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April 13, 2006
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Dana was a great kid. She was sixteen and had lost a leg to cancer. I was visiting her at Brackenridge Children's Hospital a number of years ago.
It was dusk and the room was swimming in a beautiful twilight purple.
"Hey girl," I said kissing her on the cheek and sitting down on the chair next to the bed.
"Hey," she said, smiling.
Dana's eyes always sparkled when she smiled.
"You have the best smile," I said. "It's funny. You're the one who is sick, but for some reason I feel better when I see you. "
Dana smiled even more.
"Man, I don't know how you manage to find anything to smile about with all of this ," I said, looking around the room.
"Well, I learned a little trick from you that sometimes helps," she said, chuckling.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
I really wasn't sure what she was referring to.
"Remember when we first met," she said. "And you told me about how you would lay on your bed when you were a kid and imagine you were a wild horse running in a field"
"Yeah!" I said, smiling. "When I was a child I was really sick with Glandular Fever and I was in bed for a few months. It was awful and I felt so claustrophobic. To escape I used to imagine that I was a horse galloping across a green field."
"I haven't forgotten that story," said Dana. "And when I feel trapped in here with all these tubes and wires I imagine that I'm on a mustang galloping as fast as I can. I feel the sun on my face and the wind in my hair. And in my dream I have hair. Very long hair. Not like this wig. Thinking about being a horse really helps me to take my thoughts away from here."
I smiled. I was so happy that Dana was able to use her imagination to give her mind a vacation. A well-deserved break from the pain and sadness she sometimes felt while stuck in a gloomy hospital room for weeks on end.
"I think when I die, that's what's going to happen," she said "I'm going to ride a white horse with a long flowing mane right up through the fluffy clouds all the way to heaven."
And a few months later, she did.
Posted by trevor at April 13, 2006 10:26 PM