the day before.

 these photos are from December 22, the day before.

the day before my beautiful boy left this world.  the day before my sweet boy took his last breath, in my arms.

i am splitting up this day's pictures into 'the day before' and 'the night before' because to me they felt like 2 separate periods of time.  they felt like days apart, even.  i can remember everything in 'time periods'.  the days and nights run together, but i remember instances, happenings...feelings.

this day was painfully hard.

somewhere in the late night/early morning of this day my sweet boy developed a raging fever that would not go away or respond to any sort of medicine. it was 104-105.  he was heavily sedated, with 4 different I.V. drips of sedatives and pain killers, but was so uncomfortable because of the fever that he was awake and agitated.  they finally brought in a "cold blanket" which was a temperature-regulated pad that they placed underneath him.  it basically just turned into a sheet of ice that he laid on.  it eventually would bring his fever down, but only by a few degrees.

 after numerous doses of tylenol and ibuprofen, and none of them doing anything to touch the fever, his nurse gently explained to me that it's the brain that regulates body temperature and she felt that was the reason his fever wasn't able to be controlled.

that was the moment that everything became to painfully clear to me.  it became so painfully evident that my perfect, beautiful little boy, my sweet baby, was dying.

 his body was actually shutting down.  his brain was deteriorating.  so quickly. his bladder stopped working.  the brain also regulates the bladder and he was not able to do that anymore either.  we had to use a catheter, he was holding almost half a liter in his bladder because his brain couldn't tell him to empty it anymore.  it was such a harsh reality to realize that even if i wanted to take him home, to keep him sedated and on a ventilator, i couldn't.  i couldn't stop this from happening.  his body was shutting down.  i didn't even have any options anymore.

that was hard.

i felt like it happened so quickly.

looking back now, i think that my brave little boy, my valiant little soldier, felt that he had been given permission to let go.  i had been praying so hard for him to make it to the hospital, to make it until we tried everything......and that night before, i had talked with him and prayed with him and saw his suffering.  i told him it was okay to let go if that's what Heavenly Father had planned for him.  i told him he didn't have to stay and suffer anymore, for me.  i told him how proud i was of him, how terribly much i would miss him, but that it was ok.  everything was ok.  mommy's got you, whatever happens, it'll be ok...

i think he finally felt like it was ok to let go, to stop fighting his brave and valiant fight.
i think he felt safe enough to let go.

aubrey made him this rainbow bracelet.  she brought it the day before and put it on her brother.  i promised her it would never be taken off.

and it wasn't.  he's still wearing it, a sweet present from his Sissy.

they moved us to a different room this day.  even that was hard, because i knew why they were moving us.  we were moved to a more remote, quiet, less busy part of the PICU floor.

we were moved to a double room so we would have more space for visitors, for those final goodbyes..  we were moved to the less busy section so we would have more privacy the next day, the day my sweet boy would become my angel.

 this was such a hard day.

so many hard, real things happening so fast.  so much chaos and other unnecessary issues outside of my beautiful boy were happening as well.  it was all just so much.  so heart-breaking.

so real.

i miss him so much.  this has been a hard post to write, because remembering all the feelings and emotions from this day brought me right back.  right back to the day my heart actually broke. and it wasn't done yet. 

i love him so much.

i know he fought as hard as he could for me, and that his perfect little body did as best it could.

he did everything perfectly.

<3