The
Smell of Rain
Contributed - by Cheryl Poidevin
PoidevinC@aol.com
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 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 ball park 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. |