God is good.

I know I don't say that enough. Unfortunately it usually takes a crisis to make me realize how heavily I rely on the Lord for strength and comfort, and that it's always there for me, not just in the tough times. Talk about good.

Yesterday at 3:30 the school nurse called to say she had Sam in her office, that a pencil had poked the roof of his mouth. She said he was fine, but that since it was bleeding, they couldn't put him on the bus. I was totally unprepared for what I saw when I got to the school.

He was leaning over a sink, terrified, with blood coming out of the mouth and nose. I knew right away he needed to go to the ER, even though they downplayed the seriousness of it. I peeked at it and almost fainted. The gash ran from just behind the teeth all the way to the soft palette at the back of the throat, where it ended in a Y shaped tear, with a large flap of skin hanging down.

Still thinking it might just look worse than it actually was, I was completely blindsided when the ER nurse warned me we were probably looking at surgery. Surgery. The word made my stomach seize up. Then the ER doctor confirmed the repair was beyond his ability, and said we were lucky that an ear, nose and throat doctor was performing a surgery and would be available in just a few minutes. We'd wait for his opinion on the repair.

The ENT doc agreed that it needed repair, and was fairly certain the hole went all the way into the sinus cavity. He called for an operating room.

Up to this point, Sam had a wad of gauze in his mouth to stop the bleeding, so we couldn't get many details on what exactly happened, and we weren't sure if the pencil had broken off in his mouth. When he was able to talk, I was stunned to find out it was the eraser end of the pencil that pierced his palette, which meant a larger hole that we first thought. But thankfully that meant it hadn't broken off inside his mouth. They were on the bus at the school, getting ready to go home for the day when a boy told Sam to get out of his way and shoved him into a seat, causing the pencil Sam was holding to puncture his palette.

The surgery went well, but took much longer than anticipated. Sam has seven stitches in the soft palette, and would have had more, but some of the skin couldn't be sewn back together, and will just have to heal as-is. Through the whole evening, I prayed, alone and with Sam, and felt very calm and protected, and never doubted for a second that the Lord held us in his loving arms.


He's resting this morning, and says it just feels like a bad sore throat. He couldn't have handled it any better. I'm so proud of him.