A Father, His Family, and His Special Needs Son

  The family with Samuel in the hospital after surgery      The other day I was listening to a song by Linkin Park and began to weep at a lyric: “Sometimes bad things take the place where good things go.”     It’s been a while since my last post. Over the past year, we’ve watched Samuel continue to decline. We’ve spent literal months in the hospital and had brief moments of hope, only to have them dashed again by despair.    While we continue to fight for our son every day, we recognize it’s a ticking clock we are fighting against.      Our most recent hospital trip was to the operating room so Samuel could get a feeding tube surgically inserted into his stomach. This feeding tube is necessary because he no longer has the capability of ingesting enough nutrition or medicine orally, and therefore is entirely reliant on the tube for sustenance.      Before we went to the hospital to have this surgery done, my wife laid ...