we’d managed something like five nights’ sleep in fifteen days. After more than two grueling weeks at Colton’s bedside, we had nearly hit the road back to normal—with the elevator doors literally closing, our family inside with balloons—when the whole thing crashed around us again. And now, our son was back in excruciating pain with no end in sight. We couldn’t even see a horizon.

  Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did: a freak spring snowstorm was moving into the Midwest. Within a couple of hours, thick drifts of snow lay piled against the hospital doors and wheel-well high in the parking lots. Whether we chose the children’s hospital in Omaha, eight hours away, or Denver, three hours away, there would be no way short of an airlift that we could reach either one.

  That’s when Sonja lost it. “I can’t do this anymore!” she said and broke down in tears.

  And right about then was when a group of people in our church decided it was time for some serious prayer. Church friends began making phone calls, and before long, around eighty people had driven over to Crossroads Wesleyan for a prayer service. Some were in our congregation and some from other churches, but they had all come together to pray for our son.

  Brad Dillan called me on my cell to tell me what was going on. “What, specifically, can we pray for?” he asked.

  Feeling a little odd about it, I told him what Dr. O’Holleran had said would be a good sign for Colton. So that night might be the only time in recorded history that eighty people gathered and prayed for someone to pass gas!

  Of course, they also prayed for a break in the weather so that we could get to Denver, and they prayed for healing too. But within an hour, the first prayer was answered!

  Immediately, Colton began to feel better. That evening, he was able to use the bathroom. By the next morning, he was up in his room, playing as though none of this nightmare had ever happened. Watching him, Sonja and I couldn’t believe our eyes: except for being skinny, Colton was completely and utterly himself again. In less than twelve hours, we had cycled from completely desperate to completely normal.

  Around 9 a.m., Dr. O’Holleran came in to check on his patient. When he saw Colton up, smiling and chipper, and playing with his action figures, the doctor was speechless. For a long moment, he actually just stood and stared. Astonished, he examined Colton and then scheduled another round of tests to be triple-sure that Colton’s insides were on the mend. This time, Colton literally skipped all the way to the CT scan lab.

  We stayed in the hospital another day and a half just to be certain Colton’s turnaround stuck. During those thirty-six hours, it seemed we had more nurses in and out than usual. Slowly, one at a time and in pairs, they would slip into the room—and each time, their reaction was the same: they just stood and stared at our little boy.

  ELEVEN

  COLTON BURPO, COLLECTION AGENT

  After we got home from the hospital, we slept for a week. Okay, I’m exaggerating—but not much. Sonja and I were completely drained. It was like we had just been through a seventeen-day almost-car-crash. Our wounds weren’t visible on the outside, but the soul-tearing worry and tension had taken its toll.

  One evening about a week after we got home, Sonja and I were standing in the kitchen talking about money. She stood over a portable table next to our microwave, sorting through the enormous stack of mail that had accumulated during Colton’s hospital stay. Each time she opened an envelope, she jotted down a number on a sheet of paper lying on the counter. Even from where I stood leaning against the cabinets on the opposite side of the kitchen, I could see that the column of figures was getting awfully long.

  Finally, she clicked the pen closed and laid it on the counter. “Do you know how much money I need to pay the bills this week?”

  As both the family and business bookkeeper, Sonja asked me that question regularly. She worked part-time as a teacher so we had that steady income, but it was a relati
vely small stream. My pastor’s salary was also small, cobbled together from the tithes of a small but faithful congregation. So the bulk of the earning came from our garage-door business, and that income waxed and waned with the seasons. Every couple of weeks, she presented me with the figures—not only on household bills but on business payables. Now there were also several massive hospital bills.

  I performed a rough tally in my head and offered her a guess. “Probably close to $23,000, right?”

  “Yep,” she said, and sighed.

  It might as well have been a million bucks. With me unable to work the garage-door jobs because of my broken leg and then the hyperplasia, we had already burned through our savings. Then, just when I was getting back into full swing, Colton’s illness hit, knocking me out of work for nearly another month. We had about as much chance of coming up with $23,000 as we did of winning the lottery. And since we don’t play the lottery, those chances were zero.

  “Do you have any receivables? Anything due you can collect?” Sonja said.

  She asked because she had to, but she knew the answer. I shook my head.

  “I can put off some of these,” she said, nodding toward the envelope stack. “But the tenth bills are definitely due.”

  Here’s a great picture of how small a town Imperial actually is: folks have tabs or accounts they run at places like the gas station, the grocery store, and the hardware store. So if we need a fill-up or a loaf of bread, we just swing by and sign for it. Then on the tenth of the month, Sonja makes a fifteen-minute trip around town to settle up. Our “tenth bills” are one of the cool things about living in a small town. On the other hand, when you can’t pay, it’s a lot more humbling.

  I sighed. “I can go explain the situation, ask for more time.”