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 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 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, what so ever, 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.
This is a real story.
