looking back

Today was YoYo's last day of preschool.  Wow.  Just wow.  He has so enjoyed his classmates--he calls them, "my children."  Like he's Moses.  One afternoon, he waved as we left, calling, "Goodbye, my children."  I was waiting for them to reply, "Au revoir, mon pere."

Which brings me to this time last year.  We were in Guangzhou, and so happy to be there.  We had an enormous beautiful clean (oh, thank God, clean!) room overlooking the water, and serious bonding time was spent looking out the window together, counting boats.

We had a near-miss with medical supplies.  Before we left the US, a BlueSky nurse sent a list of ostomy supplies we'd need.  I took it to a medical supply store, & the rep didn't recognize half the items-lost in translation.  He decided I didn't need nearly as many catheters as I asked for, and that sterile gloves and swabs were pointless.  "It's only a clean procedure," he insisted.  He referred us to an ostomy therapist, who gave us a big bag of sample colostomy supplies. 

In China we realized how unprepared we were.  Conditions required a new catheter every time.  YoYo's urologist advised a catheter a day, already unusual compared to the average catheter a week for a urostomy-but there are reasons.  We had 30--we needed 80.  BlueSky graciously gave us what they could, but we were still short.  Then the weirdest thing happened.  One night in Beijing, we went for a walk, and three blocks from our hotel we passed...an OSTOMY SUPPLY STORE! Um, the odds.

So we wheeled YoYo in and pulled out our purse-sized case of supplies to show the good Mandarin-speaking-only folks what we needed.  Quantity and price were communicated via calculator.  Oh, did we feel like we'd pulled off the most savvy operation ever!  And then--they were out of the catheter that we needed.  THE ODDS, people!

Fast-forward to Guangzhou.  By then, we would have been out of catheters, but I had been boiling bottled water to rinse & reuse them (every 4 hours), so that we were getting a day out of each catheter. Even then, we'd be cutting it close.  We spent hours in Zhengzhou, then Guangzhou, trying to track down what we needed.  

I was so worn out.  The trauma a child goes through when he realizes that he has been separated from his family-his first family-and handed to strangers who speak gibberish defies comparison.  If that child is a toddler, there's another layer of complexity.  When that child is dependent on caths & colostomy pouches and a very clean environment, things start to feel life-or-death all the time.  Ride in a cab? Meal at a restaurant?  Shower at a hotel?  Life or death.   

Add the natural disaster, the frequent emails from my employer asking for this task or that information, some grief from our agency, and just the regular weariness from traveling on 4 flights through 3 provinces, and survival is a miracle.  Just when it looked like YoYo would develop a bladder infection from the handling he received at the Shamian Island clinic (on May 19, as a matter of fact), Paul Gour revealed (casually, over lunch at Lucy's) that he worked with medical supplies.

Of course he did.  And of course, he was willing, even though he and Chelsea had their own toddler-size bundle of terrified with her own set of medical stuff, to arrange for catheters to be FedEx'ed to us from the US if we needed them.  

Just the knowledge-that someone we hardly knew cared enough to risk that-was like a big cool drink of calm down.  Things were going to work out.  We'd cut it close, but we'd have enough.  And we were not alone. 

We still are not alone.  Mercy!  (I think I'll go recount my caths now, and maybe I'll use one as a straw, and make a necklace out of another, and weave some others into a placemat.  Ha!)