Once Upon a Wish (14 page)

As if they needed to hear more, she continued.

“I have no memory of 812 days. I missed my thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays. I had forty-three CAT scans, eighty-seven X-rays, and thirty-two MRIs. And $3 million of St. Jude’s money was spent on me. I plan to make a difference with my life. I also plan to personally raise back that $3 million for St. Jude so that, one day, every patient will be a miracle. None of my friends will have to die.”

In the past thirteen years, Katelyn, now twenty-six years old, has traveled roughly ten times a year for speaking engagements, organized twelve golf tournaments that, combined, have raised nearly
$180,000, and has been sponsored for 5K runs, earning between $5,000 and $10,000 for each.

To date, she has raised $200,000 for St. Jude.

“Your life becomes nothing but the hospital,” Katelyn has explained to crowds of potential Make-A-Wish donors. “While most parents are taking their kids to soccer or football practice, mine were taking me to physical therapy. Other kids were doing all these things while I was just trying to learn to live again.”

Money resulting from Katelyn’s speeches, in addition to the one-hundred dollars she collected by selling handmade beaded bracelets—each with a dolphin bead to represent her wish, a shooting star bead to symbolize Wish children, and a wishbone bead to signify wishes—eventually added up to $25,000, enough to grant five wishes.

She continues to be a voice for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the message she sends with each speech, the message that lives on with the memories of her trip, is the same:
My wish healed my spirit.

   14   

The moment Katelyn’s flame touched Sharon’s dark torch, something inside of her ignited. Shouts of her daughter’s name receded to hushed whispers surrounding her, as her black torch came to life with vibrant flames.

She did it.

Doctors had told Sharon and Ray countless times to call family, to make arrangements. They said Katelyn would never wake up. Never walk again. Never talk. Never eat or see or laugh or smile. Never, never, never …

But there Sharon was, with those same doctors watching through their tears on the sidelines as Katelyn reached her flame toward her
mother’s, and Sharon knew in that moment that absolutely anything was possible and nothing would ever be taken for granted again.

Piles of unfolded laundry, aggressive drivers, a dirty house, running late—these things were once the culprits of ruined days. But laundry can be folded tomorrow, as can cleaning a house; impatient drivers must need to get somewhere quickly; running late means you have some place to go and the ability to go there.

Every day that Katelyn wakes up and crows like a rooster, happily saying, “Good morning, Mom,” is another day Sharon has with her daughter—a day they would not have if they had listened to those doctors, a day that would not exist if they had lost their faith.

Katelyn had missed her seventh- and eighth-grade school years, and when she had returned to ninth, Sharon rested against her car and watched as Katelyn was wheeled through the high school campus, her future waiting. She had a future to pursue, a reason for defying all medical statistics, a reason for living. Surrounded by the sounds of noisy buses, screaming teenagers, the hustle and bustle of school, Sharon watched as Katelyn re-entered life.

It was the same feeling she got when she turned from her daughter, red fire leading the way, and jogged with the Olympic torch for the next five blocks down the streets of Memphis. Tears poured from her eyes, once again drenching the city, and a smile crawled across her face. There was so much to look forward to—so much to run toward—and Katelyn would be a part of that race, a part of that journey.

Their Wish trip had taught them to enjoy life, regardless of limitations, in spite of difficulties. It showed them how.

Their journey had made life’s small problems disappear, and that walk, that experience of carrying the torch—a dream that had once been Katelyn’s to carry an Olympic medal—was a reminder of how far they’d come and how far they could go.

   1   

S
HE JUMPS
, I jump,
T’Ann thought, peeking over the side of the swaying boat into the dark water below. It splashed gently against hundreds of shiny fins that sliced through the tepid water, circling her daughter, who was bobbing in the waves. Brittney had fearlessly stood beside the tour boat guide just a few moments before and plunged right in. The water around her crawled with shadowy movement, and T’Ann watched nervously as Brittney poked her goggles through the surface to get a closer look at the reef sharks surrounding her. T’Ann plugged her nose, scrunched her face, and jumped, reminding herself as she hit the water,
She jumps, I jump
.

Over the past eighteen months, those mirrored words began to define everything in T’Ann’s life. Brittney’s battle with cancer was her battle. The time she spent in remission, cancer-free, was T’Ann’s freedom. The tears Brittney cried were hers, too. They shared joys and fears, heartache and triumph. T’Ann had promised Brittney they would do everything together on Brittney’s Make-A-Wish trip, even if it meant swimming with sharks. The promises they made to each other were kept, and it was Brittney who had kept the most important promise of all.

“Brittney, it’s over,” Dr. Meltzer said quietly as he stood above her small, tired body. “Can you hear me?”

A thin sheet hugged her as the doctor’s voice poked through the
fog in her waking mind. Her cracked lips remained still beneath her pale cheeks as the sunlight crawled through the small window of her third-story hospital room, illuminating her dark brown, shoulder-length hair. Brittney knew before the surgery that the doctor would cut the hair she had worn past her shoulders since she was a little girl, so her mom, T’Ann, had taken her to one of those fancy salons to get a cute, short style she would enjoy after it was over.

Her hair clung to the back of her sticky neck that afternoon as the doctor’s voice and others reached for her. Their words sank and resurfaced as she fought to put them together. Whispers calling her name floated by while the steady beeps of a monitor grew louder and sharper, becoming real. Big, brown eyes that had been hiding beneath their lids for the past eleven hours began twitching as jumbled voices became one.

“Brittney, it’s time to wake up. Can you hear me?”

It was the voice of the man who had delivered the most painful news she had ever received in her twelve years of life, and though it was a familiar voice, she strained to remember the face to which it belonged. Her eyes stayed closed as one clear thought repeated in her mind:
You’re awake, keep your promise,
she demanded of herself.
Keep your promise, Brittney.

