What was lost now is found  #insaneinsomnia

Eisley has only slept through the night maybe a handful of times since we were discharged from the hospital in late January (2017). Prior to the hospital, she slept in her bed in her room every night. During the hospital stay, the medicine regimen stopped working overnight and she hasn’t slept in her room a whole night since. Insomnia is no joke and something in her brain snapped from being hospitalized. Getting Eisley good sleep is the highest priority for us right now. I wrote in another blog about the lengths we’ve gone to as a family to try and meet this need (for all of our sake).

This past Monday we had an appointment scheduled and UCSF. The evening before, our good friends were having a meaningful celebration in Stockton so I decided to brave the rough night’s sleep in order to celebrate with them and make the early morning trek into San Francisco shorter. My parents recently moved to Tower Park Marina, 5 miles west of Lodi, so it was an easy place to crash for Sunday night.

Sunday, Eisley missed her nap because I headed down to Stockton after church which was out of her normal routine and well, because insomnia sucks. That night, post party, she fell asleep rather quickly after her regular meds. About 8:30pm she woke up sobbing and saying that she wanted to “go home my house.” I explained to her that we were having a sleepover at Grandma’s house so we could hang out with grandma more the next day. After quite a bit of consoling, she fell back asleep on the blanket pallet next to the guest bed where I was sleeping.

I hit the sack because I was exhausted and we had an early morning looming. She woke up a few times between nine and midnight like usual and I laid her back down and drifted back off to sleep. The next thing I remember is my mom waking me up frantically saying she couldn’t find Eisley anywhere in the house . I was certain she was laying on the floor next to me, but she was not.

My mom had woken up just before 2am to get a drink of water and she realized that her backdoor, which had been dead bolted shut at bedtime, was wide open. She had closed the door and headed back to bed when she remembered we were there and decided to check on us girls--and that's when she first realized Eisley was not in my room.

My mom turned every light on and we tore their house apart. My mom kept telling me that when she got up she found the back door wide open but I just couldn’t believe it. It was 3:03am the first time I looked at the clock .

My dad, mom and I all got shoes on and flashlights and started searching outside. Eisley was on heavy meds for her insomnia and I was convinced she had wandered outside (somethings she’s never done before) and must have laid down to sleep somewhere nearby (we frequently find her sleeping somewhere random on our tiles floors and not in the bed). After a blur of time of tromping through the neighbor’s yards, I drove up and down the main rode yelling for her, but it quickly became evident that Eisley was in fact gone.

Placing the 911 call was a total out-of-body experience. Even as the words came out of my mouth to the dispatcher describing the circumstances, I could not believe it. I was in shock in the truest sense of the word. The questions I was answering (and would continue to answer throughout the morning) were things I had only seen and heard in movies. After I called 911, I had to call Kaben to let him know that his little girl was missing. It was awful (and that’s an understatement).

My dad and I meticulously started walking up and own every little row of manufactured homes, through each carport and on both sides of the greenbelts dividing each row of homes and my mom starting calling her prayer chain. Tower Park is bordered on one side by Highway 12 , on another by levee holding back the river delta and on the others by open marshes and agriculture.

For a barefoot 3-year-old wandering in the middle of the night, this was the perfect death trap.

First came the San Joaquin Sheriff and then the local PD. Time kept ticking on and she was nowhere to be found. My dad had woken up some residents who had called in other neighbors to help us search. I called Kaben back and told him that this was for real and that it was time for he and Judah to come down. I still really thought she was going to be just around the corner.

Every time another agency showed up I had to explain that she was 3 ½ years old and medically fragile and on heavy medications, and developmentally delayed, and BAREFOOT, by herself in the dark, in a retirement community with hardly any street lights, and hour and a half from home. Next came the CHP, then the K9 units to search the river and levee, and then the Woodbridge Fire Department. Next thing I knew, the police were telling me that “the levee road was frequented by unsavory people” who used it to access the river for fishing.

That's when they dispatched the CHP Search Helicopter.

The tenor definitely changed as the time went by and they started talking about how an innocent runaway situation may possibly have turned into an abduction or worse. Between the searchlights of the helicopter and the sounds of the canine units searching the waterways, the energy of the scene was definitely escalated.

I found myself righteously angry at the thought of an “unsavory” person anywhere near my precious daughter and unwilling to think that she could have been run over or fallen into the many open waterways nearby. I continued to run up and down streets and through the grass and bushes in my jammies and church shoes calling for her to wake up-- but she was not there. I called Kaben back and asked him to pray for me because I did not know what else to do. The phrase he kept asking Jesus was “for us to have eyes to see her.”

