Hope & Miracles

by Amy Newmark

  Now it was time to give back, and Mica was clearly in need. She had spent the past eleven years bored, frustrated, lonely, angry, and frightened, alone on the end of a chain. Her potential went utterly unappreciated, the neglect all the more piercing due to her incredible athletic ability and intelligence. After eleven years, her family moved from their home and disposed of Mica as if she were just so much trash. From that first glance at her photo, there was no talking sense to me. I would make sure she was safe and comfortable, no matter what. A few e-mails and a transport miracle later, Mica arrived at my home.

  Mica had a tough time adjusting to her new home. She refused to be petted, walking away from all affection. She didn’t know any commands, pulled dreadfully when on the leash, and sought distance and solitude at home. She was not aggressive at all—just stiff and aloof, sad and uncomfortable. She missed her family and all that was familiar, as awful as it was. We loved her from the distance she maintained and hoped her heart would heal enough to let us in.

  After being with us for a few weeks, I decided to take her into the Catskill Forest for a short hike. She had learned her name and came when I called her, so I weighed the risk against the potential joy hiking might bring her. After a half a mile or so on the trail I took off the leash. She pranced away and sniffed the ground. Then she raced, paws flying, leaping over fallen logs, wagging and barking, along the next three miles of trail. At the lookout, she posed upon a rock and surveyed the layers of hills dropping away towards New Jersey and beyond. And everything changed.

  Mica’s miracle unfolded over many more hikes. She tasted freedom and she loved it. Hiking became a way of connecting with me, as she came to trust that I would give her the freedom she valued above all else. She’d been with us just over six months and had settled in nicely when a run-in with a porcupine resulted in a vet visit. The vet and I examined every centimeter of her body with a fine-toothed comb, seeking any stray quills. And that was when we found it: a small ugly bump on her belly.

  The bump grew quickly and surgery was scheduled. When I took Mica in for her post-op checkup, the vet sat me down and spoke in that horribly quiet tone reserved for the worst of news. Grade 3 mast cell sarcoma, very aggressive subtype, no clear margins, and in his brutally honest opinion—“six months at the most.” We discussed all the options and he shook his head slowly, petting Mica’s soft ears. “Just take her home and make her happy,” he said. “Anything else will ruin what little time she has left. Just make her happy.”

  In the face of such heartbreaking news, I did what any reasonable person would do. I adopted her. No more foster status, I felt that for whatever time she had left she deserved to die with my last name, a full member of this family.

  And then I took Mica hiking. We committed to completing the Catskill 35 — the thirty-five highest mountains in the Catskill region. If Mica could live long enough to hike them all—and then repeat four of them again in the winter—she could earn a certificate and patch for doing so. Hiking the 35 gave me a goal that structured our hikes. It gave me something to focus on besides her cancer. It gave me hope. And it gave her profound joy to be loose and running free up and down the mountains of the mighty and ancient Catskills.

  We took it mountain by mountain, hike by hike. I kept a tally sheet next to the computer, filling in the dates as I uploaded photos. Doing anything thirty-five times takes time, and I fussed and worried over Mica as we hiked the list. Her pack mates came along to lend a paw. At first I thought we’d never make it to the winter hikes. Predicted to survive six months at most, we hiked often, logging miles and mountains in good order. And miraculously, Mica did not sicken. She did not show any signs of illness or discomfort at all. In fact she looked vibrantly well. It would have been amazing for any senior dog to hike and climb at this level of intensity, but Mica bravely trotted up those mountains at age twelve with terminal cancer, thirty-nine times. I got choked up at least once on every hike, burying my face in her neck and tearfully telling her what an amazing girl she was.

  We hiked with the forest ranger and we hiked with my human friends, but mostly we hiked alone, just Mica and her canine sisters and me, up and down mountain after mountain. We gained hope. We got more and more excited as the number of remaining climbs shrank. And then the day was upon us: more than one year after her surgery, we were making that final climb. From a hopeless and pitiful creature on the end of a chain to barking her thirty-nine barks upon the summit of Blackhead Mountain, Mica’s spirit has shown me just what a miracle really is.

