Note: First, I wanted to say that the book review is down at the bottom of this post. Before that I’m sharing a little more about Sarah being in the hospital. Also, for those of you doing the From Chaos to Calm: 15 Weeks to a Happy Home series, I apologize that the last two weeks the posts have been sporadic. I hope now that things are calming down, I should be able to get back to a normal schedule this week. Thank you for your patience!

A lot of you already know that the last couple of weeks have been tough around here. My daughter Sarah has Crohn’s Disease and on Saturday, September 26, in the late afternoon I received a phone call from her that she was going to the emergency room for severe pain in her abdomen. She was at work – she works at a summer camp during the summer and on weekends during the off season – close to Nashville which is about 5 – 6 hours from where we live.

I was worried, of course, but we decided to wait until we heard an update before we would drive out there. If she was only going to be there for a little while it did’t make a lot of sense to make the drive if they sent her home before we could even get there.

I kept in touch with her  throughout the whole process, and I knew a friend of mine – the camp nurse and another’s pastor wife was there with her. Sarah sent me text updates to let me know what was going on.

She didn’t tell me how severe the pain was – or I would have panicked and been in the car immediately. You know when the nurse asks you – “On a scale of 1 – 10, how would you rate your pain?” Her pain was at least a 10 and they ended up giving her morphine.

She called me around midnight and told me that they had decided she needed emergency surgery and she was being transferred to a bigger hospital. She had an intestinal blockage/ adhesion basically caused by the inflammation in her small intestine. The wall of her ileum had collapsed and stuck together.

I’ve never packed so quickly. My three youngest girls were already in bed and I went to wake them up and told them to get a change of clothes and a few things in their backpacks. My husband and I grabbed a few things and we all loaded into the car and drove all night to get there, nervous, praying that she would be okay.

As a mom, it’s incredibly stressful when your kids are sick, hurting, in pain. Watching her suffer was hard. I wanted to take it away and make it all better. But she had to go through some hard things before she left the hospital 8 days later. I am grateful I was able to stay with her through most all of it minus a few X-Rays and CT Scans.

I am so very thankful that she didn’t have to have surgery and that she responded well to the treatments the doctors provided. She had a team of nearly a dozen doctors working with her and all of the nurse staff – everyone was amazingly kind and helpful.

The outpouring of love from our friends in the Nashville area meant a lot to me. Mary, who drove Sarah to the emergency room stayed with her long after we arrived and I can’t even begin to express how much it meant to me that Sarah didn’t have to go through of of this alone.  Lots of friends from our extended church family and from the camp where she works came to visit. Her friends, packed her things, took care of her car, drove her car to Nashville and even filled the tank. Her boyfriend, moved to Arizona for work just a month ago and he stayed in constant contact day and night and his parents offered help where we needed it.

It’s good to be loved. 

We came home with Sarah this past weekend. She decided to stick with the liquid diet for a couple of days after we got home. She was still have some pain and digesting food wasn’t fun. Then, at 4 am on Tuesday morning Sarah and I drove back to Nashville for a 9:35 am appointment with the GI doctor who had attended to her in the hospital. It was a good day. She was feeling much better and we went out to eat at Panera Bread Co. for lunch for light meal. It was delicious. And we spent the afternoon shopping and just enjoying each other.

We spent the night at her boyfriend’s parents’ house and got up early on Wednesday morning. I took her to the airport to fly out to Arizona with the doctor’s okay. The trip had been planned and plane tickets purchased a few weeks before she got sick and I was so glad she was able to go. She looked beautiful that morning – she was glowing.

She’ll be 21 years old in just a few days and I’m so glad she’s my girl. She’s brought me incredible joy over the years. She’s such a good girl. She’s kind and thoughtful. She’s a hard worker. She loves the Lord. She’s everything a mama could hope for in a daughter.

Juicing for Health

Sarah [easyazon_link identifier=”B00GCS37AY” locale=”US” tag=”keepersoftheirho”]purchased a NutriBullet[/easyazon_link] from Amazon.com while she was in the hospital and I also bought some more juice and smoothie recipe books.

In the past we’ve juiced lots of cabbage and carrot juice for her. Cabbage has this amazing ability to heal ulcers – even bleeding ulcers – in the stomach and intestines. Over the years cabbage juice has helped her immensely. Unfortunately, we hadn’t juiced much over the last few months for her and she’d had a lot of stress in recent weeks.

I wanted to share with the recipe books I own and love as well as the juicers I recommend. Juicing is a great way to add more fruits and vegetables to your diet or to help you heal from illness or disease.

The Big Book of Juices Book Review