One of the neighbors had the idea to go just outside the community and start flagging down of the cars going by on the levee/frontage road to let them know a little girl was missing and that if they saw her to bring her into the community to the police. About 4am, off duty police officers began showing up in their personal cars and I knew that could not be good.

We were desperate and felt helpless. At 4:15am, nearly two hours after the nightmare began to unfold, I heard through an officer's radio the first hint at something that could become good news:

She "had been located.”

I didn’t know what that meant and it seemed like an eternity before I heard that she was alive. Eisley was located in perfect condition and was back in my arms at 4:25am. Oh, the tears and the relief but also the sorrow and shock of what had just happened.

She had black bare feet and not a scratch on her. Two men, who had been flagged down by that kind neighbor, found her on the eastbound frontage road of Highway 12. Highway 12 is such a dangerous road that in recent years the government reconstructed the road so that the highway is elevated and the exit and entrance to Tower Park go under or parallel rather than crossing traffic. As you come from Lodi (going west) you exit to the right and wrap under Highway 12 to enter the community to the south side. As you go east, there is a frontage road that merges directly onto the east bound side of the highway. Eisley was walking up the frontage road to the highway. When asked where she was going, she said to “go home my house."

GOD SPARED OUR LITTLE EISLEY’S LIFE.

So many small elements of the story point to God watching over Eisley:

When my mom woke up before 3am to get a drink, she had a whole glass of water next to her bed and yet for "some reason" she decided to go to the kitchen to get a fresh glass of water anyways. The motion sensor light just “happened” to be on so she noticed the door was open. She just “happened” to think to check on Eisley.

Eisley was approached by a dog and in her fierce little spirit, she yelled at it “to go home right now,” and it did, leaving her untouched.

She walked barefoot for over 0.6 miles to get out of the community and then another ¼ mile over a paved levee and onto the rough frontage road filled with potholes and broken glass with not a single cut on her.

She turned right on the levee toward the highway instead of left into the river. This frontage road was separated from the open highway by a narrow strip of weeds on one side and flanked with a reed-filled marsh on the other. And she was kept in this small band of relative "safety" - she did not drown or walk onto the busy highway.

She traversed over culverts with open ditches and she did not fall in.

She was not attacked by a wild animal.

Two “unsavory” men, who were at least a few beers in after fishing all night, slowed down enough to “have eyes to see her” and then chose to return her safely when they found her. She was laughing and chatty at her return. The very people I was infuriated by the thought of even being near my daughter were the very people Jesus chose to bring her back to us.

Every LEO (law enforcement officer) agency was gone just minutes before Kaben and Judah arrived so that Judah was completely shielded from this horrific event.

THE MIRACLES ARE NOT LOST ON US! GOD WAS SO, SO GRACIOUS TO US.

As the Sheriff was handing me his card with our case number on it at the very end, I asked him what more he needed from me.

He said, “nothing.” Followed by, “You caught your lucky break this time.”

I was immediately overwhelmed by the fact that all of these people and resources were poured into finding our little wildflower and that once she was located that they were filled with joy and expected nothing from us. Talk about service. Talk about grace. Go hug a cop. Or a fireman.

As Kaben drove Eisley home Monday morning, she recounted for him what she had done and seen and experienced as Kaben passed through the neighborhood. She has continued to talk about it as she heads into her “dream world” talk. It’s overwhelming to hear it from her perspective and but so beautiful to hear how she experienced her rescue by these nice ("unsavory") people who told her she “had to ho home” and brought her straight back to mama’s arms.

In the days since Eisley’s grand adventure, Kaben and I have been unpacking the different events, thoughts, and prayers. We both separately prayed over and over that, while we have accepted that we will probably outlive sweet Eisley because of her health, this was just not the way she was supposed to die. There have been so many miracles we’ve recognized in hindsight. Just minutes before I called Kaben to tell him she had been located, he had a vision with three very specific things. These prayers that were not logical but his heart couldn’t help but utter them. All three of them were answered poignantly.

Clearly Jesus was not done with Eisley's life on earth. He allowed her to walk out that back door and chose in His mercy to put angels around her. We don't know why He chose to spare her - again- but He did.

You can continue to pray for us as processing this trauma is a journey all its own and we still don’t have a solution for her insomnia. I can tell you this much, she’s going to be sleeping at home for the foreseeable future.

WE LIVED THROUGH OUR WORST NIGHTMARE BUT WITH THE BEST POSSIBLE ENDING. THANK YOU JESUS!