Blessed to Be Back!
I’m so happy and blessed to be able to come back to Devotional Diva and continue to help women share their stories. I think I have some great posts lined up, and I hope you’ll enjoy them.
The Devotional Diva schedule will be only Tuesdays for the time being. I thought we should ease back into this!
If you’d like to submit a post and “Become a Diva,” please follow this link!
I’d like to introduce you to Devotional Diva’s new social media intern, Alice Carter! Actually, you might already know her because she guest posted last spring. She’s taking over the Devotional Diva social media pages and also will be posting some of her own devotionals!
My days over the summer break were filled with time with visiting family and lots of snuggles with my boy. I’m enjoying my new little family and this new stage of my life, even though I won’t deny that being a new mom is hard.
I mean, motherhood itself is challenging. But I feel like I need to adjust to a whole new life — a new schedule, a new way of going about things, a new body… (in fact, I published a post on my personal blog regarding body confidence — if you’d like to check it out, follow this link!) A lot of new-ness.
Remember how I talked about my trust issues with God? I’d say I have some new-found trust.
On Oliver’s one month birthday, I found some streaky marks (almost like stretch marks) on his skin that kept popping up. He would be swaddled, safe in his crib and get new ones in random places. I felt I need to call his doctor. We went to our pediatrician that day and he thought it was bruising. He said if he was bruising that easily, it could be a bleeding disorder, but that he thought Oliver most likely had low platelets.
Then he said these scary words: “I want you to be prepared that he might have to go into the hospital tonight.”
I was so taken aback that I gasped. It was an especially sad thing to hear because my mother-in-law was arriving all the way from Iowa that day.
Thankfully, all of Oliver’s blood work that day came back fine. No hospital! He didn’t have low platelets, so the pediatrician said it was probably a bleeding disorder and that Oliver would need to see a specialist.
We had to go to a pediatric hematologist/oncologist where there were little kids all over with bandannas covering their hair loss from chemotherapy — Really sick kids. It was heartbreaking. And while Oliver wasn’t being checked for cancer, it was frightening to be there with my child. (I don’t mean to upset anyone who is actually dealing with cancer in their family!)
It was a waiting game between seeing the blood specialist and getting more test results back. I didn’t think about the scariness of it all that often, but it was always in the back of my mind weighing me down. It was so terrifying to me that something serious was wrong with my precious baby.
I had to learn and learn fast to trust God and give it all to Him. I couldn’t have gotten through the unknowns without Him…I would have fallen apart. I told myself that God would take care of us and everything would be okay. I had to trust. I had to.
Again, all of Oliver’s tests came back perfect. The blood specialist really did not think it was a bleeding problem, so he sent us to a skin specialist. The skin specialist decided that Oliver’s fair skin is sensitive to pressure, but the lines weren’t bruises either. He said that some kids are just like that, it isn’t anything we are doing wrong, and there is no need for treatment. Oliver will grow out of it.
That was a major “praise God” moment. I trusted the Lord and I wasn’t let down, not even a little. There was really nothing serious wrong with my baby after all.
I’m glad I followed my instincts and got it checked out, but I’m even more glad that I gave my worries about it to God.
