Quarantine? Pandemic? Those are words that for all my 31 years of life were used solely in books or to play a board game. These weren’t words that were used to describe everyday life.
Boy, how things have changed.
Almost all of us are dealing with anything from self-isolation to government-mandated lockdowns. A few weeks ago, I experienced what may very well be one of the hardest, yet most beautiful, weeks of my life.
I had the great pleasure to take care of three babes, one almost 2 ½ years old and twins that are almost 1 ½ years old, for a few weeks while their mother was in Italy with another daughter and her life saving heart operation. The first few days with these babes were bliss. Was it exhausting to care for them? Absolutely! Was it a role that God has made me for and that brought joy amidst the exhaustion to every fiber of my being? Absolutely!
However, after a few days of bliss, the boys started to get sick. First it was just runny noses and little coughs, but then it turned into high fevers and coughs that scared me. After two days of trying to deal with this in the home, a pediatrician stopped by our home and checked out the boys. She said the twins needed to be taken to the hospital immediately..one of them had a cough so deep that he could’ve choked or had the fluid in his lungs rise so high that would’ve been life threatening that very evening.
Well, pack the bags! I was told that I may need to stay with them up to a week in the hospital so I packed those bags, loaded the car, and took off for the ER as fast as we could. (Thank you to two very dear colleagues who flew over to the house, drove with me to the ER, and then stayed with me in the ER. I cannot imagine how different that ER night would’ve been if it was just me and the twins!)
As soon as we got to the ER, we were told that yes, absolutely. The twins needed to be admitted. However, if they must be admitted, they needed to be checked for the flu. And if they had the flu, we would be sent into quarantine at Matei Balş, an infectious disease hospital. At that time, talks about covid-19 were starting to get heated, but even without these covid-19 scares, being admitted into an infectious disease hospital sounded intense!
After many tests and a few treatments, my colleague and I found out that yes, the twins had the flu. So that meant we needed to finish our testing at the first hospital, gather our papers, and head over to Matei Balş, the infectious disease hospital, as soon as possible, so we could get admitted and the twins could start their treatment.
While signing in at Matei Balş and getting the twins admitted, I learned that it was time for me to face the music..only one person was allowed to stay with the twins. My colleague went to the car to get our belongings while the twins and I headed off to the room that would become our home for the next five days.
That first night was so difficult. I’d never felt so alone and so unqualified for what was ahead. It was 4am when we finally settled in for the night and I needed to keep an eye on both boys so that they wouldn’t pull out their IVs as they tossed and turned in their sleep. The hospital only had one crib for us, so one boy was next to me in the crib sleeping fairly soundly on his back (praise God!), and the other one finally succumbed to his tiredness and was crawled up next to me in our little bed.
A few hours later the nurses came in and started handing me medication and treatments that I needed to administer to the boys. Woah, woah, woah! Wait a minute! I have to somehow hold down one boy to give him medication and treatment then keep the other boy from pulling out his IV? And with only one crib to keep them contained..how was this possible? (I had tried putting them both in the crib, but that didn’t work very well. One boy was very tired for the first few days so all he did was basically sleep! So while one was sleeping, I tried to put the other boy in the crib..but the other boy falls asleep by getting on all fours, and pushing his head along the mattress until he finds a corner to fall asleep in. Well, when you’re in the bed with another person and your head is down, trying to find a corner for yourself to sleep in, you inevitably run into your brother, wake him up, and now you’re both screaming! Oh man. Even thinking back on that makes me tired!)
So there we are, morning on the first day, and I am not feeling well, yet the boys need their treatments. The nurse got us started and then left. There I was, me and the boys, my eyes must be on them at all times and wait, I’m starving! I need to go to the bathroom! Help! Anybody?? These rooms don’t have call buttons. If you need something while in quarantine, you’re supposed to stick your head out the door for a brief moment and yell for help. But don’t go into the hallway! Just hope that your voice reaches someone down the hall and that they come. But in that moment, I felt so completely overwhelmed. Tears just streamed down my face. One after the other came slowly, and then they just fell like a waterfall.
How oh how would we manage this? These little dudes were sick, and the more I let myself think about it, so was I. I wasn’t feeling well. As those tears streamed down my face, a nurse walked in. I couldn’t stifle those tears. They just came. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I didn’t know how I could administer medication, treatment, etc to both boys. I simply didn’t understand how it was possible. I asked her if she could watch them for 2 minutes while I went to the bathroom. The nurse looked at me and didn’t understand. I told her that I can’t leave the boys unattended with the ports in their feet because they roll around, crawl, and try to stand up..and I just really need to use the toilet! I think in that moment it hit her what a unique situation we were in. Yet the rules were the rules, in this time of quarantine, only one caregiver per family unit.
