I don't know how other parents do this: spend endless hours sitting in hospital waiting rooms, wondering/worrying about their children. How they can sit there and read the same old tired magazines or newspapers is beyond me.

How can they eat or talk animatedly amongst each other when their child is undergoing painful tests or procedures (or worse, having surgery)??

I can't tell you how many times I've spent sitting in a hospital waiting room, full of other people, or sitting at the bedside of my daughter as she battles yet another infection, another illness, another medical crisis! It is something I've come to expect ever since she burst into my world ten years ago.

My daughter is ten as I just said. Her name is Trinity. Trinity Grace. She was born with spina bifida and other health poblems that have threatened to take away her life on more than one occasion.

Trinity has seizures, is prone to kidney/lung infections, has a trache (her lungs were damaged during a bout of pneumonia), and has vision problems. She cannot walk very far; she is usually in her wheelchair.

Because of her serious medical needs, Trinity is in special needs classes. Surprisingly, she does well in her studies. However her health is precarious; you never know when she is going to become sick or need to go to the hospital.

That's the scariest part in parenting a child with such significent special needs. Trinity has been through more medical hell than a child has a right to go through, and it's no wonder we, as her parents, have aged so much. We may be in our thirties, yet we look more like grandparents.

We're both completely grey and have wrinkles on top of wrinkles!

Whenever Trinity is in the hospital, there's a chair I spend a lot of my time in. It's located in her hospital room. The chair is big, it's roomy, and I call it "the crying chair". That's what I seem to do most of all whenever I sit in it: cry. That or hold her hand as she has her tests or medical procedures done, or pray while she is unconscious or sleeping.

I sit there, look at her sleeping form, or watch the monitors recording her vital signs. I've gotten so good at reading the monitors I can (halfway) understand what the numbers/squiggly lines mean, and I can tell when a problem is going to occur.

My friends (or the nurses I've come to know throughout the years) jokingly tell me I should have become a doctor or a nurse because I know more about medicine than most laypeople! LOL Well? When you've spent as much time in hospital settings as I have over the years, you learn a lot about medical issues!

I am currently at the hospital now so I can be with Trinity. She's in for her lungs again--pneumonia. She is going to be okay, but she's on a ventilator now (so her lungs can rest), and she's getting antibiotics via a central line which has been inserted in her chest. She's sleeping comfortably, and her vital signs look stable; nothing to worry about. (For now.)

If she continues to do this well, I just may slip on out of here, go home, so I can get some needed rest. A hospital is not the best place to try to get some sleep: too much noise, too many distractions going on, and too much worrying to boot!

Well, I am going to look in on Trinity before I head on out; I will write in here a few days with another Trinity update. Take care and God bless!

~Trinity Grace's dad, Roger. :(