Sometimes, the best thing we can get in life is perspective. There’s no more well worn trope than to have a character realize what’s important in life due to a birth/death/disease/zombie apocalypse/extra five minutes of movie trailers/etc. It’s an easy-to-use fallback because, at least for most people I’ve met, there’s a lot of truth to be found in that lazy writing.

These past few days, I can’t help but think that I’ve had enough perspective.

Maybe I’m just so slow-witted that I need constant reminders, but I’ve spent enough time sleeping in painful metal hospital chairs over the past seven years that getting a little too lost in my work would be a welcomed relief.

For a quick review of this weekend’s events, Finley stumbled into our room at around 11:15 pm on Friday night. That’s February 3rd. He does this nearly every night, but I happened to be awake enough this time to guide him back to his room. He seemed a little drunker on the late hour than usual, stumbling over imaginary obstacles and slurring out words that only partially made sense. He’d had a long day, so I dismissed it as typical six-year-old stream of consciousness (plus it still managed to be more coherent than Faulkner).

Less than fifteen minutes later, his jumbled words turned into gasping breaths. It took me another three minutes to be lucid enough to realize his sounds weren’t typical. He was having another seizure.

The Diastat was administered, the ambulance called, and we got to spent a long weekend staring at the green and yellow walls of the Children’s Hospital.

For those keeping score at home, this is seizure number four. Well, four, five, and six, since he broke into two more while under the doctor’s care. Six full tonic-clonic, status epilepticus seizures.

Breakthroughs, they call them, since they break through his medication. Apparently, in the medicine community, breakthrough is bad. In the real world community, that would be chaos.

Several people have asked me if it was scary. It really wasn’t, not this time. We caught it right away, we got him the care he needed, and he didn’t have depressed breathing like in our last visit. I did have about 15 minutes of terror at around 3 am when emotions steamrolled through me like a Monster Truck at the Fear Rally, but it passed quickly.

I think, in part, it’s that perspective thing. He was going to recover. He is unlikely to have any permanent damage from seizures as long as they’re caught. We were going to hit our max out of pocket anyway, so this just accelerates the schedule by about 9 months.

No, we’re probably not going to be able to live overseas–a dream of Amy’s an a passing fancy of mine. No, we’re not going to be able to go camping anywhere without a cell tower nearby–a love of mine from my youth. No, we probably won’t be able to move outside of a major metropolis. But none of that changed because of this weekend.

What it did remind me of, though, is that things could be so much worse.

After we were given a real room instead of a closet down in the ER, I got to watch a 10 year old relearning how to walk after having one of his legs amputated.

While I was going down for some food in the cafeteria, I saw an emaciated teen watching a free concert, her sallow face looking unlikely to recover from whatever disease is rampaging through her system.

When we were picking up new emergency meds, we met a young man and his mother who abandoned their life in Montana to receive a bone marrow transplant in Denver. They’ve been here recovering since March of last year. Plus he has epilepsy.

Tomorrow will mark seven years since Oliver’s birth, one week from Finley’s latest seizure. Finley was in the hospital for a long and frustrating two days this time. Some children never make it home at all.

So there’s that perspective thing. It seems like by now we should have it in spades. Hasn’t stopped the trials from coming, though. I guess we’ll keep on getting more of it until we finally figure out how to do it right.