laugh

It feels like a lifetime ago that I sat next to little Sadie’s bed, holding vigil over his motionless body, willing him to live. Despite pouring everything we had into that boy, we failed and the cancer won. I was just thinking about how easy it is to focus on the failures. Despite a year of successful surgeries, lives changed and futures reconstructed, it’s the ones we couldn’t fix that haunt me in the dark hours of the night.

I think God knew about this quirk of human nature, our proclivity to remember the dark even in the face of so much light, because he recently sent us Esau. He came to us with an eye swollen and bulging. After surgery was done to remove the useless tissue, the diagnosis was confirmed: Burkitt’s lymphoma. Again. Esau lay in his bed, curled up in a little ball, his head wrapped in layers and layers of gauze as we tried to stop the bleeding. His father (or brother; he answers to both titles) sat at the end of his bed, alternately patting Esau’s back or turning his head away from the sight of a small boy so sick.

And because we couldn’t see another one die like Sadie, God didn’t let it happen this time. Instead, we were able to get a dose of cyclophosphamide, the chemotherapy that is almost always effective against this oh-so-treatable (if you catch it soon enough) cancer. We pumped it into Esau’s small body and we held our collective breath in a silent, desperate prayer for healing. Because we all knew we couldn’t do it again.

If today was any indication, it would seem that God was listening. The bandages are long gone; Esau now sports nothing but a little patch over his missing eye. He runs around the wards, dishing out hugs and smiles with reckless abandon. And he laughs. Oh, how that child laughs. If the internet will ever cooperate with me, I’m going to upload a video of this child laughing, and I defy you to keep a straight face as you watch it.

I was doing something in another corner of the ward today when I heard two people talking. They were discussing Esau’s condition and the history of his sickness. His father/brother probably had no idea how profound his words were, but they summed up our entire work here in two short sentences.

He was sad for months and months, ever since he took that sickness. But now ... now he can laugh!

When we sail in three weeks and patients are left behind, a few of them maybe not-quite-healed, it’s Esau’s laugh that I need to remember, not Sadie’s death.

Edited to add the love:


(See what I mean?)