This is kinda long and you may have seen it, but I thought it was(is) great!!
HEAVEN SCENT
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 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 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. |
