In a matter of seconds I was pushed out of the pile of bodies surging around Josh. All the sudden the sound of voices, beeping, and wheels of IV poles across a tile floor seemed like they were underwater. I backed away slowly and fell into an all-too-familiar leather ICU chair in the corner of the room. I sent a text to the entire family that we were back in the ICU and Josh had officially gotten an infection. He was hooked up to IVs with a fast drip of antibiotics and being closely monitored. I stared at the ceiling with my head resting on the back of the chair and thought, My husband almost died in front of me. That heavy thought pained my chest with a pump of anxiety-filled adrenaline. I immediately became nauseous and threw up in the adjoining bathroom. I took about four seconds to thank God for stopping us from going to Building 62 that night, where Josh’s blood pressure could have dropped in his sleep.
Nothing had changed about the ICU room since we left two and a half months earlier. I was expected to stay and help Josh but had nothing but a chair in the corner of the room to rest in. I wadded myself up in that chair the best I could but spent most of the next three hours waking up mid-fall onto the floor. I woke up around 7:00 a.m. to the plastic surgery team changing Josh’s wound vac again and saying they thought the donor site looked fine. I did not have enough sleep to put up with a comment like that. I quickly refuted: “Of course you think it looks fine! You weren’t here this morning when it was covered in pus!” (I could go on for days about egos in a hospital.) The surgeons, one of whom was a lieutenant colonel, backed down and apologized, and we had a long talk about what could have happened if I had been as casual about this as they had been. Regardless of how the infection started, I was worried about what was going to happen next. Hardly anyone gets out of inpatient without an infection, but not everyone was as fortunate as we were that night. Many infection stories began similarly to ours but end with an emergency surgery where doctors had to amputate more. Only time would tell.
About every three hours Josh’s fever would spike, and he would have to be given more Tylenol. This infection was taking so much out of him. He could hardly stay awake and felt awful. He would sleep five or six hours, wake up for an hour, then fall back to sleep. Every time he woke up, he would look around the room and get angry that he was back in the ICU. When he felt like talking, all he would say was that we were going to lose our spot at Building 62. I didn’t care about that now, of course. But for Josh, no time had actually passed—the last thing he knew we were wheeling away from Building 62 to calm his worried wife and get his vitals checked. In Josh’s mind, he was “fine” the entire time. I was not up for arguing with him, but I would just look at him during these rants and think, Buddy, you almost didn’t make it from the fourth floor to the first floor that night. What on earth would I have done when you were in cardiac arrest on the other side of this campus at four in the morning?
We stayed in the ICU a total of three days and then moved back up to our old room on the fourth floor. His fevers were getting shorter and less severe, but it didn’t change the fact that the once hairline incision donor site had now become this gaping hole in Josh’s back that would need a wound vac for who knew how long. Josh and I talked about what the next move should be on his back. Doctor egos were still getting in the way of figuring out the problem, so we went in circles on what to do to close the wound. I believed Josh needed a skin graft on his back, which would be very tricky because he was running out of donor sites for skin grafts. However, a skin graft meant returning to surgery and daily wound maintenance for several weeks. Josh wanted no part of that. After talking to the plastic surgery team, they assured us that they could graft the wound and Josh would have a wound vac for only about a week. The alternative was to keep a wound vac on it for six weeks. I was not signing up for more wound vac malfunctions, so we both agreed to the skin graft. Back to surgery we went.
PART THREE
REDEMPTION
CHAPTER ELEVENTHE SECOND FIRST TIME
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
—2 Corinthians 5:7 ESV
PAIGE
The day after my twenty-fourth birthday, we were invited to the White House, not because Josh had received some kind of military award but to see a picture of us praying with President Obama