  It’s been six months since Mica finished. Her certificate hangs above my desk, testimony to her courage and strength. We still hike regularly, working on a new list now. At her last vet visit, we got more bad news: the shadow we saw on the X-ray is lung cancer. Not a problem. Mica and I know what to do. “The mountains are calling and we must go.”

  ~Halia Grace

  The Amazing Foul Ball

  The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love.

  ~Bryant Gumbel

  Every three weeks for two and a half months, we drove the two hours to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. After morning tests, Ross’s doctor or an intern would puncture his spine, withdraw fluid to be tested, and inject him with two powerful medications. Twelve hours of intravenous chemotherapy followed.

  The resulting nausea made Ross feel even worse, but this is what we had to do to defeat the cancer in his lymph gland.

  To distract us from our anxiety about our third visit, I bought the best box seats available for the San Francisco Giants/Montreal Expos baseball game. Ross, a seven-year-old baseball fanatic, slept in the back seat as my wife and I drove from Sacramento through sporadic drizzle.

  In the fifth inning, I left to take a picture of Will Clark from behind the backstop. He was on deck when Willie McGee hit a hard, looping foul near our seats. “No way,” I thought, and continued looking toward home plate. McGee doubled on the next pitch and then Expos’ pitcher Dennis Martinez intentionally walked Clark.

  As I returned to our seats I sensed something had happened. My first thought was that Ross or Stacey had been hurt, but people were smiling at me. Ross stood there grinning, proudly holding the hardball high above his balding head. The ball had glanced off a man at the end of our row, tipped his son’s glove, and landed in Ross’s mitt.

  If I had been sitting next to him, he would not have made the catch. My reflexive reaction would have been to protect my wife and son or at least help Ross catch it.

  People kept coming up and congratulating him on his great catch. They all wanted to touch the ball, saying they had been to hundreds of games and never caught a foul ball. A head usher also came over and examined the ball with an unknown, but official, purpose.

  The rain never came, the Giants won an exciting game, and we appreciated a quick exit from the parking lot. During the half-hour drive to our hotel, the ball seemed to glow and hum in the back seat.

  The next day, instead of being filled with his normal dread, Ross was excited. He showed the ball to Rolo, our cheerful hospital aide, who had chauffeured us between the intimidating MRI machine, the ultrasound and the bone scan on our frightening first visit.

  Ross discussed the catch with his friend Daniel as they played Nintendo while hooked up to their IVs. He proudly displayed it to the supportive hospital staff members and impressed Dr. Link and Dr. Mogul when they came by on their rounds. Later in the day, Stacey used the hardball to rub his sore back near the injection area.

  His recovery was quicker than after previous treatments. Perhaps it was the new combination of anti-nausea drugs, but I think part of the credit went to the foul ball. He returned to his second-grade class without missing a day of school. Though most of his hair had fallen out over the weekend, he didn’t care; he had a baseball to show off.

  After Ross’s chemotherapy ended, his weight and energy gradually returned. Soon he was back playing second base on his Little League team as the lump on his neck melted
away. His pediatric oncologists said that he should lead a normal life.

  Ross is thirty-one now and he’s in excellent health.

  ~Bob Dreizler

  Miracle Times Three

  This isn’t just “another day, another dollar.” It’s more like “another day, another miracle.”

  ~Victoria Moran

  My grandmother was so sick that January. It had been a particularly hard winter already, and my mom and I had just brought Gram to the emergency room. She’d had several bouts of bronchitis in recent months, and this latest round had escalated into pneumonia. When the ER doctor admitted her, I stayed with Gram at the hospital. I hated the idea of losing her, yet I feared that it might be her time.

