Once Upon a Wish (5 page)

The girl whose personality drew people to her when she walked into a room lay there quietly, eyes closed. David and Sherry stood in disbelief. Pale and fragile, with attached IVs draped over the rails of her bed, Tatum seemed like somebody else’s little girl lying there. But no, she was theirs, and this was real.

Sherry reached for Tatum’s hand and stared at her face, thinking of the time the two of them spent together in New York City when Tatum was five. The thought made her smile through her tears. While dancing in circles down the streets of the city, Tatum sang songs from
The Lion King
, a Broadway musical they had seen the night before. People stared; some laughed, most applauded.

“Is she in a show?” they rightfully asked. She belonged on stage.

“No, not exactly,” Sherry said, laughing. “She’s just in a world of her own.”

“Well, she should be,” one woman said. Her wise eyes creased when she smiled. “She just glows with joy.”

The same face that served as a canvas for an artist in Central Park to create a brilliantly colored butterfly with a wingspan
stretching from one side of it to the other was now white and nearly lifeless.

“Everybody, join hands,” Dan said, jolting Sherry from her thoughts. The four of them formed a circle around Tatum and tightly held hands. Dan began to pray, and Tatum’s chest, which had remained so still, suddenly lifted with his words. Her breaths, which had been so quiet, sounded like whispers filling the room. As Dan finished the prayer, Sherry leaned toward her daughter’s face and said, “It’s okay, baby, calm down. Just rest.” The prayer filled them with strength, and they knew they were not in this alone.

“Okay, you can come with me,” said a short Indian man who introduced himself as Dr. Patel a few minutes later.

David and Sherry followed him into another small conference room where Dr. Patel sat them down and asked, “Do you have a faith?”

Before Tatum was born, David would have proudly answered “no.” He had chosen to fall away from the Christian beliefs he was raised with—until seven years ago when Tatum was born. He looked into her eyes that day, and she had turned him back into a believer.

“Yes, we are Christian,” he told Dr. Patel. With a slightly tilted head and questioning eyes, David stared.

“Now would be a good time to start praying,” the doctor said gently. “All we know is that it looks like her organs are shutting down.”

“Shutting down?” Sherry cried. “Everything was fine a few days ago! She’s never been sick in her life!”

She wanted so desperately for her reasoning to be enough to change what the doctor was saying, but she knew it wasn’t. Her hands shook and tingled and she fell to her knees, gasping for air between sobs. For David, a solid hit to the chest with a baseball bat might have felt better than the pain he experienced when he
heard the doctor’s words. He knelt beside his wife and hugged her tightly with both arms. The brief silence gave Sherry’s mind a quick chance to clear, and she managed to ask, “What do we do next? How do we save her?”

Dr. Patel had perfected the necessary calm in a voice that still had hard news to deliver.

“We’ve done all that we can do,” he said softly. “We’re sending her to Children’s Medical Center.”

The critical nature of the moment, the shock, the reality, deepened—Children’s Medical Center of Dallas was a place for very sick, and often dying, children.

“What can they do for her there that you can’t do here?” Sherry asked. She felt as though Dr. Patel was telling them that they had given up. That there was nothing left for them to do.

“They have techniques to try that we don’t have here,” Dr. Patel explained.

The heaviness in David’s chest sunk slowly toward his heart. How could this be happening to their little girl?

The transport team placed Tatum into the ambulance, and Sherry looked at her husband as he wrapped his arms around her and whispered, “Everything’s going to be just fine.” Tucking a blond curl behind Sherry’s ear, he pulled away, touched her cheek, and smiled down at her. She let out a long breath, stared into the eyes that made her strong, and nodded.

David drove their car, and Sherry climbed into the front seat of the ambulance. When they arrived at Children’s, the driver threw the ambulance into park, the back doors were ripped open, and by the time Sherry stepped out, she was surrounded by people in white. Doctors and nurses, she guessed, but her mind was spinning. Her heart pounded violently in her chest, and one of the EMTs said, “You sign her in, we’ll take her.”

Take her? Take her where? Where do I go?

She needed David. She frantically looked around, and there, in the blur, stood Dan and Kelli. The three of them followed a nurse to the ICU waiting area, where family and friends had already started to gather.

