The Journey to Luisa (Part II)

If you missed Part I, read it here.

During the months spent making the decision whether or not we could parent a child with special needs, we sought out a lot of advice.  It is amazing to see how God placed people in our lives to fill unique roles in this process.

My oldest brother just happens to be married to a pediatrician.  We called her first.  She is pretty wonderful about giving objective, doctorly advice and mingling it with just the right amount of godly wisdom and sisterly love.  And she's good at keeping a secret.

Philip's brother just happens to be married to a Colombian, who just happens to be a nurse.  {He actually met her after we were well into the Colombian adoption process.  I think it is so cool that our kids have a Colombian cousin, with hopefully more to come!}  We called her next.  She was able to interpret for us the technical, medical documents (written in Spanish) that we had been sent.  She was also fabulous enough to take the time to type up translations for these documents for us.

With these translated documents in hand, we contacted Dr. Charlie Law at UCP Birmingham.  He graciously reviewed Luisa's files and videos free of charge.  He invited us to his office one afternoon, after a long day of seeing his own patients, to answer all of the questions we could possibly think of.  He didn't sugar-coat his opinion, but offered us his view of her needs and prognosis.

Two families, each with a child with CP, were wonderful enough to be transparent with us about parenting children with this particular special need.  They opened up to us about the joys and struggles involved.  They shared about the endless line of therapists parading through their lives, the financial struggles that come with this territory, and the difficulty of making decisions about treatments and surgeries.  They also shared about the unique joy that parenting a child with special needs brings into your lives.

Several godly friends were there to just listen.  They didn't try to instruct us on what to do.  They let us talk it through.  They let us cry.  They listened.

All of these people gave us a lot to think about.  I could best describe my feelings during this time as consistently inconsistent.  Or maybe as invariantly variable.

continued here...