I’m gonna tell this story as I remember it so take that for what it’s worth. Way back in 2005 we were living in eastern Tennessee. I worked at a parachurch organization as their events coordinator and Hannah was working as a server at a local restaurant. On one fine TN afternoon the twins had a clinic visit scheduled for their 15 months vaccinations. Hannah was also scheduled for work that day and since she made all the real money as a server (people are really generous when you give them a sob-story about moving across the country to minister) taxi-duty fell to Dad that day. I loaded all three little boys up and headed across town for what I anticipated would be quite an adventure.
The twins were actually about 16 months at the time (we couldn’t read a calendar) and Caleb was about 31 months, so you can imagine how excited I was about venturing into a public clinic with two mostly mobile little explorers and one extroverted motivational speaker. As a father I was content if my children were anything less than the loudest and most obnoxious children in the room. That day we were only slightly below the average commotion level, but sliding under the radar was good enough for me. I had a decent idea of what was in store for me so I was happy if I could keep them from causing such a ruckus that the security guards had to get involved (which we had the honor of witnessing twice that day).
After what seemed an eternity in the front room we were called to the back, a welcome reprieve for parents whose children aren’t born exceptionally patient. Luckily instead of being placed in a room where I could monitor our level of crazy behind closed doors, we were just given two chairs in the middle of what had to have been the busiest hallway in the western hemisphere. We passed the time with both twins in my lap and Caleb in the other chair doing whatever we could to occupy ourselves while we waited. Finally we were greeted by one of those nurses that when you meet them you wonder, “Why did you go into a service profession if you hate all human beings so desperately?” She grabbed one kid at a time, stuck them with 47 needles each, and sent us packing with the normal instructions to alternate Tylenol and Ibuprofen. It was really awesome traipsing back through the main lobby with a wild banshee on each arm while Caleb took the time to explain to each person we passed that they had just gotten their shots and that’s why they were crying. I managed to scoot him out the door and across the parking lot to our vehicle and had a good little wrestling match buckling all three seats in the back of the mini-van (yeah, what 23 year old doesn’t dream of having three kids stuffed into the back of the sexiest vehicle in all the world?). I sat down behind the wheel and just took a moment to be thankful that we had all made it out alive and without any major incidents. I had no idea how much our lives were about to change.
That night both Andrew and Joel spiked a fever so we put them on the alternating regimen of Tylenol and Ibuprofen. Things seemed a little out of the ordinary that night, but not enough to cause real concern for us. The coming days were a slightly different story though. We had moved them to a pretty healthy well balanced diet by this age. They were both walking and were each in the very beginning stages of potty training. They had some basic language, ‘Mommy’, ‘Daddy’, ‘I love you’ and the like. Neither of them had been on pace with Caleb’s development, but they were both in the normal range of skills and development for their age. All of that stopped. They not only stopped progressing, but they started to regress, and quickly. They stopped walking. They even stopped trying to walk. They stopped eating anything but chicken nuggets and macaroni. They lost all interest in potty training. They not only stopped talking, but stopped all forms of communication all together. It was like they were all the sudden unaware of anyone else. They stopped looking at us. Within a few weeks we had two 16 month old boys who were at the developmental age of a 6 month old. We didn’t really know how to take all of that.
One thing that had always kept our spirits high with Andrew and Joel was that they were just happy babies. They had a rough go at it from the start. They were 6 weeks premature with a 17 day stay in the special care nursery. Joel had a double hernia operation at 8 weeks and well below the recommended weight, and then had trouble recovering from the anesthesia. They both had RSV that first winter. Through it all, they were a joy to be around. They were fighters. Even though they were sometimes stubborn enough to make me want to pull out my hair at the end of the day they would both crawl up in my lap and watch a Veggie Tales movie and none of that mattered anymore. We lost that though. They slipped into a place that we could not comprehend. When I think back about those times the part that hurts me the most is remembering how miserable they always seemed. They just screamed all day. I know that’s the kind of thing parents say and we all just write it off as sarcasm, but I’m not really exaggerating. Andrew and Joel literally spent 70%-80% of their waking hours screaming. And their waking hours became horrible. We were lucky if we could get them to sleep for 4 hours a night. When we would put them to bed they would scream for hours. They would remove their diapers in protest and then, well, you know, all over their beds. We cleaned poop and pee from every surface in the room. How they managed to get it on the 10’ ceilings in that house is still mystery to this day, but they did it. Usually at around 1 or 2 in the morning when they finally went to sleep Hannah or I would sneak into their room and try to put a diaper on without waking them. They would wake at around 4 or 5 each morning. We could usually get away with an extra hour of sleep before their screaming would finally rouse us and force us to face another wonderful day in our lives. We took things in shifts based around when we each had to work to try and get enough rest to function. That was the beginning of a dark descent for our family that took years to recover from.
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