One Breath At A Time

If you’ve read the Healing School blog before, you may have wondered about my personal experiences with healing. My stories reflect the variety of ways in which God heals us, one breath at a time.

I remember one night spent at my Grandma’s, an old farmhouse in eastern Georgia
similar to this one,

surrounded by fields and red dirt roads. Cracks let in windblown dust, and my Grandma’s asthma did not allow her energy to keep the place as clean as I’m sure she would have liked. Or perhaps it was the feather pillow that made it difficult for me to breathe. I awoke in the night, gasping, coughing, unable to draw air deeply into my lungs. My mother prayed. Every parent will recognize the fear that tried to come upon us that night, particularly since my mother had watched her own mother fight this battle. I do not remember how long the attack lasted, or how much sleep anyone got, but it passed. I was nearly six years old.

I missed about half my first and second grade school days due to illness – pneumonia, whooping cough, chronic bronchitis. At one point my father took me to the doctor for an injection before school every morning. I hated baring my derriere for those shots. In school I got a reputation as a teacher’s pet - bright, compliant, able to converse with adults and answer questions by our family’s Japan booth at church missions conferences. But around my peers – when I was there - I was hopelessly shy, uncoordinated, the last one picked for sports teams. If I was up to bat, or if a boy spoke to me, I would go into paralysis.

“Just try to hit the ball,” they would yell in frustration as I stood, frozen, while the slow pitches drifted over home plate like snowflakes, one after another.

Inside I would think, “I am trying. This is me, trying. I just can’t make my arms move.”

In other games, I could run fast enough, or play dodgeball, but too much effort and I would begin to wheeze. Not at all the healthy, strong childhood God intended.

And then my family met two septuagenarians, God’s healing ambassadors to me.

Friends told us about Dr. Denmark, a Georgia legend and quite possibly the world’s oldest pediatrician. Today she is 108 and semi-retired but still gives phone consultations from home. When I was seven, she was treating second and third-generation patients.

She made no appointments and had no receptionist, just saw patients in the order of arrival. While waiting our turn, I watched squirrels play in the rhododendrons. Once I saw her husband walking in the driveway of their home next door, and wondered what it was like for him, being married to the awe-inspiring Dr. Denmark. I remember the cool dry touch of her hand, the grey hair in a bun above her stark white labcoat, her no-nonsense manner.

“Forget the injections,” she told my parents. “Give her hamburger and black-eyed peas for breakfast.” Although they thankfully did not follow that specific regimen, they took her advice and focused on wellness, strengthening my body’s immunity with common sense nutrition and exercise instead of treating me like the invalid I had very nearly become. Riding a bike up and down our driveway and climbing our magnolia tree became my daily pleasures.

“Never let anyone tell this child she’s sick,” Dr. Denmark said, out of my hearing. My mother now tells me that guests would visit our home, ask me how I felt, and I would wheeze, “I – feel – fine.” And over time, I did.

Gradually, I became a normal child, able to attend school every day with only an occasional illness. In third grade, I made my first real friend at that school, defined as one who would not beg me to reveal the name of the boy I liked, then immediately write it in the fogged-up bus window for all to see. Life became good.

Dr. Leila Denmark wrote a book, Every Child Deserves a Chance, and she helped give me mine. Around the same time, God used a second septuagenarian to minister healing to me. I’ve asked my mother to tell you that story in her own words, someday soon.