Chart of Life part 7.

Author: | Posted on: April 5, 2012

Life is rarely what you plan.  It is not easy to leap out and with hands in the air have new confrontation tackle you.  Life, can be untethered and it can seem, that you are one stone in a bubbling and limitless stream.  However, for this one girl from the East, this girl who had encountered such trips into stark darkness, it was not that simple.  The girl now with her baby and new family was on the embankment of her future and with doctors and hospitals clambering in her wake it was one time which was full of dankness.  If, you have a medical condition, that is one thing, but to know that tests and operations were to take place for someone else.  That oppressive thought was something else entirely.  The girl had been told, her baby had a condition which would require numerous operations, each to help manipulate the spine; and consequently the little girl would have to wear a plaster jacket.

This was no fahsion accessory.  It was serious Plaster of Paris and creative surgical art.  This was the worst time for the girl; to think that her little one, a little girl would have to go through untold hospitalisation and then to look so varied to everyone else.  Feelings were troublsome, they did not do what the girl expected.  As the girl prepared for the once every twelve week operation, she would become anxious for a few nights beforehand, her dreams plagued by vision of spines fracturing and the baby would ask am I going to die?

The question, those four words.  The impending procedure would carry a weight of false confidence; where the girl would look into the infant’s face and say she would be fine.  Did she know that?  The reply was in the negative and that carried its own guilt.  Was it right for her to provide the confidence that she did not have.  She simply was not sure.  The family was eventually always led down the same line, giving a false sense of security, to a small baby who was going to look down the barrier of a serious medical condition. 

The family was sickened by the prospect.  To have a visit to hospital knowing that your little girl would be going into surgery.  It was also the result they knew they needed.  Without the simulation and manipulation the little girl’s spine would be bent and there would be too much pressure put on her lungs.  The little girl’s heart would also be saved by this operation.  Still, the parents were tense, the girl held a heart of her own full of cadged doubts, as she mounted the steps with her husband and daughter she knew that this journey would be taking them to yet a further step and the hospital which could offer the next stage in their path; it was on this occasion at the Hackney Royal Orthopeadic Hospital, as the girl and boy took their baby into the building that they felt the most scared.

A surgery was looming and the girl was left to adjust to the hospital bed.  Once seated in the ward, this was the time that the girl had to settle her own stress and anxiety, look after the daughter who would be herself despite her age and distraction aware that something was wrong.  It was all ok, or so she made believe.  The nursing team came and went like a dream.  The medication and pre-med administered whilst the girl made everything seem normal and as well as possible.  Then the long walk down the corridor, the horrible sound of the feet as the operating team walked, and the little girl was taken towards theatre.  No lovely theatre, but the operation which would mean, hands on medical intervention.  That part was strange, full of smells and lighting that felt odd. 

The girl pretended that this walk was one which took them both to a place out of that hospital; it was a journey to a fun filled theatre and not the kind which would mean drugs and operations to one so small.  Yet when they arrived it would always seem so real.  The doors which the girl would have to stop at.  The environment which would take her small girl that too many steps away.  It was a bridge that she felt she could not pass.

The mother’s hand would be tight on the girl.  The grip which would connect two hearts.  As the touch soothed, made the girl feel that everything was all right.  The baby would look to the mother for strength, for courage and it was at that point that time would stand still.  It was as the injection would go into the vein, plunge into the baby’s skin, and the eyes which had been holding on to the mother’s for so long, fluttered… that the link would feel at its most strong and yet it was also then that the surgical team had to gently pull them apart. 

Having been told by the staff to go; to do something distracting while the operation took place, she thought what could she do?  What can you do when your little girl is in hospital theatre?  Is there a distracting thing on Earth which could help; and it was then that she was attracted to the hospital chapel.

It was there, that she walked through the doors, and took a seat… Quiet and daunting this place held an echoing terror of its own.  Was she really here?  One girl who had travelled so far, from the other side of the world, and who had been led to this point.  Waiting in this sacred place for news of her little girl from theatre.

The tears came.  It was evident they would.  The pent up stress; and the thoughts of how things were such a prospect that it left her to contemplate how effortless it was to give up to distress.  Her mind went to a time when she had heard, in folklore back in her own country, about times when prophets walked amongst the people and how much hope this would have offered.  How good it would have been to be able to just go up to someone and ask, go up to someone who had answers.

It was cold in that chapel.  It was in those times that the girl felt she could have given anything just to have someone there who would have been like a prophet, it was then that there was a bang and a noise which had her look up, a breeze rushed past and as she looked down a fold of paper laid by her feet, as she picked it up she read just what was on it: He is where he is needed.

The inclination to get up and look round was there; to get up and see who had given her the paper.  But there was no one there.  Alone in the chapel the girl was left to sit and contemplate how true those words were and how much in that time of need she was helped.

The little girl came out of the operation with a smile on her face.  Not phased by the procedure at all, she was well and the girl felt renewed hope.

“You who are encased in matter and have to face the daily problems and obstacles of your material bodies sometimes become so engrosed with these purely material things that you loose sight of the great spiritual realities behind them.”

“How easy it is to think of the body as the individual and this world in which you live as the reality and not to realise the truth which is that your world is the shadow and that your body is but the instrument of a much larger self.”  Silver Birch. 

Read more next Thursday.

One Response to Chart of Life part 7.

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