A few minutes later, as I was again back in the bed and trying to administer treatment to them both, or trying to administer treatment to one, while holding the other one down so he didn’t pull out his port, a cleaning woman came in to sweep and mop. Again those tears were just streaming down my face and she told me that I needed help. She looked at me and said, “you aren’t well, and you have two children. You need help and you should get help.” She soon brought in the nurse and started pointing at me and said “this little mama (mamica) needs help. She’s sick and has two babies to take care of. She must be allowed help.” The nurse said that wasn’t how things work in these days with the quarantine, but she would see what the doctor said.
In the meantime, I was in conversations with my teammates about the situation that I was in. I explained to them that I didn’t have any gluten free food or water. When I packed our bags the night before, I was reassured that they would provide gluten free food for me and that there should be water there. They had neither. One colleague was on his way with gluten free food and water, and another colleague asked: “what practical way can we help you?”. I said that I honestly could really use another person to help me, but that didn’t seem possible.
A few hours later the doctor came in and looked over the boys, then looked at me and said that I must be seen by the ER downstairs. She said that I must be treated for the sickness that I have. I looked at her, without a voice and probably paler than a ghost and said that I was fine. She smiled a sweet smile, chuckled, as did the other nurses, and said “no, you’re not fine. You must be checked out.”
And so began the incredible care that I received from the women at Matei Balş …
While the doctor and her staff were in the room, I received a message from my colleague that he had arrived at the hospital. Because we were in quarantine, he couldn’t come up and I couldn’t come down to meet him, so the policy was I needed to find someone who would go down to the gate, get the things from him, and then the hospital worker would bring me the goods. I found the sweet woman who had been in earlier to mop and sweep and told her that someone was at the gate with a few things for me.
I went back to talking with the doctor and a few moments later, I turned around and there was my colleague, standing in the doorway to our room all decked out in a mask, scrubs, and little booties. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The lady who was mopping and sweeping insisted that I needed help and the doctor agreed.
That day I was able to shower, go to the ER and be treated myself, take a nap, eat gluten free food, etc all while my colleague did the majority of the work with the boys. These are all things that I never would’ve been able to do if the sweet woman hadn’t insisted on me needing help and bringing my colleague up to our room.
As that day went on, my colleagues worked tirelessly to figure out a plan for me and the twins. One worked on going to the house to get some toys and a couple other things I forgot, while also grabbing sanitary wipes, soap, toilet paper, snacks, etc from the nearby grocery store. Another colleague found people to watch her animals and said that she would move in with us that evening and stay with us in a quarantined space for however long we were there. Yep, she moved into a room full of three sick people, not knowing if she’d contract what we had or not, and while fully knowing that once she entered the hospital with us, she couldn’t leave until we were let out of quarantine.
To say that we were loved and cared for, while people selflessly took care of us, would be an understatement.
The one colleague who thought he was just coming to drop off a few things, ended up cancelling all his plans for that day and stayed with us until later in the day when the other colleague could move in and join us for X number of days. And what great timing that was..I had felt incapable of caring well for both boys beforehand, but as my temperature rose and I got more and more nauseous, I literally do not understand how I would’ve cared for those boys and myself on my own.
And so began the crazy adventure of my colleague and I caring for these two precious boys as they battled the flu, dehydration, and other respiratory issues, quarantined in an infectious disease hospital during the covid-19 ramp up.
Each day we were in that hospital, we had new nurses and their assistants getting to know us and the story that we got to be a part of. That I wasn’t actually these boys’ mama but that their foster mom was in Italy, with another one of her children getting a much needed heart surgery. And this foster mom was single, and the adoptive/foster mother of 7 children. The staff were amazed and asked questions about all of it. Why were we doing this? What brought us to Romania? And the best questions of all…I want to adopt too. What is that process like? Who can adopt? Who can I talk to about the adoption process in Romania?
We were amazed at all that God was doing. As my colleague said, if the twins’ hospital admittance means that one more Romanian is looking into adoption/foster care, may it be so. May that experience be used for God’s glory!
