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, and 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 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 under-developed 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 ultraviolet 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,
what so ever, of any mental or physical impairment. 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
ballpark 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.
- Author Unknown -
Copyright (c) by Rusti since 2002
All Rights Reserved
Please sign my Guestbook before your leave.
I'd love to know that you stopped by.
Don't look for inspiration . BE the inspiration!