Once Upon a Wish (21 page)
Authors: Rachelle Sparks
Defeated.
She looked up through her tears and whispered, “Good-bye, baby. I love you.”
Author’s note: The process of sharing Brittney’s story for the purpose of this book was both painful and healing for T’Ann, but she did it to fulfill the dream her daughter had of helping other children by sharing her story with the world.
A P
OEM
—
A
M
ESSAGE—TO
K
IDS
B
ATTLING
C
ANCER
by Brittney Wolfe
I think I could help children with the same disease as me,
With tips to make their hospital stay the best that it can be.
This disease can make your life perspective start to change and sway,
But once you have gone through it, not a thing stands in your way.
Nurses will try real hard to keep you happy and content,
When all you need is silence, not another chance to vent.
Doctors act as robots; they find it hard to understand,
What it is that we are going through; they just lend their helping hand.
They tell you things at times that you’d never want to hear,
Which is why it is important to always have your family near.
And when you’re bored and antsy, with nothing much to do,
Have your parents bring some movies and CDs from home to you.
Bring your best stuffed animals and blankets from your past,
They’ll make you think of family and friendships that will last.
Bring pictures of your friends and your favorite family pet,
Make phone calls to your loved ones every second that you get.
Have your cat or dog come see you, if you think it’d make you smile,
And if the nurse refuses, sneak them in for just a while.
I will talk to kids with cancer because I know I’ll help them through,
I’ll broaden their horizons and give them strength to hold on to.
It helped for me to know that others had beaten it before,
I stayed positive, courageous, and grew strong forevermore.
After having this bad illness, you will start to understand,
Life and death and boundaries as they rest in God’s good hand.
STORY FOUR
•
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
—Albert Einstein (Garrett’s philosophy on life)
1 “S
OM ORKUN OSH
pi doung jet
,” said Suem Pahn, and Dine Tuy translated, “Thank you from my heart.”
Garrett glanced across the circle to study Tuy Dien’s reaction to Suem’s words, his expression, his pain, as Suem shared the story of how she lost her legs after stepping on a landmine in a rice field twenty-two years before. The explosion had sent people from her village looking for her, and she told the story of their rescue and her journey to a hospital in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
“
Pel knom tov pateah ving. Kanom arch tov leng psa ning pateah mit peak. Ka nom mint dek jum pateah teat tey
,” said Suem. “When I go back home, I can go to the market or go to see a friend. I do not have to stay in the house,” Dine translated.
Tuy, who had removed his sunglasses before joining the circle of others who had lost their legs, sat intently, squinting as though the hot, Cambodian sun was inches from his face. Garrett glanced at Tuy’s legs, gone from the knee down, and wondered if every painful wince was a reflection of his own misery—their lives, too familiar; their stories, too sad.
Next in the circle, twenty-year-old Saktourn repeated through tears, “
Orkun, orkun
”—“Thank you, thank you”—after sharing the story of how she was born with only one leg to a family of nine children. Her dream of finishing sewing school and making clothes for a living was becoming a reality.
As tears streamed down her face, Tuy squinted and closed his eyes.
Jo Joan, next in the circle, shared the story of how her leg was amputated after falling from her home, lifted by stilts, when she was a baby. Garrett watched as Tuy looked down, then up again with pained squints.
What’s wrong with his eyes?
Garrett thought, and then Tuy shared his story.
“
Ka nom taleb jeer jon pikar jeer yoo mok hay
,” he began, and Dine translated, “I have been disabled for a very long time.”
Twenty-one years earlier, he stepped on a landmine while collecting wood from the jungle. Before finishing the story of how he rode twenty miles in the back of an oxcart to the nearest hospital, where both of his legs were amputated, he stopped talking and looked deep into the eyes of everyone in the circle around him.
“
Ka nom arch pik van ta ban tey
?—“Can I please put my sunglasses back on?” he asked. “
Komdov preah ar tid tver oy panek kanom chhur
”—“The sun is hurting my eyes.”
Why did he wait so long to put them on?
Garrett wondered.
It had been forty-five minutes.
Tuy carefully placed the glasses on his face, and as he finished his story, Garrett looked long and slow around the circle, where ten people from the city of Siem Reap surrounded him. Their silence, their devotion to one another’s stories, came from a place of great respect, deep understanding. Garrett finally understood why Tuy had listened and blinked with such agony for so long. He wanted no distraction, no barrier between himself and the others, nothing to come between their stories and his undivided attention.
Tuy ended his story with, “
Hay pel nih kor jeer lerk ti moy dell ka nom mean kov ey pika. Ey lov ka nom mint rong jum neak joy krea ka nom tey
.” Dine translated, “This is the first time I will have a wheelchair. Now I don’t have to wait for someone to carry me.” Now Garrett finally understood how his charity and the work he had done would impact these people’s lives.
With his parents and a small crew from Globe Aware, a nonprofit that organizes service projects around the world, Garrett had spent one afternoon, a few simple hours in the sun, building wheelchairs from lawn chairs and bicycle wheels, changing the lives of those surrounding him.
Thanks to these efforts, Tuy, Suem, Saktourn, Jo Joan, and six others—including a twelve-year-old girl whose circulation problems left her unable to walk to school and a fifty-seven-year-old father of four who lost his legs to a landmine explosion while collecting firewood—were given the gift of mobility, of freedom, of independence.
