the kindness of strangers...streaming

My sincere thanks to my friends here who offered up prayers for Joshua today. It was a stressful event -- mostly for mom!

A little background: Joshua had been having headaches almost daily. Back in the spring, he was diagnosed with rebound headaches, and he stopped using analgesics. Over the summer he didn't have them as often, but toward the end of the summer (about the time Ohio State started back to school) they came back, and he developed a tic. I was worried, but mostly because I felt he was stressed, and the stress was causing the symptoms. Joshua is a worrier. He is the kind of kid who gets up at 7 a.m. for a 9 a.m. class. He commutes from home and he gets to campus about an hour early because he doesn't want to be late for class. (If only my other college student had a little bit of that conscientiousness.)

When the headaches came back and the tic developed, we made another doctor's appointment, and the doctor referred us to a neurologist. She did a thorough exam, and suspects that Joshua may have sleep apnea, but ordered lab work, an MRI, and EEG, and a sleep study to be thorough. The MRI was scheduled for today, and after my MRI a few weeks ago, I was worried that Joshua would have a difficult time getting through the test. When I mentioned my concern to the neurologist, she prescribed a medication Joshua could take before the MRI to relax him. He, however, said he didn't want to take it because he wanted to be able to work in the afternoon following the test.

He did great! He, apparently, was not a nervous wreck, unlike his mother.

After he went into the MRI room, I sat, rosary in hand, in the waiting room. There was an obnoxious television with a soap opera droning in the 10x20 room, so praying was difficult. There was one other woman in the room and I decided I didn't care of she could hear me whispering my prayers (the only way I can pray with distractions), so I closed my eyes and prayed. I really didn't realize how nervous I was until about halfway through the rosary when the other woman's daughter came out from her test and she stood to leave. She crossed the room and put her hand on my knee and said, "I hope you have peace in your heart." I mumbled something about my son being nervous (pft!) and she put her hand on my cheek and said, "It's going to be alright." Of course as soon as she left the room I became a blubbering mess. I thought I was ok, until the kindness of a stranger shattered my feigned calm.

When I finished my rosary, I stood and paced back and forth from the waiting room to the doors that led to the hallway where the MRI was. There were two thin windows through which I could see the door to the MRI, with its yellow and black CAUTION band pulled across. I paced back and forth until I finally caught the eye of the young man who was administering the test. As he released the CAUTION band from the door he gave me a "thumbs up" and I breathed a sigh of relief. Another blessing from a kind stranger.

You never know, on any given day, who you might meet, and how they might affect you. Today I met two kind strangers, and they lightened my load. Hopefully tomorrow I can do the same for another.

Kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless.-- Mother Teresa