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 they 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 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, 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 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~
