Tummy Ache - Part 2

These are additional thoughts to the same story. I suppose that that night I could have died and it would have been a sad story indeed. The death of an eight year old with a big tummy ache, that came too late to the hospital. He waited too long to complain about it. After all an eight year old should be able to fully express what he is feeling. Did I hold back at all? I think that I had been brave that night. I think that I tried to hold back the pain and believed that this was something that would pass in good time. Unfortunately it didn't. I was dumb silent for most of the night, even at the birthday party. I was glancing at everybody else, most of them my childhood friends who are now in different parts of the world, in the Americas. But I was then silently and stoically keeping the pulsating pain to myself, somehow treating that as something normal in the regular course of life, especially for an eight year old, even with the silly heavy bag he had to carry to school every day. But it was my body that was eloquent, thank God for that. The violent shaking of my bed was mimicking my own body's uncontrollable shaking in reaction to the extreme cold that I felt because of the fever. I don't know how high my fever was, but it would have been very high. I was wondering, we were Catholics, and always have been, but we went to a hospital that was owned by the Seventh-Day Adventists. Even the doctors, I believe, were Adventists. But they had a good reputation, or so my parents believed. My mother must have prayed a lot that night, clutching her rosary asking for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The operation went worryingly far too long for what should have been a simple and quick intrusive operation. But it was hugely successful. The fact is I live even to this day, and yes even as I write, for dead men don't write. I would not have seen the light again on February 9 of that year if my body didn't express that unmistakeable message that something had gone wrong big time, and that made my parents to speedily act, and at the best possible time. I thank the Lord for the blessing of life and giving me a chance to live out my life even to this day. That day I was reborn.