Once Upon a Wish (28 page)

She had practiced medicine on her stuffed animals from the time she was just four years old, checking their imaginary heartbeats with her plastic stethoscope, their pretend pulses with a steady hand. She studied the intricacies of roly-polies and Daddy Long-legs as she got older, and for her tenth birthday, Meera’s friends bought her a book called
The Human Body
so she could learn the inner workings of the body’s systems. But before she could become a PH doctor, she needed to beat her illness.

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Three years after Meera’s diagnosis, after her days of playing soccer and running with a child’s freedom in the sun were seemingly over, Nita and Alex wanted to lift her spirits, and their own, as she lay still, unknowing, in her hospital room. They hung pictures, reminders of their daughter’s love for the outdoors, the places they knew she would rather be.

Though Meera couldn’t see them, these images captured moments of ocean waves breaking, waterfalls splashing, and birds flying freely, and they brought comfort and peace to their lives. The photos brought with them the warmth of the sun, the serenity of the sea, the calm of the open air—the very elements that had made Meera fall in love with the outdoors at a very young age.

Her favorite place in the world was Maxwell Creek, a gentle flowing stream behind her backyard that crept through the nooks of the earth, twisting through giant maples and oaks, jutting lightly against rocks and branches that got in its way. When Meera wasn’t busy in her room with doing homework, practicing the violin, reading, or painting, she spent hours exploring the banks of the creek, learning its sounds, discovering its creatures, releasing her thoughts to the wind. It was there that Meera became at peace with her illness.

Alex glanced between the photographs hanging on the stark walls of her hospital room as he continued to whisper in his daughter’s ear, “Breathe.”

His strength, his determination, moved through her.

It guided her, as it always had. She took shallow breaths with every command, her father’s words keeping her alive when the machine no longer could.

After five days on ECMO, Meera’s doctors decided to test the strength of her organs by temporarily unhooking her. Because
transporting her on the machine to Dr. Barst’s hospital in New York was not an option, they needed to see if her body could stand to make the journey on its own. Alex and Nita watched nervously through the glass window of Meera’s room, looking beyond their own reflections, as doctors shut the machine down.

For three days they remained watchful. Meera was on dialysis and her lungs were filling with blood, but, with time, her numbers stabilized and doctors slowly began to wean her from sedation. Alex and Nita sat on either side of her hospital bed, their hands in hers, waiting, until the moment her eyes began to flutter open.

The innocence in them when they finally opened took Nita and Alex back to the day she was born eleven years before. The first time Nita held Meera in her arms, her wide eyes, an intense sea blue at the time, explored her parents’ faces, searching for answers, waiting for guidance. Overwhelmed with joy and frightened by how much he could love someone so instantly, so deeply, Alex didn’t sleep that night—Meera’s big, happy, blue eyes pierced the darkness of his mind every time he closed his.

Meera’s eyes searched now, as they had eleven years ago, between her parents.

“Hi, baby,” Nita said. “You’re okay. Everything’s okay.”

She squeezed Meera’s hands and kissed her forehead as Alex said, “We love you so much.”

He struggled with everything inside of him to keep his tears from falling and looked at her with strong, loving eyes as he caressed her face. Through every moment of weakness, every emotional collapse, he had stayed strong in the presence of his daughter. She needed that from him.

It had been five weeks since the start of the nightmare they were living, when Meera’s period was heavy and painful and lasted longer than a month. When she started vomiting continuously, their local hospital had sent her to Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, where she received two blood transfusions for all she had lost.

After a week in the hospital, Nita, who had spent every night curled up on the small couch next to Meera’s bed, woke to a panicked voice at 2:00 a.m.

“Mama!”

“I’m right here, sweetie,” Nita said, jumping to her side.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

Nita slowly helped her daughter from the bed and guided her gently to the restroom. With arms around one another, Nita was careful not to trip over Meera’s gown or the IVs hanging from her tree.

