Once Upon a Wish Read Online Free Page B

saw that the longest day of her and David’s life was slowly coming to an end. The sky was turning charcoal, and stars were beginning to poke through. The three hours of sleep they had gotten the night before on their drive home from San Antonio was somehow enough, and she knew she wouldn’t get much more until they knew whether or not their baby girl was going to live. That was something they still didn’t know, and as her thoughts started to make her feel sick, she joined the crowd. By then, David had found his way to the room.
    “Hopefully someone will come in soon and tell us what’s going on,” Sherry said, and no sooner, a doctor dressed in white with small glasses, black hair, and a contagious smile walked into the waiting room.
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    “Hi, I’m Paul Shore,” the doctor said to David, giving him a firm handshake and a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder with his other hand. David noticed right away that Paul Shore left the “doctor” out of his introduction.
    “It’s so nice to meet you,” David said, hoping he would turn out to be the man who finally had some answers. He didn’t yet, but he came back later with results of tests they had been running on Tatum.
    “Her liver is failing,” he said gently.
    Devastated by the news but relieved that doctors had identified
which
organ was failing, Sherry and David listened. Dr. Shore explained that toxins were taking over Tatum’s body and her brain was beginning to swell. He performed a successful procedure to keep the swelling down and started Tatum on dialysis.
    Testing and the distribution of medications continued into the late hours of the night and left David and Sherry pacing the waiting room and the hallways. They wanted nothing more than to see their little girl, but that was not an option. She needed them to remain patient and strong.
    The friends and family who had come to join David and Sherry surrounded them and filled them with encouragement. After four hours of dialysis, Dr. Shore told them that the level of ammonia was decreasing in Tatum’s body, but the levels of other toxins, equally as dangerous, remained.
    “Dialysis isn’t enough,” he said, letting out a long breath. “She needs a liver transplant.”
    “Let’s do it. Where do we get a liver?” David asked immediately and hopefully, thinking there had to be some sort of organ bank with an abundance of livers for situations just like theirs. He crossed his arms over his chest and shifted impatiently, ready to follow the doctor into the room with the livers.
    “It doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately,” Dr. Shore said.
    “How
does
it work?” Sherry asked.
    “We put her on a donor list and wait.”
    “How long will that take?” David asked.
    “You never know. It took one little boy two weeks before a match came in,” Dr. Shore said, trying to expose the reality of the situation without scaring them.
    “But we don’t have two weeks,” Sherry said, her voice pushing past a lump forming in her throat.
    “You’re right, we don’t,” he said, “which is why we need to get her on the list and start testing everybody in the family to see who is a potential donor.”
    Sherry would have died to give Tatum her liver, but she had one concern. “I have scar tissue on my liver,” she told Dr. Shore, then shared the story of how a painful childhood bicycling accident that sent a blow to her abdomen had lacerated her liver. “Will that be a problem?” Sherry asked.
    “It shouldn’t be,” Dr. Shore said. “We’ll test you to see if you’re even a match. In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed that we get a liver.” The doubt in their faces triggered the doctor to add, “Sometimes miracles happen.”
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    When Sherry and David received news the next day that they found a liver matching Tatum’s blood type and that it was in transport to Children’s Hospital, they knew it was true—miracles did happen.
    The morning the new liver