God is Good

Throughout Tuesday night whenever i awoke my mind could not turn off thinking about Ian.  I kept going back and forth over which route to go with treatment.  Wanting to do one thing but knowing our pediatrican who i had just talked with recommending the exact opposite.  I sent an email out to the ladies in my bible study group saying that i missed being with them for the last few weeks and asked for prayer specifically for healing for Ian, and for wisdom in knowing what to do.  I desperately wanted to move forward with confidence believing that i was doing the right thing, instead of feeling like i was in some sort of twilight zone.  Well, that afternoon, joe called me and said he had just talked to someone who completely agreed with the route that i wanted to take and confirmed all the doubts that i had about the course on which the dr. wanted me to take.  Not that we should base our decisions on one person's opinions obviously, but for me it was the answer from God that i had been looking for.  The conversation joe had with this person also helped him to have a better understanding of the process we were about to embark on.  I felt like i could breathe for the first time in days.
That night though was awful.  I had to do my bathroom time with Ian while taking care of Oliver too, cause the Joes were at Awanas that night.  Ian was crying, at some point i was crying too.  I went to bed that night completely exhausted and woke up even more tired and discouraged.  I was begging God on the drive to school for any type of encouragement He could give me, something, anything.  An hour later one of the moms on the Soiling Solutions forum wrote a long email telling the story of her 10 yr. old daughter, saying that she had now been accident free for nine months.  She didn't say when she found the SS protocol, only that her daughter had dealt with encopresis for years and years, and that now she finally had her life back.  The mom said that they had family members who still believed that the daughter had done the soiling on purpose all those years, that she was just manipulative.  Only parents who have children with this condition can understand what it's like, and the lack of knowledge people have about it.  The part i needed to hear the most though was the mom saying how hard it was in the beginning, how she and her husband had to hold their daughter down while she fought the enema with all her might, how she wondered and doubted if this could possibly be the right thing for them to do to their child.  But the day she wrote the email, her daughter had come up to her and actually THANKED her mom for holding her down in the beginning, and for continuing with the protocol, because she understood then that they were doing it to help her, and now she could have a normal life.  This is similar to the email sent by a mom a couple weeks ago who said her 8 yr. old son had recently thanked her for sticking with the protocol because if you hadn't, he said, i would probably still be wearing pull-ups to school.  Ugh. My heart breaks for these kids.  I kinda feel sometimes that we won the unlucky lottery, seeing as how it's such a rare condition, percentage wise.  But it could be something much worse than this, like cancer.  And even though i of course wouldn't want that in a million years, those kids are looked at as superheroes and brave soldiers.  Kids with encopresis are looked down upon and shamed.  Please Lord let this end soon, and give me the strength to keep up the fight.  Thank you for giving me little glimpses of hope just when i need them the most, and letting me know you do indeed care when i start to doubt you're near.