Seasons Under Heaven (9 page)

Dilated congestive cardiomyopathy.

The words exploded in Brenda’s head with the power of dynamite. She was glad Joseph was not in the room to see the effect this diagnosis was having on his parents; he’d have been frightened to death.

“It’s a condition probably caused by a viral infection,” the doctor was saying in a slow, deliberate voice. “It causes the muscle of the heart to weaken, making the chambers dilate.” He held up a diagram of the heart, trying to demonstrate what he was explaining. But the alarm bells wouldn’t stop ringing in Brenda’s mind. “As the virus damages the heart muscle, the chambers of the heart dilate and the contractions become ineffective. Right now, Joseph’s heart is not able to pump enough blood to adequately maintain his circulation.”

“What virus?” David asked the doctor in a voice that sounded far away. “When?”

“There’s a remote chance that he’s had cardiomyopathy since birth and it’s just now presenting. Or somewhere along the way, another illness may have done some damage. But my guess is that it was the virus he had a few weeks ago.”

“So what do we do?” Brenda choked out, fighting tears. She couldn’t go out of here with a red, runny nose. Joseph would sense her despair immediately. Nine-year-old boys shouldn’t have to worry about the condition of their heart.

“Well, we have three options. There’s a very good possibility that, with the proper medication, the heart muscle will make a full recovery.”

“Medication?” Brenda asked as the first balloon of hope inflated in her heart. “Really?”

“It’s a possibility,” he repeated. “The second option is that, if it doesn’t heal itself with medication, we’ll have to medicate Joseph for the rest of his life to keep his heart functioning.”

Her hope deflated. Medication for the rest of his life?

“And the third option?” David asked.

“Well, surgery. But it all depends on the biopsy,” he said. “I’d like to put Joseph in the hospital today and perform a biopsy first thing in the morning. We need to find out the full extent of the damage to his heart before we can take any action.”

“And…” she swallowed, trying to steady her voice. “What will that entail?”

“I won’t lie to you,” Dr. Robinson said, leaning on his desk. “It’s a pretty tedious process for a little boy, so we’ll need your help. What I’ll do is cut into the artery and insert a catheter. This isn’t painful. He’ll be semi-awake for everything, and you’ll be able to watch on the monitor as the catheter goes through the arteries and into the heart’s chambers. We insert dye to help us see what we need to see, and this sometimes causes discomfort. It’s a warm sensation, and passes pretty quickly. If we tell Joseph what to expect, he should take it just fine.”

“Is that all there is to it?” David asked.

“Well, no. He’ll have to lie flat and be immobilized for several hours afterward while we keep pressure on the incision.
That’s where we’ll really need you. This is difficult for adults, so you can imagine how hard it’ll be with a little boy.”

“Joseph will do fine,” Brenda said.

“What will all this tell us?” David asked.

“It’ll tell us how bad things are,” Dr. Robinson answered. “And what we need to do to save his life.”

They found Joseph sitting up and playing a game of Memory with the nurse, who seemed used to entertaining children while the doctor fulfilled their parents’ worst nightmares. Joseph looked up at Brenda, and she knew that she hadn’t done a very good job of hiding the evidence of her tears.

“How you feeling, honey?” she asked, hugging him so tight that she feared she might break him.

“Okay, Mama,” he said.

David stooped down next to him, meeting his eyes. “Doctor tells us you’re sick, buddy. He wants to put you in the hospital and do some more tests.”

Joseph’s hazel eyes grew round. “Now?”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t worry, honey,” Brenda said. “I’ll stay with you. And you won’t be in long. Just a night or two.”

“Will I get to eat ice cream?”

Brenda smiled. Daniel had had his tonsils out two years ago, and the other three kids had felt deprived because of all the attention and ice cream lavished upon him. “Probably. We’ll see.”

As they headed for the car, Brenda wished with all her heart that ice cream was all that Joseph needed.

The catheterization went well the next morning, and Joseph took it all as if it was another of their field trips. Brenda patiently
tried to explain everything that was happening, taking advantage of the opportunity to teach him a little anatomy.

