from the hearts of babes...

People often ask me where I get my “courage” to keep going sometimes.  I really don’t consider what I have as courage but I will give you a few examples of who has inspired me over the years.

I have worked a lot with damaged children in my lifetime. Probably because I was one, I am drawn to them.  I’m just going to talk about the ones whose scars you can SEE today, though. At the pediatric hospital I worked back east, we had all kinds of tragedies.  I had a young toddler whose mother put her in a bathtub of scalding water and gave her 3^rd degree burns on her feet, rear end and hands…well, anything that touched when you sit in the tub. Her name was Jazzie and she was the most beautiful little girl and every time I’d get all her little bandages all wrapped on her, I’d turn my head to do something else,  2 minutes later, she’d be all arms and legs in the air in her crib, giggling to beat the band, waving those STERILE bandages around like the fourth of July.  She was always smiling, despite the pain. She always had those raw, blistered hands reached out to me in love. When I would arrive on the unit in the mornings, all the toddlers would be in highchairs, lined up along the nurses station wall, about 10 of them, waiting for us nurses to feed them and here’d be Jazzie…arms flailing, chattering happily, so happy to see me! I always wonder what happened to her. She did not go back to that home, tho.

And then there’s Dustin, my hero. I met him when he was 17. He’d been at the Hospital since he was 6. He’d been hit by a hit-n-run driver at that age and suffered c-spine injuries that left him paralyzed, unable to breathe without a ventilator, no feeling below his neck.  His family had stopped visiting years before I got there. When I met him, Johns Hopkins had already rigged him up with a device so that he could control his wheelchair with a blow tube using his mouth. They had also done the same with a computer for him. Now, this was back before the internet was as fancy as it is now, back when all there were was bulletin boards to communicate with other people. Well, Dustin was running one himself and talking to people all over the world. He painstakingly would blow toward each key on the keyboard. No one he spoke with at first knew that he was disabled until he chose to let them into his world. He wanted to be an archaeologist and talked Hopkins into bringing him in some rocks and they even fashioned him a tool that he could work with his mouth. So he could tease out fossils from the rock.  He never wavered in his quest for independence.  He had the greatest sense of humor, too. He was on this nasty medication that caused him to have terrible, smelly diarrhea and one day I was in with him, wiping it up, him on his side and he moves his head back towards me. “So, Lisa..ya want some chips with that dip?”  Anytime I’m having a bad day, I think of Dustin. I bet he’s doing awesome.  Last I heard, he had a 24 hr nurse and was living independently and going to Hopkins, pursuing his degree.

We also had a lot of kids that came through for Ilizarov apparatus procedures.  This is used for kids that are born with one leg shorter than the other and for “dwarfism”.  They break the leg in several places and put on a halo and strategically place long screws into the bone of the femur and tibia and fibula.  Every 4 hours, it was my job to turn the screws so that it stretched the bone about 1/16 of an inch.  We do this for months at a time until the bone lengthens to it’s proper spot. It’s excrutiating to the child and we only do one leg at a time. The worst part is that you have to clean around each of the screws, tamping around the skin, to keep it from glomming onto the screw.  Such brave little boys and girls. I wiped away a lot of tears in those days and I got a lot of hugs. I was always so happy to see them come running down the halls with their straight normal legs, though. 

Everyone always tells me they could never work pediatrics. That’s it’s just too sad. You have no idea what you are missing. I had one little girl who was dying of cancer.  She kept telling me that all she really wanted was to let her mother know that it was okay, that she was going to be with the Lord. But, she was worried about leaving her Mommy alone.  So, I went to her mother and told her that her 6 yr old wanted a few minutes alone with her, that she had some beautiful things to say to “just her”.  Well, the woman couldn’t handle it and never stepped foot into that room without other people with her until the child died. Every evening, after everyone but the nurses were gone, the little girl and I would talk about it.  I wasn’t sure what to say to her about her Mother’s inability to face her alone.  But, the night she did die, she grabbed my hand and said  “Nurse Lisa….tell Mommy  that I’m sorry I have to leave her, I tried to be brave and hang on, but I just can’t do it anymore. God keeps whispering it’s time to go. I’m not scared, I just don’t want Mommy to cry anymore.” And with that, she pressed a little painted rock into my hand that she’d made with the P/T  ladies that she’d written “I’m right here” on and asked me to give it to her mom. A few minutes later, the monitors started their knell…..Mom never did come back, except to get her meager few belongings from the room. When I tried to give her the rock, she refused. I still have it.

These are just a couple of my little inspirations. I have several collages on my hall wall with pictures of these children I worked with…I don’t really need the photos, I always carry them in my heart.

Some people come into our lives and go quickly. Some people move our souls to dance. They awaken us to new understanding, with the passing whisper of their wisdom. Some people make the sky more beautiful to gaze upon. They stay in our lives for a while, leave footprints in our heart, and we are never the same." ~ Flavia Weed