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# Days before Discharge
- URL: https://www.barrettschram.com/days-before-discharge/
- Published: 2026-09-07T21:56:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T21:56:20.000Z
- Author: Schram Family

> "The LORD is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him."  
> — Psalm 28:7

Our first chapter in the hospital is finally approaching its end after almost 50 consecutive days. While our specific discharge date has been pushed back a few times (and I don't want to jinx our current one by stating it here), we're confident that our homecoming is imminent!

Barrett is gaining weight, his medication list has been reduced to something a non-medical student can understand, and he's doing most things you'd expect a 6-week-old to be doing! I certainly wouldn't describe leaving the hospital as bittersweet, but there's a melancholic quality to having spent the majority of our summer on this campus and now departing as the days shorten and the weather (hopefully??) begins to cool.

All the long hours spent here have culminated in some thoughts I'd like to share below. Not in an attempt to be overly profound, but more to serve as an important reminder to our future selves. If you're mostly interested in Barrett, you're free to drop off here.

Like many young adults, our home in the post-modern world has become a private bunker — a safe place where we can disconnectedly engage with the outside world through a combination of fiber-optic cables, cardboard delivery boxes, and take-out bags deposited on our doorstep by a vanishing courier. All this modern convenience serves to make our lives easier, but it removes the undeniably important element of daily and consistent human interaction that we all desperately need.

Every day spent in a hospital incurs endless interruptions from nurses, therapists, custodians, and your own relatives and friends. It forces you to have conversations on the elevator with strangers multiple times a day. It produces a barista who doesn't need to shout out your name and coffee order because they know your face. In short, it thrusts you back into the ['Web 1.0'](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/computer-science/web-10?ref=barrettschram.com) world that I was raised in. This building sees thousands of people each day with their own lives, stories, pains, and dreams — and you can't just scroll past them or open a different app when they start to bore you. These mundane and often banal daily interactions are far more important than I ever realized, and I am blessed to have experienced them.

Spending these weeks here has been particularly humbling and served as an important reminder of our collective humanity and status as children of God. I will leave here not only with my son, but with some much-needed perspective as well.

Barrett is abundantly blessed and fortunate to have been healed in this place, and I look forward to sharing the story of his time here as long as I am able.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/d4/25d4fb8e-7fea-4f49-9b81-f9d50ee6cbc1/content/images/2026/09/IMG_20260901_082759-2.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/d4/25d4fb8e-7fea-4f49-9b81-f9d50ee6cbc1/content/images/2026/09/PXL_20260831_185413531.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/d4/25d4fb8e-7fea-4f49-9b81-f9d50ee6cbc1/content/images/2026/09/PXL_20260907_170804202.jpg)