Once Upon a Wish (9 page)

Two days earlier, Sharon had returned from a missionary trip in the Dominican Republic to Florida, where her mother lived. Katelyn had been staying with her grandmother for the past week and had complained of an aching back since before she arrived.

“Don’t be picking her up, twirling her around when you see her,” Sharon had warned her mother, Veda, before dropping Katelyn off. “She pulled a muscle in her back lifting a heavy two-year-old little boy the other day.”

“Darlin’, you need to be careful while I’m gone,” she told Katelyn when they arrived at her mother’s house. “You need to let that muscle heal.”

During the week she was there, Veda took Katelyn twice to see Dr. Gary Soud, her pediatrician from the time she was born until a year before when she and her family moved from Florida to Tennessee. After ruling out a sore muscle, Katelyn’s doctor tried antibiotics for kidney or bladder infections, but by the time Sharon returned from the Dominican Republic, Katelyn was crawling on her hands and knees.

The night Sharon arrived, Katelyn was asleep in the spare bedroom of Veda’s house, and Sharon curled up beside her.

“I’m here, sweetie,” she whispered.

Katelyn, lost in a dream, whispered, “No, you’re not. You’re not here.” She knew her mother was out of the country.

“Yes, I am, baby. Mom’s right here,” Sharon said.

In the darkness of the room, Katelyn reached out her hand to Sharon’s arm and caressed it gently, hopefully, letting her fingers drape over her mother’s, grabbing at the shape of her arm, its texture and warmth.

“You are here!” she nearly yelled, sitting up straight, holding her mother tight.

   4   

When Sharon took Katelyn to see Dr. Soud the next day, Katelyn could not stand up straight and could hardly walk. He verified Sharon’s concern that there was more going on than some kind of infection—possibly a pinched nerve or an extended disc from lifting the heavy child. He ordered an MRI of her lower back for the following day.

The standard twenty-minute MRI took an hour and a half, with the machine scanning much higher than Katelyn’s lower back, crawling up her spine to the tip of her head.

“Lord, hold me up and get me through whatever we have to face,” Sharon whispered toward the sky as she leaned against the wall, watching doctors come and go from the room where her daughter was stuck in a machine that would soon reveal their future. She knew something was very, very wrong.

When Dr. Soud got the results that afternoon, he called Sharon on the phone.

“I can’t get away from the office, so I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, Sharon,” he said. “I’d be there with you if I could.”

She knew this was serious. Dr. Soud had never diagnosed Katelyn with anything more than a cold, had never treated her with a single antibiotic until the week before when he thought her symptoms indicated a bladder or kidney infection. She had always been the picture of health.

“Katelyn has cancer,” he said.

Sharon needed answers.

Immediately.

She could remain calm in every storm as long as she knew exactly what was going on—as long as there was a plan. Dr. Soud’s brief hesitation silently told Sharon she’d better pay attention.

He’s fixin’ to tell me something I need to hear
, Sharon thought.

“We aren’t sure what kind of cancer we’re dealing with yet,” Dr. Soud continued. “We need to admit her to Wolfson Children’s Hospital for blood draws and scans to see how her organs are doing.”

That was the plan. There was a next step.

Clarity.

Direction.

Any tears that might have threatened to fall in the midst of the word
cancer
hid behind the walls of Sharon’s strength, her confidence as a mother who knew that God would prepare her for His will, no matter what it was. To the center of her being, the core of everything she believed, she knew that if His will was to take Katelyn from them, she would know.

And she did.

Katelyn isn’t going anywhere
, Sharon thought.

They got her admitted, and later that evening, Dr. Soud made a visit to his little patient, a girl he had known and taken care of for the past twelve years. He sat down beside her on her hospital bed and explained.

“I’m not sure what you have, but I’m confident we’ll be able to figure it out and we’ll get you well,” he said gently. “We’ll be running some tests, and right now we’re just trying to figure everything out, so you have to be patient with us, okay?”

Katelyn smiled with half her heart. The other half pounded with fear. She knew that the mass they had found on her spine appeared cancerous, and, like in the minds of most twelve-year-olds, cancer meant death.

The night Ray arrived at the hospital after chasing down Crystal’s bus, Katelyn was still awake. She had waited for him, just as she had done from the time she was a little girl. It was a rule in their house that Ray was always the last to tuck her in, and those
moments before bedtime were meant for snuggling and talking about everything and nothing. He knew she would be awake, waiting, ready to talk.

