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 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% 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 that she felt so bad for him because he was doing
everything and trying to include her in what was going on, but she just
wouldn't listen, she 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 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, whatsoever, 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 nonstop 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)
(artist unknown)
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