I call halt to the rhythmic clatter of my heels on the asphalt.
I have walked back to my car, covering the length of the car park twice, for reasons neither necessary nor urgent. Both times I have turned just as I approached the entrance of the hospital and keeping cadence akin to the military drill I once lived, paced back to my car.
I know people are waiting for me. I know their hearts are desperate and the wait is torturous and long for them. And I'm doing this...
I turn and start to run back to the hospital, diverting down to an entrance not commonly known that will take me through the basement to the elevators hoping to avoid crowds. As I enter I slow, it is a hospital after all, and all too clearly can hear the clatter of my heels again.
My bag falls from my shoulder. I bend to pick it up and only when I reach for the handle, faltering to take hold of it, do I see the tremor in my own hand...
Of late this has become the most difficult of hospitals to enter: The Royal Children's Hospital.
It is all too familiar for the journey I share with my own son, Jack. We have been heavily dependent on this hospital, have known many traumatic and frightening journeys ourselves in here. I know it all too well: the grounds, the floors, the incredible staff, the chapel always empty ( it seems few parents hold faith when they're watching their child struggle). Brilliant doctors, some of the best in the world, reside here, and it has been blessing to have them help us. It is not our family's experience that has my hands trembling.
In the cool, quiet corridor of the basement, I am squat down staring at my hands but not seeing them. Not in this moment.
I'm seeing the brain fluid of a nine-year-old girl running over them, the sutures across her head failing while staff code and frantically prepare to rush her into surgery...
I see the dirt of India beneath them, bloodied by the dripping birthing fluids of newborn twins, both still attached to the placenta fighting for breath...
I see them softly cradling a seven month old baby, screeching in agony from her infusion of chemotherapy...
I see them holding the hand of a mother...
Wiping the eyes of the grandmother...
Soothing the fussing infant, untangling the drips and lines as a toddler runs about me, assisting to hold little posture as the physiotherapist tries to rehabilitate...
The work I"m privileged to do in healing is extraordinary. The people I'm privileged to help even more so.
In the years I have been doing this, I have seen so very much. Perhaps too much.
Suddenly my hands come back into focus and I'm back in the hallway of a hospital with many memories, amid the children's paintings lining the walls, the chill tiles upon the floor...and my hands are trembling.
Staring at them, I can't help but wonder:
Have I reached my limit? Have I seen too much?
Years immersed in this, walking a pioneering road amid the claims, the criticisms, the publicity, the skeptics, the wonders, the healings, the global walk, and more...All that ongoing noise...
Have I reached my limit?
My stare is broken by the tolling of my phone in my bag. A text message from the office. The family are waiting: apparently a little voice is "asking for Melissa".
I grab up my bag. My pace is long, light and quick as I head to the isolation doors of the children's cancer unit.
And I will joke and sing, laugh and play, all the while immersing this child in frequency (quantum bioenergetics) All I can do, my best, all I can, to help him.
For that little voice, louder than any of the noise just told me,
There is no limit.