It was late that afternoon when the doctor came with the results. David and Brenda stepped out into the hall while the nurse fussed over Joseph.

“How is he, Doctor?” David asked anxiously.

“Well, I’m really very pleased with what we found. His heart valves and his veins and arteries look pretty good. That’s good news. His left ventricle is still not pumping like it should, and it’s enlarged. But it’s possible that he’ll make a full recovery with medication.”

Brenda caught her breath. Had he really said that medication was all Joseph needed?

“Medication?” David asked as if voicing her thoughts. “Not surgery?”

“Not yet,” Dr. Robinson said. “We’re going to start with a couple of drugs that will lower his blood pressure and reduce the force of the contraction of the heart. We’ll want to keep him another day or so. I’d like to transfer him to the telemetry unit. We’ll hook him up to a transmitter and monitor his heart. He’ll be able to walk around the halls and get some exercise, but the nurse’s station will have the heart monitor so we can watch him. After we release him, we’ll give him a portable heart monitor to wear all day, and then you can bring it back in so we can analyze his cardiac activity and see how he’s doing.”

Brenda didn’t like the sound of any of this, but she did appreciate that they were planning to watch things so closely.

“What if things don’t go like you hope?” David asked.

“They may not,” the doctor admitted. “Then we’ll have to look at surgery. But if he’s lucky, he’ll be back to normal in just a few months. And he looks like a lucky kid to me.”

After Joseph fell asleep that night, Brenda and David sat quietly in the darkened hospital room, watching him, saying nothing. Sylvia, who was staying with their other three children, had encouraged David to stay as long as he wanted to, and Brenda
knew that if there had been enough room, he would have spent the night there, too.

She touched Joseph’s forehead. He was cold, clammy. She straightened his covers, trying not to move the cords and wires attached to his chest. The
tick, tick, tick
of the heart monitor beside his bed was getting on her nerves—especially the occasional blips that broke the rhythm, startling her. But she had been impressed by the diligence with which the nurses watched him. They had ten heart monitors over their station, monitoring ten patients, and whenever Joseph’s heart stumbled, they ran to check on him.

David’s hand touched her shoulder and she turned around. He pulled her into a reassuring hug. She began to weep, and afraid of waking Joseph, she pulled out of his arms and walked out of the room.

David followed her into the corridor. Not knowing where else to go, she went into the stairwell next to their door, sat on the top step, and buried her face in her hands. He sat down next to her and stroked her back helplessly as she wept.

After a while, she looked up at him. “David, if Joseph is out of here by then, I want you to go to church with us Sunday.”

He looked away. “Brenda, we’ve talked about this a million times. I don’t do church.”

“I know, but this is different. We’ve never had a child with a heart problem before.”

“And how does that make things different?”

“Because we both need to believe, David.” Her words were uttered urgently, tearfully.

“Honey, I know how much you want me to believe. But wanting me to won’t make it happen. I just don’t. I can’t.”

She wiped her face and tried to look stronger. “I’m going to ask them to lay hands on him Sunday,” she said. “I’d like for you to be there. It’s very important.”

“No way.” He got up and his face began to redden. “They’ll lay hands on Joseph over my dead body.”

His outburst stunned her, and she got to her feet. “David, why?”

“I have my reasons.” He pointed a trembling finger at her. “So help me, Brenda, they’re not gonna touch my son.”

Her face twisted as she tried to understand. “David, this is ridiculous. I know you’re bitter about church, but for heaven’s sake, the Bible tells us in the book of James that we can go to the elders of the church and they can pray—”

“I’ve kept my mouth shut all these years, Brenda,” he cut in. The rims of his eyes were beginning to redden, and the anguish on his face astonished her. “I’ve let you drag all four children to church with you. It didn’t seem to do any harm, so I’ve allowed it. But I draw the line when it comes to laying hands on my boy.”

“David, if you don’t believe in God, then what difference would it make to you?”

“It’ll make a difference to Joseph!” he bit out. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a little kid and have a bunch of hateful, Scripture-chanting hypocrites surrounding you with their hands all over you. It stays with you for life, Brenda. It changes the way you think! They’re not going to do it to my son!”

