A Jon Post
I was going to write about having a mission team here with us and the activities we’ve been doing. But Thursday something happened that I haven’t been able to get off my heart or out of my memory.
Carrying Tomé on a Good Day
Tomé, dear sweet Tomé, had his last 5-day chemo treatment this last week. He has been here at the hospital for a year and a half now, getting this 5-day chemo every 3 weeks, for 84 weeks. Every vein in his hand, wrist, forearm and upper arm, even in both feet, has been used many, many times. Like any other chemo course, by day 4 his body was haggard and broken by the poison dripping into it.
He had been receiving his treatment into his left foot for the first three days of treatment. One of the side effects of his treatment is that he has to urinate often and painfully. With a chemo drip in your foot, walking to a bathroom 30 yards away is not an easy task.
By this day, his foot had become swollen and painful and the chemo was no longer flowing into his shrunken vein. The nurses needed to move the needle.
Countless times they poked him, wrists, arms, even in his head… finally they found a vein in his other foot.
He was crying uncontrollably when I found him in the treatment room, gauze taped to his head, arms and left foot to cover oozing needle marks. The nurse told him he was done and could go back to his room.
So I carried him.
Crying in my arms, his weak grasp wrapped around me for balance, we made it back to his bed. At 11-years-old he’s just old enough to be ashamed of his tears when he’s in pain. This day he didn’t even make an attempt to stop them. He just leaned against me and wept softly at the pain of his final treatment.
Mustering courage he told me he had to go to the bathroom.
So I carried him.
I don’t consider myself a strong guy, but there was little that would have unsteadied my step or shaken my grip around his frail body as I made my way down that hallway to the bathroom, opened the door to the dirty stall, and knelt with him to get him close enough to the toilet.
Painful moments later, we were making our way back to his bed. I laid him down as gently as I could and covered him in his little blanket. There he lay, quivering in pain, wishing and waiting just to make it through the next day and a half.
Alice and Paula (another dear lady who comes to bless the children there), brought some milk, cookies and candy to try to help get his mind off of the pain he was in.
He closed his eyes, grimaced and tightly gripped my hand and Alice’s hand as a nurse pushed a shot into his IV in his foot.
There I sat. I knew Tomé had no words or strength to look to the Lord or ask Him to come sit in bed with him. I knew Tomé didn’t know how to approach the Lord or come before Jesus on his own.
I poured out my heart to Jesus Christ, praying desperate prayers from desperate lips. No crowd around me or Tomé could keep me from carrying this suffering boy and laying him before Jesus’ feet.
So I carried him.