Meera suddenly began to drag her feet, her arms loosening and crawling slowly down Nita’s shoulders, falling away from her body. Limp, she slithered to the ground against the strength of her mother, and Nita hovered above, frantic. She quickly pressed the nurse’s button in the restroom and screamed her daughter’s name, over and over, before turning to God.

“
Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem!
” she prayed loudly.

“In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” Nita chanted, repeating this Muslim prayer.

“
Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem!
” she continued as two nurses lifted Meera from the bathroom floor and placed her on the bed. They began CPR and chest compressions while Nita’s shaking fingers clumsily dialed her husband’s cell phone.

“Meera’s not breathing! They’re doing CPR! She’s in cardiac arrest!”

The words pouring from her mouth, the voice repeating them, didn’t sound like her own. She felt as though she were watching
herself from a distance, from another place, as she paced the room, panicked.

Alex dropped off Zane with his in-laws on the way to the hospital. He kept the tone of his voice calm and his face hopeful for the sake of his seven-year-old son. Zane did not need to know that his sister was dying.

Hands clutched around the steering wheel, Alex disregarded speed limit signs and tore through the streets. He zipped past cars on the dark freeway, tears blurring the headlights and white lines, the words in his head blocking out the sound of traffic.

This can’t be it
, he reasoned with himself.
They will bring her back. My little girl is not going anywhere.

He needed this to be true.

Alex quickly parked his car and ran as fast as he could to Meera’s room, where nurses still hovered over her body, pounding their fists into her chest.

It had been forty-five minutes.

They’re going to hurt her!
he screamed in his mind, tears flooding from his eyes, hands desperately pulling at his reddened face, his hair, as he watched his daughter’s lifeless body jolt with every attempt to start her heart. He was losing it. The pain was unbearable. He stepped out into the hallway, his sobs echoing outside of Meera’s room, and Nita left her daughter’s side to join him, to hold him.

“She’s going to be okay!” Nita insisted.

Every ounce of her knew that Meera wasn’t going anywhere. She knew the doctors who said Meera would have brain damage if she survived at all were wrong. As a mother, she could not lose her daughter, and God knew it. He would not take her from them.

“
Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem
,” she repeated, and Alex looked down, his tears dripping to the floor, before he closed his eyes and became lost in his wife’s prayer.

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“Her heart is beating on its own,” said a fellow doctor an hour later. That’s all Nita and Alex wanted to hear, but they knew there was more. “We’ve got her stabilized, but her heart is beating only because of the level of epinephrine we’ve got her on.”

The doctor, whom they had never met before now, delivered the rest of the difficult news with sincere compassion and practiced calm.

“When we stop the medicine, her heart will probably stop, and if not, her brain will most likely be damaged.”

When a doctor standing by his side added, “You should start calling your family and friends—there is a good chance she is not going to make it,” Nita turned her back and walked away. She had no tolerance for negativity, no matter how much truth was in it. They had come this far, and ending the journey without Meera was not an option.

When Nita and Alex returned to Meera’s side, her eyes remained closed, her life dependent on a machine.

“I hope you can hear me,” Alex whispered into her ear. “If you can see the angels, they’re there to help.”

He could not bring himself to tell her to go with them. They were only there to comfort her. The pain he felt swelled in his throat. He paused, gained control, and continued.

“Squeeze my hand if you can see the angels,” he said.

Meera’s hand, small and fragile, gently squeezed.

Alex looked to his wife with wide eyes, mouth opened.

“She squeezed my hand!”

Her brain was not damaged. A heavy current of excitement and fear flowed through him. The angels were there to guide her, but when Meera woke later that day, he knew she had chosen not to follow.

Meera was responding to commands and began communicating
with her parents by writing notes on a Magna Doodle, a magnetic drawing board that a nurse had given to her. When not answering questions about how she was feeling or asking for ice chips, Meera would draw hearts and write “I love you” to her parents.