Through My Daughter’s Eyes

I have just emerged from spending 16 days in the hospital with my nine-year-old daughter. I learned a lot of lessons about life, medicine, giving and receiving. I would like to share these lessons because they are eternally valuable and were acquired at great expense.

The night before the biggest event of the year for my organization was spent in the emergency room admitting my daughter with a severe infection that could have spread to her eyes and brain. After working for two dogged months on the event, I decided to forgo my attendance and let my staff run the whole affair. Who cared anyway? I needed to focus on my daughter and her well being. Nothing else mattered. If this is the way the Almighty wanted it to go, who was I to say differently? I felt relieved and redefined as a professional. I felt free, and to this day have not quite snapped back into my old uptight, competitive self. Was there really anything more important than my family's well being?

 
Instead of the usual rest and intense preparation the day before I meet 1,000 of my most important supporters and students, I was comforting my child at 2 A.M. as we entered the hospital room that would be our residence for the next 16 days.

 
After much discomfort, she fell asleep at 3:30 a.m., now hooked up to a continuous IV line and having her vitals signs checked on an hourly basis. I slept, or rather tried to sleep, next to her in my street clothes, not prepared for the journey I was now embarking upon.

My daughter's discomfort was apparent. The nurse, Teresa, was so kind, gentle and caring. Out of nowhere she brought my daughter a Barbie Doll in an unopened box in the wee hours of the morning.

 
My daughter was stunned. A present! What for? This is a hospital, not a birthday party. As a middle child in a large family, she sometimes fell through the cracks, and not much unclaimed manna came her way. Here was a present to die for, from nothing. She held the box and stopped crying, falling into a deep sleep which hourly examinations could not arouse.

Our Sages teach that unless we use life's traumas, pressures, challenges and crises to grow, they become a curse instead of the blessing they are meant to be.

For those who understand there is a God directing our lives, we need to recognize when we are being given a crisis in order to grow. The Jewish definition of a crisis is not being able to identify and access, as of yet, the tools that God embedded in us to deal with the situation at hand. We have to find those tools and then use such moments to become more than we are. The Almighty orchestrates the most perfect designer situation for each of us. If we learn to go with it rather than fight it, maybe we can understand how to become better from it. Maybe that will speed up the situation's resolution.

We taught this to our children, and added that now is the time to come together as a family and to support one other. We all grew closer as a result.

I am a different person because of my daughter's experience. And so is everyone around me. Now I know how to offer help when someone is physically in trouble. I'm not afraid and do not run away from their problem.

I also feel that I discovered humanity again. I was inspired by people of all backgrounds and stripes trying to heal my daughter, both medically and emotionally. I bonded with many people over the shared goal of getting my daughter out of the hospital in the quickest, most painless way possible.

As my daughter walked out of the ward two weeks after she was admitted, she returned the Barbie Doll to the nurses' station, still unopened. She did not need it anymore. She left the nurse, Teresa, who was on duty that first horrific night, a note of thanks, with instructions to give the Barbie Doll to the next little girl who was in distress and would need to find in the grayest of clouds that silver lining of hope and growth.

 

 

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(Rabbi Aryeh Markman, a native of Chicago and a hopeless Cub fan, is executive director of Aish HaTorah Los Angeles. For more information visit www.aishla.com)

 

(Taken from www.olam.org)