Once Upon a Wish (13 page)

It was more than a year after waking from the coma that Katelyn’s relearned abilities gave her confidence and hope for a normal life.

“Let’s surprise Miss Penny!” she said excitedly to Sharon one afternoon.

Penny was the hospital receptionist, an older, grandmotherly type of woman with big smiles and even bigger hugs.

“There’s my girl,” she said every time she saw Katelyn. “Where’s my bear hug?”

Katelyn’s goal was to walk from the therapy ward to Penny’s desk.

“You got it,” Sharon said, then walked ahead of Katelyn to stand at Penny’s desk and watch.

As Katelyn pushed her walker slowly around the corner of the
hall and started walking toward them, Sharon’s eyes welled up with tears. She pursed her lips, hoping they wouldn’t fall, but as they did, Penny wrapped her arms around Sharon.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Penny asked, squeezing Sharon tight. She hadn’t seen Katelyn yet.

With her head on Penny’s shoulder, Sharon smiled, wiped her tears, and turned her around slowly to face Katelyn.

“Oh my goodness!” Penny hollered, covering her mouth, clapping her hands. She quickly picked up the hospital’s paging system phone and shouted, “Attention St. Jude! Katelyn Atwell is walking!”

Katelyn, maintaining a turtle’s pace, had not yet made it halfway down the hall before it was filled with doctors and nurses who, nearly a year and a half before, believed she would not live longer than forty-eight hours, believed she would never wake up. They cheered, clapped, and cried as she made her way toward them, her bright, proud smile leading the way.

The same support continued for the next few months until Sharon got the phone call that would soon change their lives. She kept the call a secret from Katelyn and simply told her one morning that some people from the Make-A-Wish Foundation wanted to speak with her.

“Wow, Mom, look at this!” Katelyn said when a limo pulled up in front of their home.

She slid onto the car’s long, black, leather seat and pulled out her cell phone.

“I’m fixin’ to go talk with some people from Make-A-Wish!” Katelyn said excitedly to her mom’s best friend, “Aunt” Lyn. “I’m going to read them my poem!”

That’s all Katelyn knew, that she would read a poem she had written for her parents. She didn’t know that the local FedEx had chosen Make-A-Wish as their charity to support that year or that hundreds of golfers would be waiting to meet her, to hear her
speak, at a golf tournament that would raise the funds for her wish. When she arrived at the tournament, event spokesperson Flynn Wallace introduced Katelyn to the crowd and asked her to read her poem.

“We want to give you an idea of why we’re out here raising money for this little girl,” he announced.

Katelyn had always been an honor roll student, a well-behaved child, but every one of her elementary school report cards stated the same thing: “excessive talking in class.” She wasn’t a wallflower or the pretty girl in the back of the class with opinions but no confidence to express them. She was a hand raiser, a voice. She didn’t mind crowds or strangers, and though her strong voice was now weak, her message was just as clear and just as strong.

She walked slowly onto the stage, took the microphone from Flynn, and began to recite her poem:

Flynn kneeled beside Katelyn on the stage, head in hand. After she finished her poem and shared her story, he stood before the crowd, hundreds of teary-eyed golfers, and gathered himself.

“Katelyn, we know you’d like to go swim with the dolphins,” he said, pausing, forcing her to look with anticipation in his direction. When she did, he shouted, “And baby, you’re goin’!”

The crowd erupted and Katelyn shouted her best, “Woo-hoo!”

   12   

Two weeks later, Katelyn, Ray, Sharon, and Crystal were on a plane to Orlando, Florida, to spend a week at Discovery Cove. Thick, damp, hot air hit them in the face the moment they stepped outside, and in all its sticky misery, that humidity was familiar—it was home. They had moved from Jacksonville, Florida, to Memphis three years before, a lifetime ago, before sickness, hospitals, medicine, and surgery had defined them as a family.

While living in Jacksonville, Ray and Sharon had made the three-hour drive to Walt Disney World Resort and SeaWorld every year, when those places meant everything to a young child. And here they were again, as a whole family, which, for so long, they didn’t know if they would ever be again.

