"HEAVEN'S 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 March 10,
1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant,
to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the couples 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 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 so 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 doctor's
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 doctor's 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 chatting
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.
ARTICLE COURTESY OF TRUTH OR FICTION.COM ARTIST UNKNOWN
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