A Heart of Hope

I have a cousin, a first cousin once removed if you want to get technical.  Her name is Megan and she is the daughter of my first cousin, Wayne.  Megan is twenty-five, movie star beautiful, and sweet as peach pie.  Today was her wedding day.  She married a wonderful young man named Nathan.  They will live in Tennessee and begin this new chapter of their lives as we all did; young, madly in love, and figuring things out as they go. 

I diverge my usual teaching-centered writings today because Megan’s story is one you need to hear.  It will remind you that life is precarious and bittersweet and full of hope.  I do not know all of the details, as I live a great distance from her home and was not first-party witness to the story I am about to tell, but I can share what I recall and come at it from my own perspective.

When Megan was a teenager, a virus invaded her perfectly healthy heart, causing an athletic, picture-of-health girl to become incredibly ill.  It was a fluke thing, the doctors said.  It could happen to anyone.  Why Megan?  Only God knows.  This is where Faith becomes the bedrock of a person’s life.

Megan recovered and resumed her life, for the most part.  She did not spend a great deal of time dwelling on that unpleasant chapter of her life.  She graduated high school, went on to college, and then found a job she loved.  Her life was as beautiful as she is.

In the fall of 2009, she began to experience some of the same troubling signs she had endured before.  With growing certainty she knew that something was terribly wrong with her heart and she dreaded the thought so much that she kept her symptoms to herself and tried to function normally.  Around Thanksgiving of that year, she knew the jig was up.  She was growing weaker by the day and becoming desperately ill.  She finally confessed her symptoms to her parents and the doctors confirmed her fears.  Her heart was degenerating rapidly and was not going to get better.

Megan’s perfect life now spiraled downward with dizzying speed.  She soon became too weak to do anything except lie on the sofa and simply BE.  She had energy for almost nothing and her parents watched their child go from successful, healthy young adult to bed-ridden invalid.  Breathing became difficult and keeping food down nearly impossible.  Her already thin frame lost pounds it could ill-afford to lose. At her lowest point she weighed something like eighty-five pounds. 

Her dad, my cousin, began to journal their journey in the form on an online blog, much as I am doing now.  He found solace in pouring out his grief digitally.  Thousands of us cried and grieved with a daddy who was watching his girl lose her fight.  It was almost unbearable to read some of those posts.

By March of 2010, her situation was critical.  Somewhere in that time frame, she was placed on the heart transplant list, which is a complicated acceptance process with layers of “need.”  Because there are so few organ donors in comparison to need, only the most ill and near death are even considered for such a rare gift as a healthy heart.  The list of criteria to be considered is staggering.

Megan was too ill to really understand all that swirled around her during that time.  She had been in the hospital for many weeks, every breath a fight.  Her parents stood helplessly by her bed and watched her hover ever closer to death.  They were powerless to stop the progression of her insidious disease. They could only cover her with their unfailing love and storm the gates of Heaven with their prayers. 

How does one go about praying for such a thing as a heart for a loved one?  You fully understand that in doing so, you are asking the death of someone else to be hastened.  Someone’s mother, or son, or brother will have to die so that the one you love can live.  It is a heavy duty to ask such a thing of God.  And yet….  You do it.  You have to.  You trust a loving God to sort all the ethical details out.  You WILL your child or spouse or friend to LIVE. And you pray for a heart to come before it is too late. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.  We do whatever it takes to keep our loved ones near us.

March melded into April and Megan’s doctors knew they were running out of time.  Megan’s frail heart would soon be finished nourishing her body with life-giving blood.  Options were discussed and a stop-gap measure was found that would buy her a little time, but just a little. 

On April 17^th, her heart had had enough.  Pneumonia invaded her body and as her temperature rose, her chances for survival plummeted.  Her parents could see it on the face of every medical person that came in to her room that day. 

It was time to say goodbye to Megan. 

What Megan and her family did NOT know just yet, was that a donor heart had become available that matched perfectly.  Unbelievably bad timing that now that she had a heart, she was too sick to receive it.  But her doctor did the unthinkable and began to screen and prep her anyway, without raising the hopes of her family.  They did not know that their miracle had become available.  They only knew that Man said it was too late.

You need to know that our family believes in prayer.  And we believe that God is in the business of miracles.  So while Megan’s heart and body failed, the rest of us went to prayer.  Does God hear our prayers?  I believe that He does.  I’ll never forget the phone call I received telling me that Megan’s white cell count was dropping and her temperature returning back to normal.  The pneumonia she had begun the day with was leaving her body.  Now things sped up at breakneck speed. 

Oh, the rejoicing when Megan and her family learned of the beautiful, pink heart waiting for her!  By Sunday evening, Megan was recuperating from heart transplant surgery and was experiencing the reverse of what she had been.  She was no longer in the process of dying.  Now she could get back to the business of living. So many miracles and so much to marvel over.  Megan was alive, thanks to the unspeakable gift of a donor heart. 

I took a picture today.  I stood at the window on the second story of my house and photographed the sky, as I often do living here on the prairie.  The rain was coming down somewhere to the west of us.  We can see storms coming for miles.  An opaque black curtain stretched from sky to earth.  But shining through the dark of that curtain,  for just a moment, the image of the sun was radiant.

I think that describes Megan’s story to perfection.  The best of modern science and medicine said that hope was gone for her.  They had done the very best they could.  It must have been so difficult to deliver that news to her grieving family.  All seemed incredibly dark for a time.  We hate it, but sorrow touches even movie-star beautiful, sweet twenty-five year-olds. 

And yet….

The sun had never really stopped shining.  Storm clouds can cover that brilliance so completely that we forget it is still with us.  All we see are dark clouds.  But it is there;  shining, and illuminating, and warming lives.  I believe it is called Hope.

Today Megan stood in front of the same Dear Ones who never left her side for all those months and made promises to a young man that God brought in to her life just weeks after her transplant.  Nathan and my son, Trevor, have been good friends for quite some time.  Trevor and Megan have shared a friendship that transcends familial blood-ties and Trevor convinced Megan to visit him in Kansas City as soon as she was healthy enough to travel.

During that visit, on a whim, Trevor stopped at Nathan’s place and introduced he and Megan to one another.  Megan’s second miracle was now unfolding.  Before long, they were dating and quickly fell in love.  Megan’s new heart was now truly christened.  It had found a home in Nathan’s love.

I stand in awe of Megan’s story.  It bespeaks of all life’s most ardent emotions;  sorrow, grief, desperation, joy, new love…and hope.  Always hope. 

I could not attend the wedding, but my heart was there, sharing a day pregnant with meaning and emotion.  This day was the culmination of a love story that began long before Nathan and Megan ever laid eyes on one another.  Their story begins long, long before that.  Their story tells of a God who knew that Night would turn to Daybreak for Megan.

Even when it was the darkest, the sun was still shining. 

Megan’s heart somehow knew it….

(If you would like to read more about Megan’s story, the web address is:  http://megansheartstory.blogspot.com/)