Character Driven Read Free

Abramson and Dr. Gobin stepped up for us and agreed that if Candace and I were willing to take the risk, they were willing to do the procedure. We knew that we had to do everything we could to save Tatum’s eye. The decision was in that way easy. Subjecting your infant daughter to anything, even a regularly scheduled immunization, is hard. Sitting in that office, floors above the growl and hum of midtown Manhattan, we took a deep breath, trusted that the Lord had led us to this place for a good reason, and signed the consent forms and did all the other necessary paperwork.
    Obviously, there is never a good time to have anyone in your life become sick, but the circumstances of Tatum’s diagnosis were marked by all kinds of potential pitfalls. That spring we had only recently moved from the Bay Area to Salt Lake City. I had been traded during the off-season, but with the kids still infants and lots of loose ends to tie up, it hadn’t made sense to move right away that summer. I’m sure a lot of you can relate to the problems of moving and having to find new doctors, plus deal with health insurance companies (we were fortunate to have good coverage) and all the issues of who’s in network and who’s not. Candace had been concerned that something wasn’t quite right with Tatum’s eye, but had been assured by our pediatrician that nothing was wrong. Only when we finally settled in Salt Lake City and Candace pursued second and third opinions did Dr. Katie McElligott confirm my wife’s suspicions. I was at practice when the voicemail message came in telling me that we needed to get to a pediatric ophthalmologist that afternoon. I joined them there, and I was glad that we had been persistent and followed Candace’s gut instinct that something was wrong. If we had waited and if we’d let the red tape of insurance companies deter us, I don’t know what the outcome would have been.
    Call it a mother’s intuition, call it her keen sense of observation, call it the Lord moving in mysterious ways, but whatever you call it, we were grateful that we had acted on Candace’s suspicions. Neither of us had ever heard the word retinoblastoma before, and I’d never even thought that people could have cancer of the eye. In most ways, Tatum was a typical ten-month-old child. Being fraternal twins, Drew and Tatum were going to be subject to a lot of comparisons, maybe more so than other siblings. When they were born, Tatum had darker skin than Drew, whose coloring was more cocoa. Drew had a lot more hair than Tatum, though now that isn’t the case, and he was always a lot less patient than her. When Drew was hungry, everyone in the house, and probably the surrounding neighborhood, knew that he needed food. He had to nurse or get a bottle immediately, and we could do nothing to persuade him to just hold on for a minute. Tatum, on the other hand, would wake from a nap and assess the situation, come fully awake and alert, then eat. Even from her earliest days, she seemed quite playful and mischievous, more capable of demonstrating a bit of an attitude.
    Candace had noticed that sometimes when she looked into Tatum’s eyes, something didn’t seem quite right. She couldn’t articulate exactly what was wrong, and each time I looked into my little girl’s eyes, I was so in love that I couldn’t imagine there being anything wrong with her. I felt the same about Drew. They seemed to me to be God’s perfect little creations—even if they did fuss and cry a bit. But sometimes when light shone in Tatum’s eye, Candace thought it didn’t seem to reflect back the same way it did from her other one, or in the same way it did from Drew’s. In the more than ten years that I’d known Candace, I’d learned to trust her instincts. If she thought something was wrong, then something had to be wrong.
    Candace noticed that in some photographs of Tatum, depending upon the angle, one of Tatum’s eyes reflected back a white light. That white light,