Each and every day those cleaning ladies, nurses, and doctor came into our room and treated us with the best care. They smiled, they stayed and talked. I can even recall two women that had tears in their eyes. One was the first doctor who admitted the boys and I into Matei Balş..she looked at me and said that it’s hard for anybody to be in quarantine, let alone with two kids and me being sick. She told me that God was with me. I wanted to hug her, but I couldn’t in this time of physical distancing, so I smiled back and my tears soon matched hers.
I’ve heard of other people who have long hospital stays, and they talk about the relationships they form with their doctors and nurses. I can now attest to that. I look back with incredible fondness at all the women- doctors, nurses, cleaning ladies- that cared and loved us those five days. I feel a connection to them all and can still see their smiling, caring faces in my mind.
I think of these ladies now as they are fighting day after day with this covid-19 virus. They told us before we left that the hospital we were in would be changed to deal strictly with covid-19 patients. They knew that their lives would be changing dramatically, and they were prepared to pack their bags and move into the hospital for X number of weeks if that’s what was asked of them.
As we prepared to leave that last day, we again had great conversations with these ladies. All of them had masks on, but the smiles and the concern that we could see simply by looking in their eyes, meant the world to us. We packed up all of our things, and the lady who mops and sweeps, the very first lady who advocated for me and brought my colleague up on that first day, offered to go down to the car with us and help us bring our things out there. As I had one child on each hip, my colleague had bags lining her arms, and this woman had a little cart piled with our things, we started down the hallway that we could only hours before just yell down and hope that help would come. As we started our journey down that hallway, the cleaning ladies and the nurses lined the hallway and said the most kind and loving things to us. I noticed tears again in one of their eyes. One of them told us to stop and wait a minute and as we stood there, loaded down with little humans and all our belongings, she returned with facemasks and gingerly put them on our faces. She gently tucked our hair behind our ears, fitted the mask over our faces, gently squeezed the top of the mask above our nose, and wished us much health.
I don’t think we’ll ever forget our five days of quarantine at Matei Balş. The care, the love, and the selfless sacrifice from these women as they gave up two of the precious masks that they were running low on and could very well save them from contracting this awful virus. Yet they selflessly gave them to us, as they had selflessly cared and loved us those past five days. I cannot thank them enough, and I may never see them again. But I can pray, and pray I will. Prayer for their families and prayer for them during this time as they give of themselves so the rest of us have a chance at getting better and one day returning to our “normal” lives. Thank you ladies of Matei Balş. You will always be remembered fondly by this mamica.
Boy, how things have changed.
Almost all of us are dealing with anything from self-isolation to government-mandated lockdowns. A few weeks ago, I experienced what may very well be one of the hardest, yet most beautiful, weeks of my life.
I had the great pleasure to take care of three babes, one almost 2 ½ years old and twins that are almost 1 ½ years old, for a few weeks while their mother was in Italy with another daughter and her life saving heart operation. The first few days with these babes were bliss. Was it exhausting to care for them? Absolutely! Was it a role that God has made me for and that brought joy amidst the exhaustion to every fiber of my being? Absolutely!
However, after a few days of bliss, the boys started to get sick. First it was just runny noses and little coughs, but then it turned into high fevers and coughs that scared me. After two days of trying to deal with this in the home, a pediatrician stopped by our home and checked out the boys. She said the twins needed to be taken to the hospital immediately..one of them had a cough so deep that he could’ve choked or had the fluid in his lungs rise so high that would’ve been life threatening that very evening.
Well, pack the bags! I was told that I may need to stay with them up to a week in the hospital so I packed those bags, loaded the car, and took off for the ER as fast as we could. (Thank you to two very dear colleagues who flew over to the house, drove with me to the ER, and then stayed with me in the ER. I cannot imagine how different that ER night would’ve been if it was just me and the twins!)
As soon as we got to the ER, we were told that yes, absolutely. The twins needed to be admitted. However, if they must be admitted, they needed to be checked for the flu. And if they had the flu, we would be sent into quarantine at Matei Balş, an infectious disease hospital. At that time, talks about covid-19 were starting to get heated, but even without these covid-19 scares, being admitted into an infectious disease hospital sounded intense!
After many tests and a few treatments, my colleague and I found out that yes, the twins had the flu. So that meant we needed to finish our testing at the first hospital, gather our papers, and head over to Matei Balş, the infectious disease hospital, as soon as possible, so we could get admitted and the twins could start their treatment.
While signing in at Matei Balş and getting the twins admitted, I learned that it was time for me to face the music..only one person was allowed to stay with the twins. My colleague went to the car to get our belongings while the twins and I headed off to the room that would become our home for the next five days.
