I have always loved the month of April, and for lots of good reasons actually. First off, it is my birthday month, which is always fun, the beginning of spring (or fake spring as we Chicagoans like to say), and the month in which two very special holidays usually take place. One is certainly Easter of course, and the other is Passover, which, if your spouse was raised Jewish as mine was, you probably wind up celebrating in some form as well. While many couples who self-identify themselves as “interfaith” celebrate dual holidays without much concern since after all it just comes down to spending time with each side of the family, that’s not the case with us. We genuinely love and get excited for each of these celebrations, due to the fact that one, my wife has become a Christian and accepted Jesus or Yeshua as the Jewish Messiah, but I have also very much embraced her Jewish roots and have come to appreciate Judaism as the foundation of our Christian faith, and truly feel that my understanding of Jesus and his message has become so much more enlightened through a deeper and more profound understanding of his own background. Every year, for example, we attend a Passover Seder hosted by a Messianic Jewish congregation that meets at our old church, and it is such a wonderful experience to celebrate the holiday with Jewish believers who embrace Jesus as Messiah.

This year, April played out quite differently for us, and that is evidenced by the fact that I am writing this from the parent lounge on the 10th floor of our local pediatric hospital, where my son sits eight floors below me, recovering from brain surgery on an issue we just recently discovered. For this reason, and lots of issues connected to it, our April will look differently, as we will not be celebrating Easter and Passover in the usual ways, since there will be no church on Easter Sunday, no Passover seder that we will be attending while my son recuperates. While I did get a chance to celebrate my birthday, it was a shortened one at best, as the Friday of my birthday had a cloud hanging over it as the thought of my son’s surgery loomed that Monday. But how did we get here might you ask? Well it all began several weeks ago when my son came home with my wife one Saturday afternoon from his ABA therapy, and after having vomited in the car ride home, he suffered what essentially was a grand mal seizure right as he got home. Having called the paramedics and transported to our local emergency room, it was later discovered that my son has something called a “chiari malformation” on the back of his cerebellum, which while not technically responsible for the seizure in the car or the two other he had on the way to the hospital, it nonetheless was a problem causing pressure on his brain and potentially responsible for a variety of other conditions that we had previously attached to his autism, such as poor motor skills, vision issues and digestion issues among other things. After spending four days in the hospital and having subjected my son to a variety of scans and evaluations, there was no clear explanation as to what caused the seizures. What we were told by both a neurologist and a neurosurgeon during our stay was that he definitely had a chiari in his brain, and we had to address it due to all of the other related issues it may be causing.

We went home and got ourselves as back to normal as we could, and prepared for our next steps appointment with the neurologist team a couple weeks later, although we knew that we were essentially just going to be making an appointment for his inevitable surgery. The entire time in between the hospital stay and that appointment my wife and I spent in heavy prayer and discussion over this choice and what it could mean for our son. What we were struck by was the fact that not only had we not known about him having this condition, but we did not even know what a chiari was before this. There were also a multitude of friends and family who began to reach out to us via phone, text and social media, all of them supporting us with their thoughts and prayers but even more amazingly many of them sharing their own experiences with chiari. Some of them had even mentioned not just the hospital we were at but also the specific neurologist and surgeon we were going to work with, speaking to themselves or their children having been operated on by them and the incredible job they had done. The more we reflected on all of this new information and the shocking events that brought us to this place, we began to consider that we might be experiencing some kind of miracle discovery for our son. As scary as the bout with the seizures were, we would never have discovered this condition without them, and thanks to my wife’s quick decision making, we were luckily moved to the right hospital. Once we were at the next hospital and people began to pour in with information about the doctors and specialists there, we knew who to ask for and insisted on seeing those professional only, even when others would make rounds and stop to talk to us. Thanks to all of these events lining up exactly the way that they needed to, we were at this place, preparing to possibly correct a significant issue that our son had had for years, something only God could orchestrate. 

When we finally made it to the appointment with the neurology team, they had all of the information they needed to confirm his condition and what needed to happen, showing us the results of the scans and showing us the severity of his chiari; we all agreed to do the surgery. While the surgeon was in no way pressuring us to do anything immediately, even suggesting to get a second opinion if we felt necessary, we knew our son could be in an extreme amount of discomfort due to the pressure now on his brain. At the end of our meeting with the surgeon, we were given a choice of dates, and while I initially felt like it would take time for them to schedule, which might be good to give us time to prepare, the first date was relatively soon: April 15th. The 15th I thought, that is only a couple of weeks away, it seemed so soon for the extreme type of surgery he needed, and right after we had just gone through the ordeal of his seizures. My wife and I looked around at the medical team and the other family members present and agreed, that sooner was better, and the timing was actually very good since I would be on spring break. The procedure would be a couple of hours and then a hospital stay of about three days to recover, very similar to our last visit, and then several weeks of recovery at home.

