Read for the Cure

Chapter Six: THE LONGEST NIGHT

In a perfect world, no one person would ever have to do a hard thing alone. If you were lucky, there would always be people around you and many unseen hands helping you. There would be whispers of encouragement to buoy you up and sentences said in passing that would all only be positive and full of good will; beautiful words that would float up into the air like bandages ready to bind and dress your wounded spirit and all your friends would be constantly on the alert to help keep you from falling off of that high, steep, dangerous place named: despair.

I was in the hospital and almost died from a severe reaction to my first dose of chemotherapy. During those five days, a grand total of 120 hours, there was literally only one person employed at the hospital who thought to deliver me a prescription that I badly needed for my spirit. This angel of mercy, this sweetheart of a nurse bent over my bed, gently laid a hand on my arm, and transmitted to me, in the form of a reassuring shake, a speech without any words that so eloquently said: “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

No. I did not hear those words spoken aloud but I could read her heart through her hands and I will tell you that that one single hearty clasp on my arm spoke volumes to me and offered to me what traditional medicine in that hospital had not been able to give, did not know how to give, some courage for the journey, an antidote more commonly known as: HOPE.

Earlier that same day an army of experts had surrounded my bed and no-one in that group had bothered to speak to me, they only spoke about me, as if I was not there. I wondered as I lay there silently if any of them knew the power that could be found in a single, human gesture. As they discussed additional remedies and remarked on the severity of my case, I thought about the healing power that nurse’s silent medicine had had on me earlier that gave me something that could not be measured in cc’s or units. She did not record the dose on any hospital chart but this medicine had begun its work in me, all the same.

“You’ll be all right,” that wordless grip had murmured to me softly, feeding me what I most hungered for and most needed to feast upon, something uplifting, some pill that had a drop of the milk of human kindness in it. I found myself yearning for any one of those doctors clumped about my bed that morning to look up at me if even for one brief moment, to catch my eye, to smile at me, but none of them had.

But, I had been silently spoken to during the night. My body had listened and my spirit now had some strength to soar in a new direction, one that said that yes, I might be down but I was not out yet. This small gesture had emboldened me enough inside that I gathered enough energy in me to believe it. Here was the exact medicine that I needed; some faith along with the antibiotics was a winning combination, the pearl beyond price, because what it offered was something priceless.

And no… there would not be a charge from the hospital for this nameless treatment, nobody on staff would count the cost of that dose and charge me for it. There was no visible amount in quantity dispensed that would show up later on any of my bills. And yet it still would seem crazy to me that no-one would stop long enough, as busy as they all were, to calculate the real value, the healing power of one single kind gesture to a person in need---one wish from one heart to another, one simple plea for your recovery from a stranger who cared about you, what immense good that could do to aid in your recovery, how needed for a body it was and how little of it was being applied. Who knows if it might be a very important ingredient needed to make all that other very expensive medicine work.