That first night was so difficult. I’d never felt so alone and so unqualified for what was ahead. It was 4am when we finally settled in for the night and I needed to keep an eye on both boys so that they wouldn’t pull out their IVs as they tossed and turned in their sleep. The hospital only had one crib for us, so one boy was next to me in the crib sleeping fairly soundly on his back (praise God!), and the other one finally succumbed to his tiredness and was crawled up next to me in our little bed.
A few hours later the nurses came in and started handing me medication and treatments that I needed to administer to the boys. Woah, woah, woah! Wait a minute! I have to somehow hold down one boy to give him medication and treatment then keep the other boy from pulling out his IV? And with only one crib to keep them contained..how was this possible? (I had tried putting them both in the crib, but that didn’t work very well. One boy was very tired for the first few days so all he did was basically sleep! So while one was sleeping, I tried to put the other boy in the crib..but the other boy falls asleep by getting on all fours, and pushing his head along the mattress until he finds a corner to fall asleep in. Well, when you’re in the bed with another person and your head is down, trying to find a corner for yourself to sleep in, you inevitably run into your brother, wake him up, and now you’re both screaming! Oh man. Even thinking back on that makes me tired!)
So there we are, morning on the first day, and I am not feeling well, yet the boys need their treatments. The nurse got us started and then left. There I was, me and the boys, my eyes must be on them at all times and wait, I’m starving! I need to go to the bathroom! Help! Anybody?? These rooms don’t have call buttons. If you need something while in quarantine, you’re supposed to stick your head out the door for a brief moment and yell for help. But don’t go into the hallway! Just hope that your voice reaches someone down the hall and that they come. But in that moment, I felt so completely overwhelmed. Tears just streamed down my face. One after the other came slowly, and then they just fell like a waterfall.
How oh how would we manage this? These little dudes were sick, and the more I let myself think about it, so was I. I wasn’t feeling well. As those tears streamed down my face, a nurse walked in. I couldn’t stifle those tears. They just came. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I didn’t know how I could administer medication, treatment, etc to both boys. I simply didn’t understand how it was possible. I asked her if she could watch them for 2 minutes while I went to the bathroom. The nurse looked at me and didn’t understand. I told her that I can’t leave the boys unattended with the ports in their feet because they roll around, crawl, and try to stand up..and I just really need to use the toilet! I think in that moment it hit her what a unique situation we were in. Yet the rules were the rules, in this time of quarantine, only one caregiver per family unit.
A few minutes later, as I was again back in the bed and trying to administer treatment to them both, or trying to administer treatment to one, while holding the other one down so he didn’t pull out his port, a cleaning woman came in to sweep and mop. Again those tears were just streaming down my face and she told me that I needed help. She looked at me and said, “you aren’t well, and you have two children. You need help and you should get help.” She soon brought in the nurse and started pointing at me and said “this little mama (mamica) needs help. She’s sick and has two babies to take care of. She must be allowed help.” The nurse said that wasn’t how things work in these days with the quarantine, but she would see what the doctor said.
In the meantime, I was in conversations with my teammates about the situation that I was in. I explained to them that I didn’t have any gluten free food or water. When I packed our bags the night before, I was reassured that they would provide gluten free food for me and that there should be water there. They had neither. One colleague was on his way with gluten free food and water, and another colleague asked: “what practical way can we help you?”. I said that I honestly could really use another person to help me, but that didn’t seem possible.
A few hours later the doctor came in and looked over the boys, then looked at me and said that I must be seen by the ER downstairs. She said that I must be treated for the sickness that I have. I looked at her, without a voice and probably paler than a ghost and said that I was fine. She smiled a sweet smile, chuckled, as did the other nurses, and said “no, you’re not fine. You must be checked out.”
And so began the incredible care that I received from the women at Matei Balş …
While the doctor and her staff were in the room, I received a message from my colleague that he had arrived at the hospital. Because we were in quarantine, he couldn’t come up and I couldn’t come down to meet him, so the policy was I needed to find someone who would go down to the gate, get the things from him, and then the hospital worker would bring me the goods. I found the sweet woman who had been in earlier to mop and sweep and told her that someone was at the gate with a few things for me.
I went back to talking with the doctor and a few moments later, I turned around and there was my colleague, standing in the doorway to our room all decked out in a mask, scrubs, and little booties. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The lady who was mopping and sweeping insisted that I needed help and the doctor agreed.
