Rhonda Phillips Experience
From Rhonda Phillips, Logan, UT
Mother of eight children, including two sons born with Down syndrome
It was Patrick's first stay in Primary Children's Hospital so it was in the old children's hospital. The Intensive Care was a long space with small rooms on both sides of a long hall. The first room was a room with a sink and gowns, so before you went into the ICU you had to put on a gown and scrub with a special sponge scrubber that was filled with a brown antiseptic soap. Let me go back, before you entered the ICU was a waiting room with couches around a small area. On one side of the room, was a beautiful cherub like babe sitting, eyes looking up and arms outstretched with a big smile on its face. He looked like a Gerber baby, perfectly shaped in every way from the dimples in his cheeks to his cute little toes. Everytime I entered the ICU I would look at that statue and think how cute it was.
Patrick was in the first room on the left after the scrub room. It was a small room but there was room enough for three small plastic bassinettes. Patrick's was around the corner of the door to the right. A rocking chair had been brought in next to his bassinette for me to sit in and nurse and hold him. Next to the chair was another bassinette in this bed was a six month old little boy.
On the furthest wall were supplies and on the wall to the left of the door was another bassinette but no one was in it while Patrick was there. Both Patrick and the other boy's beds had all the monitors set up to the side of them and both had a number of various tubes coming from them.
Patrick had surgery on his intestines so he had a gasteroscopy tube into his stomach and a feeding tube down his nose where they had a continuous feed going by a machine. He also had an IV for a medicine oxometer. With all these wires and tubes it was very hard to hold Patrick. I would sit in the rocker and a nurse would get him out of the bed and very slowly we would situate the wires and tubes around so I could feed Patrick. We were in PCH for one month.
The boy next to us had been there for most of his six months of life. When I asked the nurse what was wrong with him she said it would be easier to answer what wasn't wrong with him. He was Hydrocephalic- so his head was very large and clef paletic- so his face was deformed. But the thing I remember most is he had no stomach muscles so all of his insides were not held in by anything and it made his stomach very big and disproportioned to the rest of his body. Everytime he would move, his stomach would kind of slosh around with only skin to hold it in place.
On one of the days I had just settled in to hold Patrick, the alarm next to me went off. A nurse came in and yelled down the hall for the crash caret. Immediately the tiny room was filled with people, doctors, nurses, and a respiratory specialist. It all happened so fast I tried to scoot back into the corner as much as I could but there was no where to go. So I sat and watched. After what seemed to be a long, long time, the machines went quiet. The intensity that everyone was working stopped and everyone began to leave the room. I didn't realize what had happened till they had all gone and a nurse put a white sheet over the little deformed body lying still.
I was twenty one years old and had never witnessed anything like this before. I wanted to get out of that small room but couldn't. When the nurse finally noticed me, I asked her for help to get Patrick back in his bed and get out of there to digest what had just happened. As I went out into the waiting room and sunk down into a chair there I was alone and scared and confused and then I looked up and there was the statue. It was no longer just a healthy baby reaching for its mother or Father, but it was the little boy who had just died, now whole and smiling, reaching for his Heavenly Mother and Father. No more tubes, no more wires, no more pain, no more deformity but a beautiful, healthy child.
The confusion and loneliness were gone and remaining was a testimony of the resurrection, the knowledge of the love of our Heavenly Father that in the next life we will be made whole.