Heritage Snapshot: Part 83

Oscar’s cheerfulness and love of life infected everyone who met him. He visited every new patient on the children’s unit and wanted each one to be his friend. When a six-year-old girl was admitted with problems similar to his, he assured her that he was praying for her. “Be brave,” he said. “Those needles hurt, but I know that you will be brave.” He brought her flowers, shared his lunches, and entertained her by plucking randomly on his toy guitar, singing as he played. Dr. Dale Rowland, then a pediatric resident, and Dr. Ralph Harris sometimes invited Oscar to accompany them on rounds as they visited other patients. Whenever a child was about to have blood drawn for the first time, Oscar would hold the child’s hand and say, “You won’t need to cry. I have this done to me all the time. It just hurts for a minute.” A kidney transplant was Oscar’s only hope for a normal life. He and his nurse, Bonnie Porter, talked about it often. Bonnie asked Dr. Harris about donating one of her kidneys for a transplant. But the idea was not practical. Unless the tissue matched perfectly, the organ would be rejected. Twice, when acceptable organs were available, Oscar had kidney and urinary tract infections. His condition made surgery risky no matter what course the physicians took. Finally, because his kidneys threatened his life and had twice prevented transplants, the decision was made to remove them at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. A week after returning home from surgery, Oscar became listless and began breathing with difficulty. Fearing heart failure, Bonnie took him to the Medical Center even though he protested that he was “not that sick.” Medicine and dialysis seemed to correct his problems, and by 10:30 p.m. he was sleeping comfortably. But two hours later, early Tuesday morning, Oscar went into cardiac arrest. The medical team succeeded in shocking his heart into a steady, normal beat, a procedure that often leads to recovery. But valiant little Oscar was unconscious. During the next few hours his heart stopped beating and was restarted a dozen times. A respirator assisted his breathing. A dialysis machine cleansed his blood and intravenous solutions enriched it. Nurses and friends lingered outside his room hoping to be needed. Among those standing by, none had his brown skin or black hair. But one young woman’s tears were nearer the surface. Oscar was not her child, but Bonnie Porter was obviously “his mother.” The doctors shared anxious glances with her. The effort to revive Oscar continued for three days. Bonnie tried to communicate: “Oscar, this is Mommy. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” No response. She played his favorite record over and over again in hopes that he would give some sign that he heard her. But he did not. Although his heart continued to beat, on Thursday afternoon, Oscar’s electroencephalogram went flat. His brain was dead. At Bonnie’s request, Oscar was laid in her arms. She gently rocked him to sleep for the last time, weeping softly as dozens of Oscar’s hospital friends silently bade him good-bye. “Go to sleep, baby, go to sleep,” Bonnie whispered. She cradled him in her arms for three hours before he took his last breath at 4:24 that Thursday afternoon. Neither the 70 dialysis treatments he endured, nor the pain, nothing but death itself had succeeded in stifling his buoyant charm. According to Dr. Harris, “What we learned [Oscar had been the most ‘conferenced’ child at the Medical Center] didn’t enable us to save Oscar’s life, but it will help others. We learned a lot about life from Oscar, too. We learned about love and courage and the will to live.” Writing about the experience later, Chaplain M. Jerry Davis, Rel.D., said, “The plant was broken before the bud had bloomed. The problem of unfulfilled potential arouses in the heart the simple, pointed question, ‘Why?’ The Scriptural answer is that sorrow, suffering, sadness, and death have no place in God’s plan. They are the reason for His plan.…”