THREE
COLTON TOUGHS IT OUT
That next month, the cast came off. With the cancer scare and kidney
stones behind us, I spent a couple of months learning to walk again, first
with a walking cast, then with a pretty nasty limp, slowly working my
atrophied muscles back to health again. By February, I finally achieved
some independence—just in time for a district board meeting of our church
denomination in Greeley, Colorado, set for the first week in March.
“You need to get away,” Sonja told me a couple of weeks before the
board meeting. “Just get away and have a little fun.”
Now, here we were at the Butterfly Pavilion. A monarch butterfly fluttered
past, its bright orange wings segmented in black like stained glass. I
breathed a prayer of thanks that our trip had happened at all.
Two days before, on Thursday, Colton had begun telling Sonja that his
stomach hurt. I was already in Greeley, and at the time, Sonja was teaching
a Title 1 class at Imperial High School. Not wanting to put the school to the
expense of a substitute, she asked our good friend Norma Dannatt if she
could watch Colton at her home so that Sonja could go to work. Norma,
who was like a favorite aunt to our kids, immediately said yes. But at
midday, Sonja’s cell phone rang. It was Norma: Colton’s condition had
taken a nosedive. He had a fever with chills and for most of the morning
had lain nearly motionless on Norma’s couch, wrapped in a blanket.
“He says he’s freezing, but he’s sweating like crazy,” Norma said, clearly
concerned. She said Colton’s forehead was covered in beads of sweat as
big as teardrops.
Norma’s husband, Bryan, had come home, taken one look, and decided
Colton was sick enough that he should go to the emergency room. Sonja
called me in Greeley with the news, and just like that, I saw our trip to
celebrate the end of a string of injury and illness being cancelled by...
illness.
Sonja checked out of work early, scooped up Colton from Norma’s
house, and took him to the doctor, who revealed that a stomach flu was