  Other people thought so too. She’d lived a long, happy life, everyone said—a platitude I didn’t want to hear. True, Gram was ninety-three years old, but I loved her with all my heart. She had suffered with Alzheimer’s for nearly a decade, and even though, over time, the disease had taken her little by little, she’d never come to a point where she didn’t know me — until that night. Her eyes looked wild and glassy; she babbled words that didn’t make sense. At one point, she reached out and smacked my face, something my cherished Gram would never do. As she struggled to breathe in her hospital bed, I tried to conceal my pain. Letting go a sob, I called a nurse to help, then left Gram’s room and wept in the hallway. The shock of it all cut deep.

  Moments later, a gentle priest was by my side. “It’s okay to cry,” he said. “That’s why God made tears.”

  As morning dawned, tears indeed seemed the theme of things.

  Gram’s doctor came in and kissed her cheek. “Goodbye, Marie,” she said, eyes watery. “You’ve been a good patient.”

  The charge nurse was similarly emotional. “Her kidneys are shutting down, bless her heart. It won’t be long now. Godspeed, Marie.”

  By noon, my mom and dad, as well as my aunt, uncle, and cousin had joined me in our vigil. Gram had lapsed into semi-consciousness sometime in the middle of the night. She didn’t seem to see us, just stared into the distance, mumbling incoherently. Late in the day, Dad called Ellen, a hospice chaplain we’d met when my grandfather fell ill. Now a family friend, Ellen hurried over to Gram, who continued gazing up, as if seeing someone there. Her words still didn’t make sense, and all we could decipher was an occasional “yes” or “I will.”

  Ellen explained that Gram was actually present in both worlds; bodily, she was still here with us, but spiritually she was straddling a chasm. In her tender manner, Ellen coaxed Gram to “Take the Lord’s hand. It’s okay to cross over, Marie.”

  I prepared myself right then to accept the inevitable, but Gram hung on through the night. By the next morning, however, it was clear that something truly amazing had occurred. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Far from “crossing over,” Gram now sat up in bed, fully coherent. She patted a spot beside her, and, in shock, I sat down. Then, in a serene voice, she called me by a name I loved but hadn’t heard in a very long time: not “Theres-A,” my formal given name, but “Trees-IE,” her silly nickname for me.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  As the morning advanced, Gram’s miraculous recovery astounded everyone. Eventually, she was well enough to leave the hospital, and after a couple of days, while still frail, she settled into a new routine at a skilled nursing facility. I went home to St. Louis, four hours away, hating to go, but knowing I had to get back to my family. The doctor had warned that Gram could leave us at any time, and for weeks after arriving home I worried.

  The dreaded phone call came on an unseasonably cold day in May, and it unfolded in a way I never would have expected. I picked up the receiver to hear Mom’s tortured voice. “I have to tell you,” she choked out. “I need to say . . . your dad has died.”

  At first, I couldn’t process her words. “What?” I gasped.

  Mom tried to speak again, but then a social worker took over the phone. I listened in disbelief. All along, I’d expected news of Gram, so how could this be about Dad? My mind caught on the memory of him at the hospital, so distraught over Gram’s situation, yet knowing just what to do. Solid as a rock, my father. How could he be gone? I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.

  Somehow, my husband, Jeff, and I made the four-hour drive to our hometown in record time. We went straight to Mom’s house, and while Jeff fetched take-out dinner that none of us ate, I sat with Mom at the kitchen table, watching the setting sun. Dad had gone out to garden early that morning, suffered a massive heart attack, and died right there in his back yard. I stared out at the fledgling tomato plants he’d never get to tend. It all seemed unreal. How could this be?

  The next day, Jeff and I took on the very hard task of telling Gram the news—and that’s when a second astonishing event transpired. Still in the throes of Alzheimer’s, Gram had continued to fade away, with fewer moments of lucidity, but as the words about Dad tumbled out, she nodded. “I know,” was all she said, quite articulately. “I came back to help, Treesie. Your mom is going to need me, and I’m supposed to be here.”

  My mouth fell open in surprise.

  Suddenly, it all made miraculous sense.