The doctor’s voice faded as her mental strength crawled into the deepest realm of her consciousness, clinging to a little voice that had turned her into the resilient, independent young girl she was. That voice begged her to gain the strength she knew she needed to keep the promise she had made to her mother. A powerful internal force pushed through the thickness of her mind, sending signals to the tips of her toes. Her feet pushed slowly through the tucked covers at the end of the bed and her toes, painted a loud shade of green, curled.

Dr. Meltzer’s eyes grew wide as he watched them bend back and forth slowly before becoming an unmistakable, intentional
wiggle. He was the one who had told Brittney only days before that the odds of her becoming paralyzed from the surgery were even greater than the odds of her dying. Now she was moving all of her toes, and he watched in awe in that quiet hospital room.

Staring at his little patient, Dr. Meltzer ran a hand through his pointy black hair and covered his gaping mouth with the other as a second miracle unfolded.

Brittney, with eyes still closed, slowly lifted both arms into the air, fists leading the way, and popped her white-tipped, manicured thumbs toward the ceiling, giving the most determined thumbs up the doctor had ever seen.

Dr. Meltzer finally left Brittney’s side and raced to the hospital waiting room where T’Ann sat with her family, including Brittney’s father, Charlie, and T’Ann’s boyfriend, Andy.

“She kept her promise,” Dr. Meltzer said, surprise and delight in his voice.

The eleven hours it took T’Ann and Charlie to hear those words were the longest hours of their lives. Filling the minutes and seconds with puzzles and nail biting, crying and pacing, it felt as though eleven years had passed.

   2   

Brittney’s promise was born from a nightmarish time that began one sunny Mother’s Day afternoon in 2001, when T’Ann discovered that her perfectly healthy twelve-year-old daughter had an eleven-inch tumor woven around her cervical spine.

Complaints of a sore neck and numb fingers had resulted in a few visits to Dr. Meltzer, a neurosurgeon at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, who confirmed his suspicion with an MRI and diagnosed Brittney with a tumor so rare it hadn’t been given a name.

Days inevitably passed after T’Ann and Brittney received the news, but time had stopped and the world no longer looked the same. The guarantee of Brittney’s growing up, going to college, getting married, and having children had been taken away. She was about to turn thirteen and complete the seventh grade, but there was no way to know if she would make it to the eighth. The last trip they had made to the desert to camp and ride dirt bikes might have been just that—her last. This was a time when T’Ann thought her daughter, who was stronger and more self-assured than T’Ann had ever been, might lose all hope and claim defeat before putting up a fight. But Brittney had decided that losing wasn’t an option.

“I’d like to get fake fingernails, Mom,” she said softly one night shortly after finding out about the tumor. “I’ve always wanted to do it, and I think I’m old enough now. I want to get them done before the surgery so they look nice and pretty for when it’s all over.”

Her daughter, who seemed to look at this surgery as an obstacle in her life rather than a possible end, stared up at T’Ann with a hopeful and teasing smile. It was hard to believe she was the same tomboy who loved camping and hiking. She was the girl who played Barbies in the dirt and couldn’t pass a puddle, muddy or not, without jumping into it.

“Fake nails?” T’Ann said, hardly able to form the words. “You’re not old enough to get those. You can get your hair cut and I’ll take you to get a pedicure. If you want, you can get a manicure, too, but no fake nails.”

Brittney’s persistence didn’t surprise her mom. It was the same persistence she had shown on her first birthday when she decided it was time to eat Mickey Mouse cake instead of open presents. When Brittney was five, T’Ann started letting her decide what clothes she would wear to school. She would put together three
outfits and let Brittney pick the one she’d like to wear. When her mom left the room, Brittney would put on a top from one outfit and the bottoms from another and insist on going to school with stars and stripes and mismatched colors.

Well, I told her she could pick out her outfit
, T’Ann would remind herself and laugh quietly as she dropped her colorful daughter off at school every morning.

This innate determination to get what she wanted only grew stronger with age, so T’Ann knew Brittney would need to hear the word
no
a few more times before accepting that she was not getting fake fingernails.

It was after dinner one evening that T’Ann changed her mind. During the week between finding out about Brittney’s tumor and the day of the scheduled surgery, she and Brittney found endless ways to spend their days together just in case they were their last. They cuddled and watched movies, baked, played games, and did puzzles.

Brittney, T’Ann, and her boyfriend, Andy, sat one evening with a bright, spirited woman named Patty, who had changed Brittney’s diapers and earned the title of “Grandma” rather than “friend of the family” during the course of Brittney’s life. As the four of them put together a puzzle that, in the end, would bring to life a small dolphin jumping out of the ocean, there was a moment of silence between stories and laughter when Andy turned to T’Ann with a thoughtful look.

“You should let her do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Get the fake nails.”

T’Ann wasn’t sure where it came from, but she looked into Andy’s loving eyes and decided he was right. They had been dating for nearly a year, which was how long it had taken Brittney to get past
the stages of hating him, resenting him, warming up to him, eventually accepting him, and finally loving him.

“All right,” T’Ann said, turning to Brittney. “You can get those fake nails.”

“Yes! Thanks, Mom …”

“Hold on a second,” T’Ann said with a look that told Brittney there was more to it than that. “You can get those nails if you make me a promise.”

She stared with intense eyes at her beautiful daughter then leaned toward her delighted face.

“When you wake up from this surgery, promise me you will wiggle your toes and give the doctor a thumbs up,” she said, choking out her words as her throat swelled.

Though she knew the odds of her daughter’s waking from the surgery, and the chances of her ever walking or moving her arms again if she did, were very slim, she believed it was a promise Brittney could keep. T’Ann’s eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t blink—she kept them on her daughter as she squeezed her small hands and waited for an answer.