Wow. We got a call from Children’s Hospital this afternoon, only about fifteen hours before this huge surgery. They’ve had to cancel. We don’t know much, yet. Only that there has been an emergency involving Lilyan’s primary surgeon. We do know that he has felt much urgency about getting this done, and that he would never cancel unless it was absolutely necessary.

Tomorrow morning we will call his nurse and get more information and try to figure out what the new plan is. Lilyan has had quite a bit of back pain this past week, so we are worried about having to put this off at all. And we know that coordinating schedules for three surgeons is a big deal, so we don’t know how quickly this could be rescheduled. And we don’t even know if this emergency is something that will prevent her surgeon from operating for a long time or not. We just don’t know anything, yet. So we wait.

It’s been a weird day, even before this phone call. Over the past week, God so graciously allowed us to put Lilyan’s surgery in a box and leave it there so that we could mostly just focus on being with the kids and doing fun things and watching their hearts for any struggles with anxiety over what’s coming. We were amazed at how little this coming event affected our time together or intruded into our thoughts. But when we woke this morning, knowing that surgery was only 24 hours away, it was suddenly all we could see and feel for the moment.

We had already planned to fill this day with making caramel apples, watching the Bengals, and carving our pumpkin for this year, but we felt somehow kind of numb and disconnected from ourselves and like we could hear every second ticking away on the clock as we moved through these activities with the kids. We knew, though, that we were glad that it was finally almost time to get this done. And then the phone call.

We gathered the kids and explained to them what had happened, prayed together, and are continuing with our plans for the day, but we’re also having a little trouble processing everything we are feeling now.

We will post more as soon as we know more. Thank you for hanging with us in this strange place of limbo. We know that, even though it feels like limbo to us and maybe even kind of out of control, God is still firmly in control and that everything is proceeding according to His plan.

I’ll close with a few pictures of our day together today.

Lilyan’s a little emotional over all of this, too. She said she feels both “happy and sad.”