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8
WINDOW ON THE WORLD
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When she began choking on her
food, Nita's diet was reduced to broth, juice and pudding. She had always
loved to eat, but an electromyograph (EMG) showed the paralysis was still advancing upward, now overtaking her
swallowing mechanism. A low-grade fever set in. Then, as she watched it
helplessly her left hand began to grow cold. Another EMG confirmed that her hand was also paralysed.
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Nita fought off the overwhelming
misery by putting her right hand to constant use. She insisted on combing her
own hair, brushing her teeth, buttoning and unbuttoning her shirt. She read
the Word with a voracious appetite, propping the Bible on her stomach and
turning the pages with her right hand. Her exterior was cheerful and visitors
found her to be talkative and jovial. She never expressed her fear to anyone,
but inside, the fear was very cold and very real.
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Nita's roommate in her new ward
was a little old lady who was dying of rectal cancer. Nita watched her
wasting away and found herself wondering. Are
we under the same cloud of death? Each day the question seemed to loom
larger in front of her.
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Her cold left hand became deathly
pale, and soon she could not move it at all. The wasted muscles began
shrinking, and the hand slowly curled up.
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The physical therapists still
paraded in and out, going through their assorted charades, twisting and
squeezing and flexing the numb limbs. Nita cross-examined each of them,
searching for clues about her future. They all said the same meaningless,
"You'll be all right" - except one. Dr. Roy was a devout Roman
Catholic, a father of children who were similar to Nita in age and
personality. Watching Nita deteriorate was hard for him. Doctor and patient
were fond of each other; they talked comfortably, and Roy never expressed his
sense of sorrow or mourning. But neither would he lie to Nita, and when she
asked about her future, he always had to say he wasn't sure. She knew he was
doing his utmost for her. But she could see his eyes cloud up, and she knew
from his face that she was dying piece by piece.
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Her sensitivity was vanishing
fast. From somewhere along her rib cage downward, she had lost all feeling.
When the nurses washed and powdered her, they rubbed cream into her skin. She
didn't feel a thing. Each day the
paralysis crawled a little further, creeping up her trunk to her shoulders.
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Her right hand, still functioning,
grew weaker by the day, until it became a chore for Nita to flip the switch
on her stereo or pick up her Bible. The attendant's call button was just
under her right arm so that when she felt like reading she could push the
button and have the attendant put a pillow on her chest, then place on top of
that a cleverly designed book stand her cousin had shipped in from England.
On that would be placed her Bible.
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Little problems grew big as the
paralysis increasingly complicated Nita's life. There was an ancient
two-bladed fan in the ceiling over the bed. It was worthless, so her family
brought in two new fans, one for either end of her bed. Invariably the breeze
would flip the page over before Nita had finished reading it, and she would
either have to skip ahead arbitrarily or begin the process all over again by
pressing the call button and summoning the attendant for help.
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But Nita clung tenaciously to the
Scriptures. It was a far cry from her days at the university in India, when
she read a few verses out of duty every morning before jogging off on her
usual four-and-a-half-mile trek. Jogging now was nothing but a frustrating
memory - now, she was literally
feeding on the Word, reading and rereading Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah ...
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And visitors continued streaming
in and out. Nita was never without attention and affection. On her birthday,
as she struggled to keep her mind off her father's death, her room had been
steadily engulfed in flowers. First they covered the night stand, then the
locker, then the edge of the bed. Finally another table was pulled up
alongside the bed, and when it was filled, a second table was brought in and
filled. At the end of the day, when everyone had gone, Nita folded her hands,
inhaled the fragrant air and said to herself, "This is what I'll look
like when I die."
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One of her favourite visitors was
Father Shirley Ferdinando, a forty-year-old Catholic priest who served the
hospital as chaplain. Judge Edwards had strictly taught his children to
respect anyone, Catholic or Protestant, who served the Lord. The judge had
served as legal advisor to the Roman Catholic priests, and they were often to
be found in the Edwards' home, rocking little Nita on their knees. At that
time, her parents had a running argument about Seventh Day Adventists: Mrs.
Edwards thought they were a cult and should be avoided, but the judge
declared that anyone coming in the name of the Lord should be welcome in
their home and treated with respect.
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When Father Shirley walked by on
Nita's first night in the hospital, she had greeted him, partly out of
respect for his position and partly out of loneliness. She was, after all, an
alien, never having spent time in any hospital before, and having been out of
Sri Lanka for the past several years. Each day as the priest came through to
serve communion to the Catholic patients he stopped to chat with Nita. With
Shirley's warm sense of humour, they soon became fast friends.
