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| "The Lamp" by Drew John Tankersley |
Happy sez- The tale I am about to tell is one that needs to be
told, one that I have told in the past and one that needs to be told
over and over again. This story is absolutely true and is about a little
boy or an angel - you be the judge
In the 1950s in Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles there was a whole
floor, the fourth floor devoted to children that were dying of heart
trouble. In those days doctors did not have the knowledge, procedures
and medicines of today - they just were not invented yet, the iron lung
(there was a room full of them just down the hall we were never allowed
in) along with some of the first antibiotics and the fluoroscope were
state of the art technology then. For most of us, the lucky ones, there
was only one hope - an experimental operation that could give us a
chance at life and the doctors a chance to learn something that might
help someone else. Open heart surgery and the heart lung machine was
just being developed, and was often used in these experimental surgeries
and with each use something new was learned. In those days they
operated on one child a day, Monday through Friday, and by Friday
night, oftentimes all five children were dead. We, the children
understood this and for the most part accepted this the best we could.
You grow up rather fast in many ways and you learn several things - you
learn to fight, you learn to have faith, faith in your parents, faith in
your doctors but most of all you have faith in God.
It was fall 1958 when I was in this time for a rather extended period of
time. In those days there were four beds to a room and as kids easily
do you soon became friends with your roommates, at least the ones that
were well enough. (You can always tell the really sick kids, they don't
cry, they mostly lay staring or are unconscious). I was almost nine
and there was a kid in one of the other beds that I immediately struck
up a friendship with. He was a lively little boy of about six or so
with dark hair and a ready grin and easy laugh. Even though he was dying
he loved to pull jokes on the nurses, or sneak out of bed and go for
wheelchair rides or go into other rooms ( a BIG no-no) and talk to the
kids and sing Yankee Doodle to them, a song that he just loved. It was
obvious how much he loved everyone and was he was always concerned with
them, not
just how they were feeling physically but how they were
inside, in their spirit and heart. He was always going to the the one
that was having heart surgery that next day and somehow he had a way of
calming a soul. I remember a little dark haired little girl of about
eight in the next ward that was having surgery the next morning, her
parents were gone and she was terrified. He went to her (I know the
nurses
had to know he was there out of not just his bed but his
room) and spent most of the night in there singing Yankee Doodle to her,
a song he was constantly singing, sometimes annoyingly so, until she
finally was graced with some calmness and got a little sleep. She died
the next morning during surgery.
It is those after hours that can get to you in a children's hospital,
the time after visiting hours when your parents are gone, when the hum
of hospital life has slowed down and the lights are dimmed in the wards
with only the light from florescent tubes in the hallways reflecting off
the pale yellow walls. It can be lonely and terrifying but I never
heard him complain or talk about himself, his only focus was others. I
got to go home for a couple of months just before Christmas, and I never
saw him again but my mother later told me his story, a short story, a
story he never got a chance to live out but a story that was filled with
God and Grace.
He was dropped off at the hospital by his parents, who lived two miles
from the hospital, sometime in June or July. They never came to see him
or contacted him in any way, they left him to die. He died right after
Christmas.
As one of the lucky ones that survived, you soon get caught up in the
whirlwind of life, of living that life you were graced with. As the
decades go by and I think back and I realize that even though his name
is lost, the calmness of spirit that he gave you, the lessons by example
on how life should be lived to the ready smile and laugh, but most of
all that voice singing Yankee Doodle and I know my life was blessed by
an angel!
