time

It has been such a long couple of weeks. My great-grandmother suffered a stroke on Thursday and passed away on Friday. She was 98, but in good health, so it wasn't really an expected death. I had been meaning to get down to see her for weeks, but...it never seemed to happen.

Then after we decided that I needed to dramatically scale back at work, we got slammed again--nobody is working overtime anymore, so that's around eight grand we're losing, plus we got notified that there aren't going to be hours at our per diem job where Rob has been working at least a 24 hour shift for over a year. This is a drastic pay cut for us, and I can't quite figure out what we're going to do. I won't put on here what we were making together with the overtime and per diem job, but we were quite comfortable. So now I'm struggling, trying to figure out what to do.

And then.

Driving home today with Josh in the backseat, just a few miles back into my county, a vehicle in front of me hit a little four-year-old boy.

What am I to do? I'm a paramedic. I pulled over.

But I had nothing with me, not even a pair of gloves.

I asked a friendly looking bystander to please go check on my son, sleeping in his car seat in the back of the car. I attempted what stabilization I could, and prayed that the ambulance would get there soon. I borrowed a firefighter's radio and tried to contact my crew coming in what we had and how bad it was. I tried to keep my voice from shaking on the radio, tried to keep the thought that could be my son out of my head.
And when the helicopter lifted off, after I did everything I could do, and so did the firefighters and the ambulance crew and the helicopter nurse and paramedic, I pulled my son out of his car seat and held him close. The wind from the helicopter blew his hair, and he smiled his big gummy smile, and kissed me on the cheek.

Mommy, he said in his four-month-old talking way, I know that you are my mommy, and I love you.

And I kissed my beautiful little boy back, and looked over at the other mother standing there, watching her little boy, now very badly injured, lift off into the sky to get to a hospital where they could help him.

Oh, my precious little boy. Everythign else faded away in that moment--worrying about the money and the hours and the time and all of that. I get to wake up tomorrow morning to a happy, beautiful, whole baby son crawling onto my chest and kissing me till I wake up and smile at him.

There is nothing in the world that is worth giving that up for.