Before visiting SeaWorld, sitting in the splash zone of a Shamu show as they did when they were little girls, before riding Space Mountain at Walt Disney World, Katelyn’s wish came true. At Discovery Cove, Ray parked her wheelchair in the white sand and, because of the distance, carried her to the bright, blue water lagoon, where Dixie, Katelyn’s dolphin, was waiting.

A trainer by her side, Katelyn learned to send Dixie swimming backward and get the dolphin to wave her fins and jump toward the sky, all with a few motions of her hand. Ray and Sharon stood behind, supporting Katelyn’s body in the warm water as she played with the dolphin, free from everything.

Then, supported by a jacket, Katelyn sank into the water’s gentle
grip, pushed and pulled her arms through it effortlessly. She closed her eyes, face pointed toward the hot sun, and felt her body relax, the weight of her illness, its burden, washing away. Ray, Sharon, and Crystal bobbed beside her, laughing as the dolphin danced through the salty water, brushing them with her fin, teasing.

They had spent countless hours, handfuls of summers, floating together as a family in the waters of Lake Broward in the small town of Pomona Park, Florida, where Ray grew up and where he and Sharon lived when their daughters were little. With the dolphin, they shared the same laughter, the same joy they had always found as a family, something Ray thought was gone until that moment.

“Grab on!” the trainer yelled, and Katelyn watched as Dixie, bottlenose smile leading the way, swam toward her. Katelyn waited patiently, her smile reflecting the dolphin’s, and threw her arms around Dixie’s dorsal fin as she swam quickly by. The force pulled against Katelyn’s fragile body, but her mind was stronger.

She held on with every ounce of determination inside of her, engaging every muscle she had worked so hard to strengthen for this very moment. The dolphin became her force, her power, as her own body had once been when she competed as a swimmer. Once again, Katelyn was plowing through water, the spray of it on her face, family in her wake watching through happy tears.

Katelyn would never become a competitive swimmer, her body and mind would never work quite the same, but she was not going to sleep through the rest of her life. That gift, that miracle alone, was something she and her family would never take for granted. As they had from the time Katelyn became ill, they would focus on what they had, not on what they did not have. And one thing they had was this day, this very special day of renewal and hope.

As Katelyn and Dixie circled the lagoon, Sharon and Ray knew it was a moment that would change them forever. They were no
longer a family with a dying child, the hospital was no longer their second home, doctors were no longer their extended family. Their lives would no longer revolve around tests, surgeries, and medicine. They learned, in that moment, what the rest of their lives could be.

They could have fun; they could travel, and laugh, and make plans for their futures. Knowing she would always be in therapy, always work toward maintaining and gaining strength, Katelyn also knew, after her Wish trip, that there were no limitations. She got home from her trip and sat down with a pen and paper. She wrote:

Before her Wish trip, the farthest Katelyn had ever traveled from her Florida and Memphis homes were North Carolina and South Carolina to visit family. In the past thirteen years, since her original diagnosis, she has been to the White House in Washington, D.C., ridden on a subway in New York City, placed her palms in the hands of celebrities on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, visited Thomas Jefferson’s house in Virginia, and walked the sandy beaches of Hawaii. She has flown an airplane over Deland, Florida, zip-lined at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and jumped from the belly of a plane.

All it took was one day, one moment, for Katelyn and her family to learn to live again.

   13   

“I thought you might like to know what it took to have me standing here tonight,” Katelyn said to a group of employees at the New York Stock Exchange a few months after returning from her Wish trip to Orlando. Inspired by what hope she had found on her trip—not only in her miraculous abilities but also in the reconnection she experienced with her family—Katelyn had made two commitments: to help grant five wishes by raising money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and to pay St. Jude back every penny it took for them to save her life—$3 million.

She started by sharing her story with the world, one group at a time. She spoke to schools, hospitals, universities—any platform she could find—and sat down with individual investors and potential donors, gearing every speech, every point, to her audience.

“You’re number people, right?” she teased in New York. “For me to be here tonight, it took 203 days in the hospital—109 in the ICU—645 outpatient visits, 1,262 hours of rehabilitation, 81.5 hours with the psychology department, twenty brain surgeries, sixteen EEGs, twelve types of braces, two different wheelchairs, a walker, crutches, and a cane.”