"Haley" means "heroine"

"My migraine isn't there."

Larry and I just got back to the hotel after spending the whole day at the hospital. Haley is hurting from her big surgery, but she was clearly able to tell me "my migraine isn't there." The magnitude of this statement is still not hitting me full force. This kid has had a migraine every day of her life since September 5th 2008. That's 2144 days (according to Larry, the math teacher.) The only time it went away was when she would get a pain shot, and then it only diminished it from a 9 or 10 to a 4 or 5, and about six hours later it was back in all its fury.

She is very sore in her head, but she says it's not deep pain, but post op pain. Also her neck hurts in the back where she has an incision and she has two drains sticking out of her neck and upper back (I think). She has pillows all over her to support her, two IVs, a catheter, foot pumps to prevent blood clots, and, of course her neck brace. She is lying almost flat by doctor's order, so she can't see you unless you're in her line of sight. This afternoon when all the anesthesia meds were wearing off, and before they got her pain meds fully on board, her pain was a 15. (On a 0-10 scale.) But by this evening, she was more settled. I told her to try to relax and breathe slowly and to remember that this is temporary and to be expected. I'm sure that after all the pain she's had, it's hard to believe that pain will go away on its own.

I stood at her bedside stroking her head and reassuring her that it would go away and that she will get stronger every day, when I remembered the meaning of her name. We named her Haley because we liked the name and because her older sister, Paige, was concerned that if the new baby was a girl and she got a "girly" name like Victoria, Paige would always be known as the plain one. We looked in a baby name book for a name that would "match" Paige, and we found a list of similar names that included Haley. When we looked up the meaning, we found that it means "heroine". I thought, "that's a nice meaning, I hope she grows up to be a heroic person." Little did I know at the time how much of a heroine she would need to be.

And so there I stood, at the bedside of my heroine, thinking how proud I am of her, how her suffering has been vindicated, and that she has fought well. Some people may not know that she has been doubted, accused, disbelieved and dismissed. This was as a young child (starting at age 9). How sad that when a person is fighting pain, they also need to fight to be believed and taken seriously. It really makes me sad.

Anyway, as I thought of all of these things, I also thought of the quote at the top of this blog; Haley's favorite quote, about how one day all the bad things will be turned into good things in the day of the Lord (when Jesus comes back). And I thought that in a very small, teeny tiny way, we had seen a bit of that today. This very day, June 26, 2013, the bad became good. Yes, she hurts, and no they haven't tried to stand her on her feet yet (that will happen tomorrow--prayers appreciated that she won't faint!), but there was a very significant turning back of pain for one young woman in a hospital in Maryland. Maybe it's a foreshadowing of that Day to come. Maybe God gives us days like today as a foretaste of that Day to come. If so, there had better be some serious cosmic Kleenex because I cried buckets of tears of joy today. When all of her siblings had left and it was just her dad and me, I cried and cried and cried at the goodness of God, the Great Physician.

This is a picture of Haley in the pre-op holding area almost ready to go to the OR this morning. Her dad is reading her a passage of Scripture before surgery.