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"Hey, how come you pray for
them every day," Nita chided him lightly one morning, "but you
never pray for me? Come on, pray for me too!"
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Shirley blinked in surprise, then
closed his eyes and began to pray. Praying for his new friend became part of
his daily pattern. The friendship grew stronger. As he met each member of
Nita's family, as he heard the pieces of her story, as he learned that her
birthday was the anniversary of the judge's death, he was drawn more and more
into the circle of her tragic new life.
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The chief neurophysician, J. B.
Pieris, disliked Father Shirley. Pieris was a Buddhist, fervently
anti-Christian, and quick to run the priest out of Nita's room whenever he
noticed them together. This girl had entirely too many people praying for
her, Pieris grumbled to the staff. Nuns, relatives, now this priest... If
Shirley was going to spend so much time with her, the physician sneered, Nita
Edwards might as well be transferred to a church.
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But it was Father Shirley who gave
Nita a window on the outside world.
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She had stared for so many hours
into the ceiling that she had counted and memorized every slat and bolt. Dr.
Shan had long ago confiscated her collection of psychology texts - "Bad
for your eyes," he had insisted - and dumped them in the bin. Perhaps
this was an act of revenge for the professional grief Nita had brought him.
With no television on the island, and having absorbed her limit of varied
other reading materials, Nita's mind had finally bogged down. When she was
alone, a million thoughts crowded each other for attention, but she could
concentrate on none of them. Only visitors set her free. "Hey, Shirley,
guess how many bolts there are in that
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ceiling," Nita offered
playfully one day.
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The priest gaped skyward with his
usual active sense of humour. But the girl's situation hit home with him in
that moment, and he looked around the room for some way to cut her loose from
her prison.
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There was a beautiful wooden
dressing table against the wall, with a wood-framed oval mirror attached.
Shirley leaned into it and pushed it toward Nita's bed.
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"What are you doing?"
Nita exclaimed, as she heard the noise.
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"I'm going to let you see
what's going on outside these four walls."
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The considerate priest pushed the
dressing table until it sat at an angle to the bed, then tilted the mirror
down by inches until she could look into the mirror and see out of the
window.
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It was only a portion of the
hospital parking lot - but it was like the Garden of Eden to Nita. Here for
the first time in months was a window on the world outside, a new sight on
which her weary eyes could feast. And an ever-changing scene!
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Soon her family and friends had
found the magic spot on the parking lot, and they began parking there when
they could, or walking by and waving on their way in to see her. On their way
out, too, everyone stopped to wave good-bye. Nita was unable to raise her
hand enough to wave back, but, if she gave a big smile they could tell she
had seen them.
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The physical decay continued,
unwilling to be arrested. Week after week the functions of her body broke
down, her systems dissembled themselves. Nita's mother, and her family and
friends, watched helplessly. Breathing became a tougher task every day, until
finally her diaphragm collapsed, another victim of the ghastly paralysis. She
began waking at odd hours, choking and gasping for a simple breath. Respiratory emergencies struck with such
alarming frequency that an oxygen unit was finally left in her room. To
keep her once-athletic lungs from collapsing, she was propped up on a bedrest
with ten pillows.
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Tubes were poked into Nita's
wasting veins, up her nostrils, and down her throat. The constant smell of
blood made her sick. She came to dread looking toward the door, for she could
see the approach of the laboratory technicians - "the mosquitos,"
she called them - who came to draw blood samples from her limp arms every
day.
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There were endless X-rays, endless
tests. At a given hour every afternoon she was wheeled down the hall for
electrotherapy. There, technicians hooked her up to electrodes and sent
jarring bolts of electricity through her body. She arched and jumped with
every jolt, but after the session her limbs were always as dead as ever. Here
rich-coloured skin faded to grocery-bag brown. Her eyes sank deeper and
deeper into her skull. As each new organ failed, the pain increased. In
tragic irony, the numbness on her exterior was matched inch-for-inch by the
physical agony internally. Medication accomplished little.
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She took comfort in the Word. Isaiah 43:2 reassured her:
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"When
thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers,
they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt
not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee."
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Still, the paralysis crept upward.
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The real nightmare had not yet
begun.
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The miracle was nowhere in sight.
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8 WINDOW ON THE WORLD
