An April Friday night, at our summer home on an island an hour north of Seattle. I'm with my husband, my parents and their best friends who I've known all my life.

I must have looked lost (although I’d been here many times before) and slightly crazed because the woman at the reception desk immediately asked who I was there for and I told her I was John’s mom. She jumped up and put her head through a door behind her and simply said, “Mom’s here.”

The next few hours are a blur of doctors, nurses, beeping machines, IV's, phone calls, sitting, waiting, praying.

While it did help to have some detail about how John ended up in the hospital it was still a surreal experience to be standing by, helpless, just waiting. We didn't even really know what we were waiting for - and the steady stream of nurses, aides, doctors and other busy-looking people rushing in and out of John's room didn't fill us in. So we waited.

At some point on Saturday one of the many doctors came in and said they were going to take John for a CAT scan - I wasn't exactly sure what a CAT scan would tell us but assumed it was a way to check his brain for damage.

When you have a lot of time to think about life, in a situation where life isn't a given, some things get really clear, really quickly. Like priorities and what's worthy of getting stressed out over.

Perched in my recliner I watched endless procedures happening and after a while sort of settled into the rhythm of care. There were several exciting but then also disappointing moments when the nurses would test John's ability to breathe on his own by lowering the output of his ventilator...only to find out he wasn't able to continue breathing so they would reset it to full capacity.

After John's breathing tube was removed they also removed his catheter and started running more tests to see how his organs were doing.

In his sliver of a whisper he begged and begged and begged all night to please give him some water - which I could understand since his mouth had been open for over 3 days with a tube down his throat and lips swollen and cracked. A couple of times I dozed off in my recliner only to wake up to him trying to pull himself out of his bed to get to the small sink in the corner of the room.

It didn’t occur to me that we were on the stroke unit for a reason – I just knew that the room was much larger, triangle in shape and had a peek-a-boo view of downtown Seattle through the thick trees on the hospital campus. I thought about how much John would love that – he’s a kid who loves his city passionately and I hoped that when he woke up and saw the iconic top of the Space Needle it might help him remember or recover or whatever it was that he needed to get better.

I tried to swallow the panic that kept rising up in my chest when I thought about what the rest of John's life might be like - what the rest of OUR lives might be with him like this. It was only the first day out of ICU, I kept thinking, things will get better.

During one night shift we heard a soft knocking on the door and when it opened there was a massive hulk of a man in scrubs coming toward us. He had to have been almost 7 feet, 300+ pounds, and zero body fat. His name was Sal and he was from Gambia.

On one of the first afternoons I drove home from the hospital, I was in a daze at the wheel trying to process everything, which was still so difficult. I was at a red light and looked out my window to see an incredible rainbow bright in the dark-ish spring sky. It felt like a colorful hug from above and it was the first time I sensed a tinge of solid hope that things might turn out ok. There was nothing logical to indicate that things could possibly turn out ok, but I knew it was a sign that I wasn't alone, and neither was John.

After a few days on the 5th floor I realized that I really had no concrete idea of what the details of John's overdose were! The past week had been a complete blur of just keeping him alive and it strangely hadn't occurred to me to ask anyone specifically about what and how much John had taken the night he arrived in this situation. I felt a little negligent because that seemed like such an obvious question, but I realized that everything was probably happening in it's proper time - it didn't really matter if I knew this information in the past week, it wouldn't have changed anything.

Over those few days we tried explaining to John what was coming next but that was a little bit like talking to a distracted 2 year old, we had no idea if he was processing what we were telling him. And if he did, the next time he woke up we had to start all over again with why he was even in the hospital so we decided to just proceed and hope for the best.

I wished that there was a qualification list for the parents of the person being discharged because by this point all I wanted to do was crawl into John’s magically maneuverable bed and have people bring me food and drinks all day and night because I most definitely wasn’t ready for this transfer.

I was speechless that a patient in his condition could’ve done this without alerting anyone on the staff, and gotten to the point that he was going to leave on his own. He could barely stand up but was adamant that he was leaving, and if I wasn’t going to give him his wallet he was going anyway and would beg someone to give him bus fare. I asked him where he was planning to go and he said to his friend’s house, back in the neighborhood where the last OD had happened.

We quickly fell into a new daily, hourly routine which was much busier (and louder) than the previous hospital. The acute-inpatient physical rehab program occupies about half of the 8th floor of the hospital and looks like a cross between a psych ward and a not-fancy gym.

I was personally thrilled with the fact that John was safe and sound and getting medical attention - I knew his priority was getting out but that very thought struck fear through me and filled me with dread because we didn’t have a plan for what was coming next.

None of the resources we’d contacted seemed to make sense for John so the plan was he’d be coming home with me where he’d continue to recover and do outpatient physical therapy three days per week. I was terrified of this arrangement but his dad had to get back to work in California and there were no other options.