True story… At the hospital, Erik was led to a private waiting area, where the brain surgeon came in to see him and his wife.
The surgeon explained that their daughter had been in a road traffic accident and was in a medically induced coma. Her vitals were stable but the doctor explained that they’d had to relieve the pressure on her brain by removing a piece of skull.
Erik and his wife were numb. They drank rubbish coffee from a machine and stayed by their daughter’s bedside. Late that night, her intracranial pressure spiked and she was wheeled into theatre once more.
Erik held his wife and sobbed, ‘Where is the good in any of this?’
When Kate came out of her second brain surgery, the doctors transferred her to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where she underwent intensive rounds of therapy. Because of the accident, she could no longer speak, her depth perception was impaired, and she had lost nearly all of her memories.
Miraculously, by October, Katy was able to return to school part-time and continued to attend rehab. Everything was super-slow. Remember, she was missing a chunk of skull.
By November, the little girl was well enough to return to Stony Brook so that the doctors could replace the missing jigsaw piece of bone and it seemed that, despite the odds, Katy was going to make it.
Her dad continued searching for the meaning in everything that had happened: I’m grateful she’s alive, he admitted on the eve of her third brain surgery, but I don’t know how much more of her I am going to get back.
Again, he returned to the question: Where is the good in any of this?
He found it when Katy came out of the surgery. The two of them were in the recovery room. His daughter was still woozy from the anaesthesia when a series of visitors began arriving at her bedside.
The first person to come was a doctor. ‘Katy, you wouldn’t remember me,’ she said. ‘I’m the admitting physician who was in the emergency room the day you came in.’
Moments later, a smiling nurse popped by: ‘Hi Katy, great to see you on the mend. You won’t remember me, but I was the nurse who was there when the original operating team came and started working on you.’
‘Katy, you wouldn’t remember me,’ another guest said, ‘but I was the chaplain on duty when you came in and I spent time with your parents.’
The grapes and flowers were piling up!
‘Hi Katy,’ said the next person, ‘you won’t have a clue who I am, but I was the social worker who liaised with school.’
‘And I was the nurse on your second surgery,’ said another beaming visitor.
According to her dad it was ‘a parade of smiling faces.’
The last visitor was a nurse named Nancy Strong, who had overseen Katy’s stay in the intensive care unit over the summer. Erik pulled her aside and said, ‘You know, I think it’s great that you are all coming by to wish Katy luck. But there’s something else going on here, isn’t there?’
‘Yeah,’ Nancy said, ‘there is. For every ten kids we see with this injury, nine of them die. There is only one Katy. We need to come back and we need to see her, because she is what keeps us coming back to work in this place every day.’
And Erik realized, this is the good.
The message, loud, proud and clear from the entire Art of Brilliance team… NHS and social care; thank you.
Thank you for caring.
Parents, step-parents, foster parents, grandparents, thank you for caring.
Teachers, teaching assistants, lunchtime supervisors, school caretakers, thank you for caring.
Shortly before he died of cancer Kenneth Schwartz wrote, ‘quiet acts of humanity have felt more healing than the high-dose radiation and chemotherapy that hold the hope of cure. While I do not believe that hope and comfort alone can overcome cancer, it certainly made a huge difference to me.’
Anyone in a caring profession, whatever your job and whatever pay grade you’re on, or indeed whether you’re caring for an elderly relative for no pay whatsoever, I thank you for your ‘quiet acts of humanity’.
Thank you for caring.
Pass it on.