December 5, 2023
December 5th started out as a normal day but it is the day that our whole world turned upside down and is the reason the blog is so behind. The day started with getting Zoe off to school. DJ drove her to school, came home and worked out. I had just gone into the bathroom to start drying my hair to get ready for a routine doctor appointment when I heard a cookie sheet fall on the floor. Sookie was barking incessantly. I kept yelling at her from the bathroom and just assumed she had knocked stuff off the counter and that DJ was outside which was why she would not stop barking. When she wouldn’t listen to me yelling, I came out to try to get her to stop only to find DJ on the floor having a seizure. I immediately grabbed his phone and called 911. It was the scariest moment of my life. Thankfully, we live super close to the fire department and EMS arrived at our house in 5 minutes. He was conscious by the time they got there and was so confused as to what was going on. They took him to the hospital where he had a CT scan done. In all of this, I texted our 2 doctor friends from church. Dave, who works at Greenville Memorial in the ER, texted back that he was coming. He took over our care and he was the one to read the CT scan results that showed that DJ had a brain tumor. We truly cannot thank him enough for being there with us because we cannot imagine that news coming from a total stranger. We were admitted to the hospital because they thought DJ might need surgery the next day. The next day we saw the neurosurgeon who is the top one for brain tumors. He gave us some pretty scary possibilities and said he wanted to do surgery the next week. We were completely rocked by all of this but were thankful he was not heading straight to major surgery with no time to really prepare for it. We went home with a week to talk to the girls about things and get things in order for him to have surgery on the 14th.
This was such a shock to us and has consumed our lives for the past few months. But, even in all the hard we’ve seen God’s hand carrying us through it all. From the timing of the seizure (after he got home from driving Zoe but before I left and Ava was still asleep so she didn’t see it), to Dave being in the ER, to getting the best neurosurgeon we could get, to our family, church family and friends stepping up in huge ways to help us. It’s not the road we want to be on but we are thankful to have the support we have to walk this road with us. We’ve also seen so many prayers answered so far through it all.