Before he opened the door to her room, Sharon’s words echoed in his mind as if they were his own.

You can’t be crying,
she had said
. You will scare her to death.

So he wiped his tears once again and walked into Katelyn’s room, where she lay beneath a tree of IVs dripping relief into her veins to keep the pain in her back at bay. As he approached her bed, his mother’s voice joined his wife’s.

Pull up your bootstraps, and pull ‘em up tight.

It was the advice his mother had always given in hard times.

It was time to be strong.

“I knew you’d be up,” Ray said nonchalantly with a smile before sitting down beside Katelyn and taking her hand. She looked every bit as healthy as she had a few days before, when he had tucked her into her own bed at home.

“Don’t worry about this,” he said to his daughter, hoping to give her the confidence he knew she and Crystal had always depended on. “Whatever we’re dealing with, everything will be fine.”

Katelyn nodded gently. He kissed her goodnight and stepped into the hallway, where he found Sharon and wrapped her in his arms.

“We’re gonna get through this together,” he whispered in her ear.

They had witnessed the ending of a marriage between two of their closest friends after the loss of their daughter, and that was not going to happen to them.

“We are going to do this together, talk about it together, feel it together,” Sharon said, her head buried in Ray’s shoulder, and all he could do was nod. They needed each other more now than ever.

The next day, they knew exactly what they were dealing with.

   5   

“Katelyn has leukemia,” said Dr. Michael Joyce, an oncologist from Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville, where Dr. Soud had referred Katelyn and her family.

“She has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, or ALL, one of the most curable types of cancer,” he said, giving them some hope. “We can treat her here, but I think you should get her to St. Jude in Memphis. They are known for their work with cancer and they are up-to-date on all the latest and greatest treatments. We consult with St. Jude and we follow their protocol. It’s an option for you, but the decision is yours.”

They had called Memphis “home” for the past year, so the decision was easy. The next day, they were on a plane and admitted to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where they learned Katelyn’s protocol—two weeks of intense chemotherapy to get the cancer into remission and then two-and-a-half years of daily, weekly, and monthly drugs to keep it there. After blood work and DNA testing to see how well Katelyn would respond to treatment, they learned that her cure rate was 98 percent.

This is gonna be a breeze,
Sharon thought.

There was a clear-cut plan, a fourteen-drug protocol, a strict regimen with precise doses, deadlines, direction, and a predicted, successful outcome. They just needed to take one step at a time, and those steps would lead them to the beginning of a cancer-free road.

But less than two weeks after being admitted, Katelyn developed a high fever and doctors discovered through cultures and blood work that she had bacteria in her blood and bowels, so they started her on antibiotics.

“Mom, my back hurts really bad,” Katelyn complained one
night, so Sharon went into the bathroom of her hospital room and filled the jetted Jacuzzi tub to the brim.

“Hop in,” Sharon said, and Katelyn sank into the water’s warm embrace. She closed her eyes and let her head rest gently on the cool porcelain—her body weightless, her mind free of cancer.

From the time Katelyn was six years old, she had spent nearly every single day of her life in a pool, swimming with her teammates, preparing for meets. The rise and fall of the breast stroke, the feeling of her body’s movement through water, its calming sensation, were all as natural as breathing, and, to her, just as important.

She lay in that tub as still as the water until her goose-bumped skin was as shriveled as a prune. Sharon smiled. She remembered the time Katelyn’s coach blew the whistle during a swim practice in the middle of winter and shouted, “Hit the showers!”

The other kids had climbed from the pool, but Katelyn continued down its length, lap after lap, lips quivering, breath lost, determined as ever.

“Time to get out,” Sharon said, helping her daughter from the tub and back into the hospital bed, her body as relaxed and free as the tide.

The next morning, Katelyn woke up with a splitting headache, worse than she had ever felt in her life.

“I can’t stand it,” she said with her hand pressed to her forehead, and Sharon filled the tub again. Katelyn climbed inside, and as she had the night before, she let her body sink to the bottom, become one with the water as her head rested peacefully and her eyes closed. Gentle water lapped against her body almost invisibly with every drip from the faucet. Sharon watched as water did its magic on Katelyn, soothing her from the inside out, before it turned on her and crashed violently, suddenly, against her.

Katelyn’s body jolted and stiffened, thrashed the water’s calm, sending tiny tidal waves onto the hospital floor.