It was a printout of one of the images from a CT scan that had been taken before her surgery on Tuesday. Her head was at the top of the screen, her brain pushed aside by the collection of fluid inside her skull. At the back of her head, where the bones of her skull should have been a smooth, unbroken line, there was a gap. The computer had measured it: 1.4 cm. Hardly anything, you might think, but that gap had allowed fluid to pour out from around her brain, pushing the skin at the back of her head into a massive balloon. The bulge at the back of her head was bigger than her head itself.Dr. Gary and his team performed two operations on little Oceane this week. On Tuesday, they peeled back her skin and stopped that hole, and on Thursday they threaded a small tube under her skin from her brain all the way down into her belly. (That tube will keep the pressures in her head where they belong by acting as a release valve, absolutely necessary since he had closed the hole that had acted in the same way before.)
All that is a lot of medical mumbo jumbo for you if you're someone who doesn't normally take care of neurosurgical cases, I know. And I'm not trying to get you to totally understand what they did for her. Just know that it was an operation that would have been risky in any circumstances, in the most advanced hospital in the world.
I asked Dr. Gary why he had that particular picture stuck to his door, and he shook his head with a quiet smile.
I don't want to forget, he told me. There's something so much bigger than us at work here. We can work so hard, and we can do a good job, but ultimately, it's not us. There's something bigger.
And so, when I wandered on to the wards a little later and saw Oceane in her mama's arms, her now-tiny head wrapped in clean, white gauze, I couldn't help thanking God. Because when I stuck my finger into her little hand and she turned to me and her face broke out into a huge, baby grin, I knew that Something Bigger had been hard at work.
at work. And thank you for willingly and enthusiastically being a part of His work.
Thank you, also, for your kind reply to Mark's e-mail last week. He read and re-read your responses, then carefully folded them and stapled them into his book. He doesn't want to lose them. He is still quite amazed that he talked to a missionary all the way over in Africa!