Sherry took a moment to step away from the crowd and look out the window, where she saw that the longest day of her and David’s life was slowly coming to an end. The sky was turning charcoal, and stars were beginning to poke through. The three hours of sleep they had gotten the night before on their drive home from San Antonio was somehow enough, and she knew she wouldn’t get much more until they knew whether or not their baby girl was going to live. That was something they still didn’t know, and as her thoughts started to make her feel sick, she joined the crowd. By then, David had found his way to the room.

“Hopefully someone will come in soon and tell us what’s going on,” Sherry said, and no sooner, a doctor dressed in white with small glasses, black hair, and a contagious smile walked into the waiting room.

   5   

“Hi, I’m Paul Shore,” the doctor said to David, giving him a firm handshake and a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder with his other hand. David noticed right away that Paul Shore left the “doctor” out of his introduction.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” David said, hoping he would turn out to be the man who finally had some answers. He didn’t yet, but he came back later with results of tests they had been running on Tatum.

“Her liver is failing,” he said gently.

Devastated by the news but relieved that doctors had identified
which
organ was failing, Sherry and David listened. Dr. Shore explained that toxins were taking over Tatum’s body and her brain was beginning to swell. He performed a successful procedure to keep the swelling down and started Tatum on dialysis.

Testing and the distribution of medications continued into the late hours of the night and left David and Sherry pacing the waiting room and the hallways. They wanted nothing more than to see their little girl, but that was not an option. She needed them to remain patient and strong.

The friends and family who had come to join David and Sherry surrounded them and filled them with encouragement. After four hours of dialysis, Dr. Shore told them that the level of ammonia was decreasing in Tatum’s body, but the levels of other toxins, equally as dangerous, remained.

“Dialysis isn’t enough,” he said, letting out a long breath. “She needs a liver transplant.”

“Let’s do it. Where do we get a liver?” David asked immediately and hopefully, thinking there had to be some sort of organ bank with an abundance of livers for situations just like theirs. He crossed his arms over his chest and shifted impatiently, ready to follow the doctor into the room with the livers.

“It doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately,” Dr. Shore said.

“How
does
it work?” Sherry asked.

“We put her on a donor list and wait.”

“How long will that take?” David asked.

“You never know. It took one little boy two weeks before a match came in,” Dr. Shore said, trying to expose the reality of the situation without scaring them.

“But we don’t have two weeks,” Sherry said, her voice pushing past a lump forming in her throat.

“You’re right, we don’t,” he said, “which is why we need to get her on the list and start testing everybody in the family to see who is a potential donor.”

Sherry would have died to give Tatum her liver, but she had one concern. “I have scar tissue on my liver,” she told Dr. Shore, then shared the story of how a painful childhood bicycling accident that sent a blow to her abdomen had lacerated her liver. “Will that be a problem?” Sherry asked.

“It shouldn’t be,” Dr. Shore said. “We’ll test you to see if you’re even a match. In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed that we get a liver.” The doubt in their faces triggered the doctor to add, “Sometimes miracles happen.”

   6   

When Sherry and David received news the next day that they found a liver matching Tatum’s blood type and that it was in transport to Children’s Hospital, they knew it was true—miracles did happen.

The morning the new liver arrived, seventy-five of David and Sherry’s family, friends, and church family were at the hospital to show their love and support. They were piled into the waiting room and wandering the halls, available for needed hugs and words of encouragement. The news of Tatum’s illness had spread like wildfire to people they didn’t even know throughout the United States and into other countries.

Dan had given Sherry a “prayer pager”—a beeper for people to send the number 143 (common code for “I love you,” as the amount of letters in the phrase is one, four, and three, Dan explained)—to receive reminders of the love and support from family and friends. Emails requesting prayer and “143” to be paged to David and Sherry were sent to Sherry’s missionary friends in
Sweden and Africa, and those emails reached across the globe, through other countries, and into Mexico. The prayer pager buzzed in Sherry’s pocket every minute or so with “143”—reminders of how much Tatum was loved.

Sherry was encouraged that people everywhere were praying for her little girl. She felt as if she could see those prayers floating to Heaven, and after news of the liver, she was sure they had landed right in God’s lap and brought about a miracle.

As David and Sherry broke away from the group to meet with Dr. Shore and Dr. Goran Klintmaulm, a world-renowned transplant surgeon from Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas who would perform the transplant surgery, David felt hesitant excitement rush through him. Tatum was going to live.

It was a bittersweet feeling since he knew that a liver for his daughter meant someone had just died to give it.