Golden Box Book Publishing Read to Help Animals | Page 8

Little Johnny
As a young nurse in Hungary, I worked in the pediatric unit for a short
while. Johnny was a nine-year-old cute as a button little boy who had
leukemia. The medications and treatments wiped him out physically
and emotionally, but he still had a sweet smile for everyone who
entered his room.
Restrained sobs choked me every time I saw his pale, angelic little face
and heard him say, “Hello, beautiful. Give me that shot quickly and tell
me a story.” (His father was a flirt and he imitated him by calling the
nurses beautiful or gorgeous.)
Our storytelling sessions started when he had a very bad day after
chemo, and the medications didn’t work to suppress his nausea and
headache. All I could do was sit by his bed, hold his hand and wait for
the stronger medication to kick in. To break the silence and get his
attention away from heaving and pain, I started reciting a fairy tale.
“Once upon a time...”
As I continued the story, his breathing slowed, and he hung onto every
word, seemingly forgetting his pain and misery for a few minutes.
The story with medicine became our routine. One morning, because I
didn’t remember any more fairy tales that I had read as a child, I
started telling him my childhood memories.
One of my fondest memories was how my best friend and I saved four
drowning kittens when a cruel neighbor threw them into the river.
Johnny grew weaker and weaker and could listen to the story only a
few minutes at a time, but he remembered the next day where we left
off. When we got to the part where my mom prepared a wicker basket
for the kittens, Johnny’s eyes lit up and said, “A kosarnyi kiscica,” which
means: “A basketful of kittens.”
When I wrote this story into a children’s book last year, in memory of
little Johnny, I gave the book the title that he came up with: “A
Basketful of Kittens.”
I never had a chance to tell him the end of the story. The next day,
there were only a few minutes left to tell him how Daniel and I dealt
with the neighborhood bullies, but when I entered little Johnny’s room
that morning, his bed was empty.