  And two years later, on the night after my beloved grandmother finally did pass, a third little astonishing thing occurred. Staying once more at Mom’s, I was awakened from sleep by a wispy touch on my shoulder. Call it a trick of light, call it a shadow, but I could see Gram’s presence.

  She remained there for the merest of moments, then seemed to float out into the living room, where she hovered beside Dad’s chair, and I swear I heard her say, “I helped.”

  I believe Gram knew full well on her hospital deathbed that Dad was going to die. I believe that, far from the nonsensical words we’d all thought she’d uttered, she was actually conversing with someone on the other side, learning about her one final task. I believe she accepted that task willingly, returning to us with a renewed spiritual purpose. She and Mom had always been close, and her presence and required care would give Mom a renewed purpose too.

  I’ve come to think of these events surrounding Gram’s death as her trinity of miracles, her Miracle Times Three. They’ve strengthened my faith and helped me to see that our deceased loved ones don’t ever really leave us at all. No, far from gone, they become celestial collaborators with God, our own personal connections in Heaven. They journey from this world on into the next, and sometimes, if we’re blessed, they journey back again, to give us hope, to give us counsel, and to give us love.

  ~Theresa Sanders

  Tears of Joy

  Faith is like radar that sees through the fog.

  ~Corrie ten Boom

  When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. My hair was thinning, I had dark circles under my eyes, I was chronically fatigued, and everything hurt from my nose to my toes. I had constant painful and limited blurry vision. I was losing my sense of taste and smell, my voice was hoarse and raspy, my ears were constantly ringing, and I developed a dry cough. My mouth was constantly dry, and swallowing was difficult, I lost my appetite and I choked when I did eat. My mouth always hurt with throbbing ulcers on my gums and I was losing teeth. My diagnosis was an autoimmune disease called Sjögren’s syndrome.

  Each day my vision worsened and my pain increased. My eyes were so dry that the corneas split open. Those tiny ulcers made my eyes burn constantly and I feared going blind. I used as many as twenty prescription drops each day, but nothing worked. I wore moisture chamber goggles but they didn’t do much good and I looked utterly ridiculous in them. In fact, they reduced my peripheral vision so much that I couldn’t see people who stood beside me. I was constantly falling because I couldn’t see things right in front of me. I had to stop driving and I spent most days on the sofa unable to see anything. I desperately needed my body to produce tears, but the fact is that my lacrimal glands dried up and no longer worked.

  I traveled roughly 300 miles to Johns Hopkins because they have
a clinic especially for Sjögren’s patients. At the Wilmer Eye Institute, my sympathetic doctor worked with hands like a magician. But the news was discouraging: my eyes were as good as they were ever going to be. I made four trips a year to Johns Hopkins, where I received excellent care for my other Sjögren’s symptoms, but my eyes continued to deteriorate. My vision was still poor, my eyes hurt constantly, and I still couldn’t produce tears.

  To complicate matters, I was trying to write my second book with limited and blurry vision. I prayed to St. Lucy, the patron of eye disorders, and while my eyesight never improved and my eyes were still dry and painful, somehow each day I made progress with the book.

  When a group of parishioners from our church made plans to travel to Lourdes, France, the idea of asking for a miracle became appealing. In 1858, the Blessed Mother appeared to St. Bernadette in a grotto in Lourdes, where people were being miraculously cured after bathing in the spring water. “Why would Mary grant me a miracle?” I asked my husband Pat.

  “Why not give you a miracle? You deserve one! You are doing God’s work by writing religious books and prayers.”

  I thought about the truth in his words for a few minutes. “Can we afford to go to France?”

  Pat furrowed his brow. “We’ll find the money!” he said. “I’m calling Father Chuck to reserve two seats for us.” When he hung up the phone, he said, “We just got the last two seats!” Pat took my hands in his. “We’re going to France!” he said. “There’s an informational meeting scheduled next week. Father Chuck asked us to attend.”

  As Pat drove to the meeting, we noticed that puffy white clouds had formed a perfect white cross in the sky directly over the church. Maybe it was a sign.