Author Unknown
A
cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the doctor walked
into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing.
Still
groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand as they braced themselves
for the latest news. That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had
forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency cesarean to
deliver the couple's new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing. At 12 inches long
and weighing only one pound and nine ounces, they already knew she was
perilously premature. Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs.
"I don't think she's going to make it," he said, as kindly as he
could. "There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the
night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could
be a very cruel one."
Numb
with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating
problems Danae would likely face if she survived. She would never
walk; she would never talk; she would probably be blind; she would certainly be
prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental
retardation; and on and on.
"No!
No!" was all Diana could say. She and David with their 5-year-old son
Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a
family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping
away. Through the dark hours of morning as Danae held onto life by the
thinnest thread, Diana slipped in and out of drugged sleep, growing more and
more determined that their tiny daughter would live and live to be a healthy,
happy young girl.
But
David, fully awake and listening to additional dire details of their daughter's
chances of ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew he must
confront his wife with the inevitable.
"David
walked in and said that we needed to talk about making funeral
arrangements," Diana remembers, "I felt so bad for him because he was
doing everything, trying to include me in what was going on, but I just wouldn't
listen, I couldn't listen. I said, 'No, that is not going to happen, no
way! I don't care what the doctors say. Danae is not going to die!
One day she will be just fine, and she will be coming home with us!'"
As
if willed to live by Diana's determination, Danae clung to life hour after hour,
with the help of every medical machine and marvel her miniature body could
endure but as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana.
Because
Danae's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially "raw", the
lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort -- so they couldn't even
cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their
love. All they could do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultra-violet
light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay
close to their precious little girl.
There
was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks
went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength
there. At last, when Danae turned two months old, her parents were able to
hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later
though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of
surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero.
Danae went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.
Today,
five years later, Danae is a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray
eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She shows no signs, whatsoever, of
any mental or physical impairments. Simply, she is everything a little
girl can be and more but that happy ending is far from the end of her story.
One
blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae
was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ball park where her
brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing. As always, Danae was
chattering non-stop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when
she suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked,
"Do you smell that?"
Smelling
the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes,
it smells like rain." Danae closed her eyes and again asked, "Do
you smell that?" Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think
we're about to get wet, it smells like rain."
Still
caught in the moment, Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her
small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells
like God when you lay your head on His chest."
Tears
blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily hopped down to play with the other
children. Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana
and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their
hearts, all along. During those long days and nights of her first two
months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her,
God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers
so well.