I spent the next couple of weeks with a variety of thoughts and feelings churning through my head, mainly how exactly did we get here, get to this place of my son manifesting seizures he never had before, the chiari being uncovered which was truly a great blessing for him. But now, we faced a future that was still quite uncertain, after all this was going to brain surgery. Brain surgery. He would have his skull opened up and possibly some of top vertebrae removed to make space for his brain, but what would he be like after that, would he actually be healed from some of his other conditions or would there be little to no change? Would he somehow be different, hopefully in a positive way but would something go missing instead, some part of his personality that we had come to love that would just be gone? I truly became sad, sad not because my son might be healed, but that he would have to experience a procedure more extreme than he ever had, and even though we would speak to him about it, would he really understand what was about to happen to him, that he would go to sleep in the hospital again, but this time when he woke up while he should feel better, he would also be in a level of pain and discomfort he had not had before. He should get over it easily the doctors insisted, but I just kept feeling myself in his body, and the fear and uncertainty that he would feel the day of the surgery, I just wish I could be going in there instead of him.

The day of the surgery we got to the hospital bright and early at 5:30 in the morning, we had packed overnight bags for a couple of days, and had all of my son’s requisite comfort items, his ipad, blankets and stuffed animals. We got registered and waited a few minutes before being taken down to the pre-op area, I could sense my son’s anxiety and fear as he kept shaken while I held him tight as we waited for the nursing staff to get him prepped. Eventually we were able to get him changed, get him onto the hospital bed and soothe him enough to get him wheeled out towards surgery (a little oral anesthetic helped to get him calm for sure). By the time he was wheeled away from us on the cart he was sitting nice and relaxed, his comforting bedtime music playing on his ipad and clutching his teddy bear tight as he rode away, my heart being pulled right along with him, and I just kept going back to my original question: How did we get here? My wife and I walked upstairs to the waiting area, and we were given a lovely semi-private sitting room where we instructed to wait for the phone to ring on a nearby table. All I could say to my wife, who wanted to spend time in prayer just then was, I need to go to the chapel, but alone, I needed to be alone with God now.

She probed me to share, and while I felt like just trying to process all of this personally, I decided to share, and with tears welling up I began to tell her all of what I had been going through these last few days and weeks. Many of these were feelings we both shared but I also went back to what I had mentioned at the beginning here, how this April just felt different, how there would be no Easter Sunday service, no Passover seder, and my birthday aside it just didn’t feel the same, and as much as I tried to plug into the miracle of his healing the stress of the last episode in the hospital and now the uncertainty and fear of this procedure had gotten to me; I was weak where I thought I could be strong. But then I shared something else that I had been meditating on this whole time as well, something that God must have also put in my head to help counter everything else, and it was “The High Priestly Prayer” from the Gospel of John. This is the prayer that Jesus prayed in the garden right before his arrest, the prayer he prayed to help empower his disciples as he was leaving them , the prayer in which he tells the Father “The glory that you have given to me I have given to them…” (John 17:22 ESV). I considered the sacrifice of our Messiah at this time, the fact that he not only surrendered his physical body so that we might be saved, but that he also offered up his glory, his spiritual being for us as well.  In that sense, his sacrifice becomes all the more meaningful, as he literally poured out everything he had, physically , emotionally and spiritually for his children. And in the same way, I shared with my wife how I prayed a similar prayer over my son, that I would surrender everything, every grace, blessing and favor given to me by God so that my son might be healed. The more I spoke it out, the more it hit me that this is exactly what we celebrate at Easter, a miracle of sacrifice so profound that we can only scratch the surface of how deep it goes. But as we Christians also love to say this time of year “Sunday is coming”, and I knew had to put my hope in that same God that loved me enough to give everything for me, that he would do the same again for my child, and I would learn a valuable lesson in the process. Sunday was coming, and this year we quite possibly would have an Easter miracle just a few days early.

As I write the ending to this piece, I continue to reflect on the miracles of this April, regardless of how different this one turned out, the fact that my son came out of the surgery and is recovering nicely albeit slowly is truly a blessing. We do not know how much of a change we’ll see in him, but we already notice that he has improved in small ways with some different aspects of things he has struggled with, which makes us happy. I mentioned that we celebrate Passover along with Easter in our family, and one of the parts of the seder that I look most forward to each year is the singing of a song called “dayanu”, which essentially translates to “it would have been enough”, as in it would have been enough had God sent one plague to convince Pharaoh to let us go, but he did more, he continued to send plagues and signs to convince him, and then he set them free, and that would have been enough, but then he gave them the promised land. This year, I could equally say the same about me and my family, as it would have been enough if he found my son’s condition, but then he led the right specialists to us, and it would have been enough if he got him to surgery, but now he may heal him in ways we couldn’t believe. I won’t get a chance to sing the song and bang on a table in the usual raucous fashion this year with a room full of people, but in my heart I’m bursting with celebration every day because Sunday is coming.