Brenda gaped at him, desperately trying to put this new information into the context of David’s background. “Stays with you for life? Changes the way you think? David, did someone lay hands on you?”

He swung around and reached for the door handle. “I’m going home. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“No; David. Please! We need to talk about this. How can I understand you when you won’t talk to me?”

He stopped before opening the door, and turned slowly back around. He was trying to calm himself, taking deep, deliberate breaths. His voice was low when he finally spoke. “All right. Let’s talk. You want rational reasons, I’ll give you some. It doesn’t work, for one. If it did, everybody would be doing it, and we wouldn’t need hospitals. They have funerals for Christians every day, just like everybody else.”

She tried to think. Somehow, this was a conversation vital to David’s life. She had to answer wisely. “Because God doesn’t choose to heal everyone.”

“That’s convenient,” he said. “You’re told that He’ll heal you, and then if He doesn’t you can say He just didn’t choose to. So how does anybody ever know what to believe?”

Her tears assaulted her again as this disappointment she had grown accustomed to hurt her as if it was new. “Faith, David. It’s just faith.”

“What about Joseph’s faith, when he expects to be healed but walks out of there still sick? And what happens when nothing changes, and your church friends start saying it must be because there’s sin in your life, or in Joseph’s life—or better yet, in
my
life, since I’m the one who doesn’t buy into all this? What they’ll be saying is that God is cursing our little boy, because otherwise their prayers would have healed him. And then they’ll say it’s a demon, not a heart problem, that’s keeping him from getting well. How’s he going to feel about having a demon in him, Brenda? What do you think that’ll do to a little kid’s mind?”

She wasn’t angry anymore, for suddenly she understood. These weren’t hypotheticals, thrown out to win an argument. This was a scene right out of David’s childhood. It had happened. New tears trickled down her cheeks as she looked at him. “They told you you had a demon?” she asked.

“I was one angry kid,” David whispered, as if saying it too loudly might shatter him completely. “I had reason to be. And not because of any demon. It was disappointment.”

“About your father,” she whispered.

He shot her a look, as if surprised she knew.

“Your mother told me before she died,” she said. “You had never told me you were a preacher’s kid.”

He breathed a laugh and rolled his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe she would call him that. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you knew?”

“I wanted you to tell me yourself,” she admitted. “It seemed like such a painful thing.”

“Then she told you about the organist he left town with?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and stood there for a moment. Was he thinking that his mother had betrayed him? Brenda hoped not. He was angry enough at his mother already.

“So I suppose she told you about the parsonage, too—how the dear church gave us a week to get out because they had to make room for their new preacher. How we had to live in a garage apartment…”

No, his mother hadn’t told Brenda that. She listened to him carefully, gratefully. She’d been so desperate to understand. “No wonder you were angry,” she whispered.

He laughed bitterly as tears misted in his eyes. “They were sure I had a demon. Tried to cast it out.”

“David, those people didn’t know God. They couldn’t have, or they would have loved you and cared for you. They would have seen what you needed.”

He shook his head. “I know you think your church is different, Brenda. On the surface, maybe it seems that way. But it’s not.”

“Come and see,” she pleaded. “You can stand right there as they pray for him. It won’t be a bunch of people yelling and pushing on him, David. Just a few of the elders, gently touching him, talking to God and asking Him for healing. Nothing angry or evil. Just people of faith taking their needs to God. Look at me.”

He raised his eyes, and she saw the trepidation, the pain there.

“David, you know how much I love our children. Would I ever put them in jeopardy? Would I let anyone frighten them or hurt them in any way?”

“Not on purpose.”

“It’s not going to hurt Joseph to have a group of people praying for him. It’ll just remind him that God is there, with him, that He won’t let him down.”

Anger flashed across David’s face again, and she knew what he was thinking: That there was, as Brenda had admitted, no
guarantee that God would heal Joseph—and if He didn’t, then in David’s opinion God would indeed have let Joseph down. She knew David couldn’t understand. Nor was it something she could explain to him. It was something only the Holy Spirit could convince him of.