Christmas in the ERC

After Debbie and I left, the next week was the week before Christmas. So we started planning for Christmas in Denver. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we switch off families for Holiday’s, and it was going to be a Christmas with the Elder family. Of course they understood that we would be going to Denver to be with Caitie as much as possible. She had not been there long so we really were not sure how much time we would be allowed to spend with her, but we knew we could not stay in Albuquerque while she was hospitalized in Denver. My brother planned an early Christmas party at his house for us and my mom. We opened our presents to each other and had a nice Christmas dinner and celebrated the best we could. I thought we would stay at the Ronald McDonald House again, but I can’t lie, this thought was pretty hard to swallow. As luck would have it, my dear friend Mary, who I have known since the girls were in elementary school who had moved to the Denver area the year before, called me with an answer to prayers I didn’t even know I was praying. Mary has a daughter the same age as Caitie and she is just a wonderful giving person and I am lucky to call her friend. She told me that she was planning to come to Albuquerque for the holiday and she thought we might want to stay at her house while we were visiting Caitie. Her home is about 35 minutes away from the ERC, it was perfect! So when Chris got off work on Friday we loaded up and drove to Denver. It started snowing as we drove into town. Again we went straight to ERC to see Caitie for the evening visiting hours. It had been about a month since Amanda had seen her, we were all happy to be together and the snow was so pretty, we got to visit with her in the art room that night and it is a big space and we had it to ourselves, it was a good visit. When visiting hours were done we left to find Mary’s house, it had snowed the whole time we were visiting. Snow is different in Colorado, it sticks! The roads were covered in snow and driving was treacherous, it took us over an hour to get there but we found it and it really was a perfect place to stay. We spent the Saturday visiting shifts going back and forth to see Caitie. Between visits we tried to see parts of Denver, which is a pretty cool place. We visited the 16th street mall and we went to the movies We convinced Chris to go watch The Greatest Showman, he isn’t really the musical type but he tried. I will say Amanda, Taylor and I loved every minute of it and it will always have a special place in our hearts. If you have never heard the song “This is Me” it is a great power anthem about loving yourself for who you are. I highly recommend it! Christmas Eve was on a Sunday, we went to church nearby where we have friends who attend, and a couple of Amanda’s friends who live in Colorado Springs traveled over and came to church with us and we had lunch together. It was nice and a fun treat for Amanda, then we went to ERC and visited with Caitie again. We were not sure how the visiting hours would be on Christmas day. They weren’t great, I had hoped they might allow Caitie to come out and spend time away with us, but that was not allowed. We were given one extra visiting shift other than the normal evening visiting shift. It was from 10:00 am to 11:30 am, We got up Christmas morning and Amanda and Taylor opened some gifts at the house, we really didn’t know where we would be visiting, if we would be alone or with other people? We had a lot of gifts but didn’t really know how much to bring or what she might even be allowed to keep? We decided just to bring all three girls stockings, so they could open those together and then bring Caitie her presents. Obviously there were many visitors that day, they put us in a downstairs large room that Caitie said is used for yoga. She had never been in it before, she was not clear for yoga yet. We had to share it with another resident, it was a young mother, her husband and two young daughters I would guess the girls were about 3 and 5 years old, they were there opening presents with her. The room was large enough that it wasn’t uncomfortable but of course we were both aware of each other’s presence. This illness does not discriminate, it can effect anybody at any point in their life. It was hard not to watch those little girls and think about when my girls were that small. That family was doing an amazing job supporting each other and trying to make the best of a difficult situation. I also could not help but wonder if that could maybe be the life Caitie may live someday. Would this follow her forever? Will her husband need to support her through this someday instead of her dad and I? I so wanted this to be the only time, the end of this, I wanted her to just be healed so badly. But at that time, we were far from that place. We just had to get through today, her future was still to be determined.
After this visit we were not allowed to come back to see her until the night visit at 7:00. So we had a few hours to find stuff to do in Denver on Christmas day. We found a neat outdoor ice skating rink with a big pretty decorated tree behind it, there were lots of people there because skating was free! However, we weren’t really dressed for ice skating and it was freezing, the temps were barely in the 20’s. We tried to ice skate but the skates were big and the ice was bumpy, it wasn’t like the movies at all! Nothing around it was open and we needed to use the bathroom, we found one Starbucks that was packed to the gills! We waited in line to use the bathroom and decided to leave. We drove back towards Mary’s house and found a little Chinese food restaurant that was open and had our “Christmas dinner”. We went back to Mary’s and watched a couple episodes of Stranger Things until it was time to go back and see Caitie again. Caitie was still in okay spirits but it was obvious that it had been a difficult day for her and all the people around her. She did surprise us though, she had made Christmas Cards for each of us, they were decorated cute and holiday like, and inside each card she had written each of us a personal note expressing her gratitude for our support and apologizing for getting to this place. We were all in tears and touched by her words. She had even managed to buy us some gifts from the gift shop when she was in the Acute Hospital. It was beyond sweet and unexpected. If anyone ever tries to tell you that people who have eating disorders are selfish, and too concerned with themselves, (and people did say these words to me personally.) let me tell you there is nothing further from the truth. Any person who is suffering personally but has enough caring to be able to try to do for someone else is not selfish! I always knew Caitie had a beautiful heart and going through this with her has just reaffirmed that to all of us who truly know her and love her. Eating disorders are not a choice, mental illness is not a decision a person makes. It is not a cry for attention, it is disease, just like any other disease. No one would blame the cancer patient for getting sick, nor should we blame the person with an eating disorder. However, this is common thinking and one of the main reason’s people who suffer from this disorder don’t want to tell anyone. They are judged and wrongly condemned more often than not. And don’t get me started on the way we as a society view health and wellness, diet and exercise, how weight is constantly associated with health and wellness. I will share my views on these topics as well, but not today.
We drove home the day after Christmas, I was scheduled to return on January 1st with my mom for the week long care giver training that started on the 2nd, the timing wasn’t great because I worked in the school and we were returning from our winter break on the 2nd, but I knew I needed to attend this training. Due to this plan I did not plan to visit Caitie for New Year’s Eve. However, Chris could not bear the thought of her being alone for the holiday and since he wasn’t able to attend the care giver session he decided to return to Denver for the weekend of New Year’s, he went by himself and stayed at The Ronald McDonald House. His truck broke down while he was there that weekend. It was just typical, the one weekend someone is there alone and that is the weekend he has car trouble! Life is just funny like that, luckily he was able to get it fixed, $650.00 later, he learned how to Uber but was able to drive his truck home. He was driving home on the 1st while I was driving there, we actually talked on the phone and were able to see each other and wave as we passed each other on the freeway as he returned home and I drove there. You know, often times you hear stories of families who are going through difficult times, who start fighting or struggling to get along while that happens. I am so very grateful to say that did not happen to us. Yes, it was stressful, and yes trying to manage all the normal stuff plus this was hard on everyone, but we tried hard to stay focused on the big picture, we needed Caitie to get well, we needed to figure out how to help her heal and how to be better for it in the end. The Bible talks about the trials of life and the lessons to be learned from them, if we were to learn and do better we had to focus and learn everything we could to do better tomorrow. Everyone was affected, everyone had to make sacrifices, but we all wanted the same thing. Caitie to be alright, and with that goal in mind our family stayed strong together. I’m so blessed and grateful for this family, the holiday’s of 2017 were not my favorite, but we found a way to be joyful. We were together, we loved each other and that is really what it is all about right?