When the elevator door opened the other morning,
this nurse was standing in the hospital corridor and in a single
movement she reached -,out and yanked me off the lift. I wasn't
even supposed to be there because I had been upstairs visiting
an old golfer with a new hip but I have known her a hundred years
and on the darkest day she manages to wear the brightest of faces.
"Come
with me," she ordered.
"Where?"
I wanted to know.
"To
meet some kids," she said, as she walked briskly down the
hallway. "Put them in the paper so all these fools out there
who think they're having a bad day when their car doesn't start
or something will feel like dopes."
We
went into a room with a splendid view of the city. There, in a
chair set beside a bed, a 9- year-old boy named Thomas was pasting
a Ken Griffey Jr. sticker in a souvenir book.
He weighed maybe
40 pounds and wore a Seattle Mariners baseball cap on his bald
head. IV tubes ran from a bottle hanging on an aluminum rack into
the boy's right arm. His face was hollow from cancer treatments
and his prognosis is far from promising but his eyes glistened
with excitement as he talked about his favorite sport.
"I saw him
play last summer," Thomas said, meaning Junior Griffey. "He
was awesome. My Dad took me to Fenway Park. I had never been there
before. Maybe next year if they play again I can go back. My Dad
says we will anyway."
A
few doors down, Kathleen who is 8 and battered by bad blood cells
was watching a cartoon on TV. She was a tiny girl made big by
her bravery.
"I
can' t go home for Thanksgiving," Kathleen said, "but
I'm going to try and go home for Christmas. Everybody's real nice
here but I told my mom I'd sleep in my own bed for Christmas.
That's what I want to do.”
Too
much of the world is filled with grief. And if it's not heartache
that surrounds us, it is often heartlessness or the shortsighted
who offend us with selfishness or greed.
In
so many cases, we are led by the dumb who are deaf to common sense
and blind to what is truly important. Our politics have become
one long, seemingly final, fraudulent act within a theater of
the absurd as people who appear never to have been inside a church
of any denomination are consumed now by school prayer when, in
truth, the only thing they truly worship are election results
and campaign contributions.
Then,
there are those among us who can cause the spirit to soar simply
by listening and looking at them: The very young, cursed by grievous
illness, the nurses who care for them, the doctors who treat them
and the, parents who love them with a devotion that can not be
defined.
Yesterday,
one of these noble young people finally made it home to Haverhill.
Her name is Dottie Lessard. She is 27 years old and across all
those years She lived with the definite calendar imposed by cystic
fibrosis, until October 27 when she received a double-lung transplant
in a 12-hour operation at Massachusetts General Hospital.
My
doctor called me at four in the morning and told me they had a
donor," Dottie Lessard was saying. "I had been waiting
for two years and seven months. That's how long I was on the organ
donor list. I went right into the hospital. I wasn't scared at
all. I was happy."
Twice during the
operation, Dottie Lessard's heart failed. Twice, doctors brought
her back. And today - Thanksgiving morning - her feelings are
hard to match.
.
"This is
the first time in my life I can really breathe," she was
saying. "It feels so weird to breath, to have lungs to do
that. It's like a new life.
"I
can take a deep breath. I'm learning how to cough. I'm learning
how to use my lungs. But how do you say thank you to the doctors
who saved your life and how do you say thank you to the person
who donated their lungs to me so I could live?"
Dottie Lessard
was a friend of my little pal Joey O'Donnell who was claimed by
cystic fibrosis eight years ago yesterday at the age of 12. After
her operation, she drifted in and out of consciousness during
a dicey period in Intensive Care.
Joey
was like my little brother," she pointed out. "And it
was a weird feeling, hard to explain, but when I was in the ICU,
he was there with me. I know he was there. I saw him. I think
I was dying and he pushed me back."
"
I was talking to him and I know now he's OK, that he's in a really
good, place," Dottie Lessard said. "He was there for
me and he helped me live. Now I'm home for Thanksgiving and I
know what it means to be grateful."