That day I was able to shower, go to the ER and be treated myself, take a nap, eat gluten free food, etc all while my colleague did the majority of the work with the boys. These are all things that I never would’ve been able to do if the sweet woman hadn’t insisted on me needing help and bringing my colleague up to our room.
As that day went on, my colleagues worked tirelessly to figure out a plan for me and the twins. One worked on going to the house to get some toys and a couple other things I forgot, while also grabbing sanitary wipes, soap, toilet paper, snacks, etc from the nearby grocery store. Another colleague found people to watch her animals and said that she would move in with us that evening and stay with us in a quarantined space for however long we were there. Yep, she moved into a room full of three sick people, not knowing if she’d contract what we had or not, and while fully knowing that once she entered the hospital with us, she couldn’t leave until we were let out of quarantine.
To say that we were loved and cared for, while people selflessly took care of us, would be an understatement.
The one colleague who thought he was just coming to drop off a few things, ended up cancelling all his plans for that day and stayed with us until later in the day when the other colleague could move in and join us for X number of days. And what great timing that was..I had felt incapable of caring well for both boys beforehand, but as my temperature rose and I got more and more nauseous, I literally do not understand how I would’ve cared for those boys and myself on my own.
And so began the crazy adventure of my colleague and I caring for these two precious boys as they battled the flu, dehydration, and other respiratory issues, quarantined in an infectious disease hospital during the covid-19 ramp up.
Each day we were in that hospital, we had new nurses and their assistants getting to know us and the story that we got to be a part of. That I wasn’t actually these boys’ mama but that their foster mom was in Italy, with another one of her children getting a much needed heart surgery. And this foster mom was single, and the adoptive/foster mother of 7 children. The staff were amazed and asked questions about all of it. Why were we doing this? What brought us to Romania? And the best questions of all…I want to adopt too. What is that process like? Who can adopt? Who can I talk to about the adoption process in Romania?
We were amazed at all that God was doing. As my colleague said, if the twins’ hospital admittance means that one more Romanian is looking into adoption/foster care, may it be so. May that experience be used for God’s glory!
Each and every day those cleaning ladies, nurses, and doctor came into our room and treated us with the best care. They smiled, they stayed and talked. I can even recall two women that had tears in their eyes. One was the first doctor who admitted the boys and I into Matei Balş..she looked at me and said that it’s hard for anybody to be in quarantine, let alone with two kids and me being sick. She told me that God was with me. I wanted to hug her, but I couldn’t in this time of physical distancing, so I smiled back and my tears soon matched hers.
I’ve heard of other people who have long hospital stays, and they talk about the relationships they form with their doctors and nurses. I can now attest to that. I look back with incredible fondness at all the women- doctors, nurses, cleaning ladies- that cared and loved us those five days. I feel a connection to them all and can still see their smiling, caring faces in my mind.
I think of these ladies now as they are fighting day after day with this covid-19 virus. They told us before we left that the hospital we were in would be changed to deal strictly with covid-19 patients. They knew that their lives would be changing dramatically, and they were prepared to pack their bags and move into the hospital for X number of weeks if that’s what was asked of them.
As we prepared to leave that last day, we again had great conversations with these ladies. All of them had masks on, but the smiles and the concern that we could see simply by looking in their eyes, meant the world to us. We packed up all of our things, and the lady who mops and sweeps, the very first lady who advocated for me and brought my colleague up on that first day, offered to go down to the car with us and help us bring our things out there. As I had one child on each hip, my colleague had bags lining her arms, and this woman had a little cart piled with our things, we started down the hallway that we could only hours before just yell down and hope that help would come. As we started our journey down that hallway, the cleaning ladies and the nurses lined the hallway and said the most kind and loving things to us. I noticed tears again in one of their eyes. One of them told us to stop and wait a minute and as we stood there, loaded down with little humans and all our belongings, she returned with facemasks and gingerly put them on our faces. She gently tucked our hair behind our ears, fitted the mask over our faces, gently squeezed the top of the mask above our nose, and wished us much health.
I don’t think we’ll ever forget our five days of quarantine at Matei Balş. The care, the love, and the selfless sacrifice from these women as they gave up two of the precious masks that they were running low on and could very well save them from contracting this awful virus. Yet they selflessly gave them to us, as they had selflessly cared and loved us those past five days. I cannot thank them enough, and I may never see them again. But I can pray, and pray I will. Prayer for their families and prayer for them during this time as they give of themselves so the rest of us have a chance at getting better and one day returning to our “normal” lives. Thank you ladies of Matei Balş. You will always be remembered fondly by this mamica.