Garrett had once viewed his inability to walk as a life sentence, the wheelchair, his prison, secluding him from his world of traveling, rock climbing, bike riding, camping, basketball, and soccer.
As he sat in that quiet hut, words of stories circling his mind—“I can go anywhere, do anything …”; “I don’t have to wait for someone to carry me”—Garrett realized that while these people had spent most of their lives trapped in their homes, within the walls of their villages, his prison had wheels—invisible bars, freedom.
2 All that was beneath me
Was ten feet of air
Before I knew it
I hit the ground
Crying
With my elbow beneath me
Not being able to move anything A muscle
A bone
Nothing
—Garrett Stuart, second grade
Voices of children bounced between the sky-high walls of Vertical Dreams, where little hands grabbed and reached, little feet gripped the rock-climbing holds. Eight-year-old Garrett was among them. His arms were toned from sports, his mind was strong as he pictured himself climbing in Costa Rica, rappelling in Utah’s Zion National Park—places his parents, Mike and Linda, spoke of often. These thoughts drove his small body to inch forward, one good hold after another, up toward the top of the steep, ten-foot-tall wall to which he clung.
The echoed sounds of kids shouting, parents cheering, were mute in Garrett’s mind as his body, shaky with determination, reached higher, grabbed tighter to every colorful hold as he approached an archway near the top of the gym.
He looked to the ground, looked at his leading hand, looked to the top of the archway, less than an arm’s length out of reach. He would dyno—jump to the next hold—as he had done a million times before. If he missed, the mattress-lined ground would cushion his fall.
Garrett pushed off from his hold, up the wall. His body flung itself forward, and his fingers gripped the next hold briefly before sliding off as his body joined gravity, the rushing ground, his thoughts slipping away. He hit as fast as he had fallen, his body cushioned, his elbow cracking on the hard ground between mattresses. Pain bolted through his arm, filling his mind and his lungs with screams his parents heard from the tops of boulders they were climbing around the corner.
Mike and Linda leaped down, boulder after boulder, with the skill and precision of professionals, mountain lions, to find their son screaming at the base of the wall, the floor of the gym. Linda scooped him into her arms, and they rushed him to the hospital where doctors reset and cast Garrett’s arm.
As nurses inserted an IV, Mike made a face and said, “I think I can see your blood oozing out!”
Garrett looked at his father, the person who had teased, “Get up, walk it off,” when they found Garrett on the ground of the gym, crying. He was the one who always said, “Shake it off, you’re fine,” whenever Garrett fell off his bike, a small smile silently echoing his jovial, can-do spirit.
Garrett, who admired his father, appreciated his wit, found no humor in jokes about blood or IVs. Face white, heart pounding at the mere thought of the word
oozing
, Garrett’s eyes fell from his father’s as his head jolted toward the ground, his body heaving. Mike stared as his son threw up his lunch and his worries all over the hospital floor.
No more jokes,
Mike told himself before doctors placed a cast on Garrett’s right arm.
Garrett returned to second grade just a few days later, and six weeks after that, once the cast was removed, he went back to playing basketball, soccer, and T-ball and continued hiking and rock climbing.
On rainy, New Hampshire days, when playing football in the street with his best friend, Travis, wasn’t possible, when the rain forced him to stop games of hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids, abandon the forts he was building, or quit games of tag and basketball, Garrett would invite friends over for games of Yahtzee or ones he made up on the spot.
“Okay, roll the die!” Garrett would shout as he and Travis took turns rolling the die, collecting Monopoly money for every roll. Roll a six, collect $6. Roll a two, collect $2. Garrett’s mind, a calculator, quickly added numbers in his head. They became richer faster with the help of six dice, where they could collect as much as $36 at a time. They played Garrett’s made-up game for hours, collecting thousands.
He was practicing for the day he would count his millions.
“Did your big check come today?” Linda would ask nearly every day from the time Garrett was three years old.
“Nope, not today,” he’d say, closing the door of the mailbox. Never disappointed, he remained hopeful that one day $1 million would appear.
“Check again tomorrow,” Linda would say, quietly laughing to herself as she wondered where her son got the idea that someone, someday, would be sending a check in the mail for $1 million.
Garrett was good with numbers, great with math, which, in addition to science, was his favorite subject in school. He was meticulous, careful, and logical about his math homework, and he knew that one day, when he grew up, these skills would come in handy as the owner of a business that would make him a millionaire.
One day, as he hovered over his homework, adding and subtracting on paper with perfect lines, Linda watched over his shoulder and studied the way he wrote his numbers, the pencil sitting strangely in his hand. Elbow directly in front of him, forearm straight, Garret’s hand curved slightly outward at the wrist, fingers wrapped clumsily around the pencil.
Over the next couple of months, Garrett’s struggle became more pronounced, and Linda and Mike decided that his crooked arm, the way it progressively curled away from his body, must have resulted from breaking his arm.
“Some people just aren’t that flexible,” an occupational therapist told Mike and Linda after working with Garrett for a year to correct the twist of his wrist. Exercises intended to strengthen the muscles and retrain his arm and wrist didn’t seem to be working, and that was the explanation they received.
Remaining hopeful that therapy would eventually work, Linda and Mike, who had received no instruction from doctors to stop
their active lifestyle, continued their outdoor adventures of camping, hiking, and climbing with Garrett. Since his arm was still healing, they chose shorter mountains to hike, smaller boulders to climb.
