My brother, a sweet child who is full of life, wasn’t feeling very well. His fever rose, and it was difficult for him to breathe. When he went to the doctor, the diagnosis was familiar and not too scary: pneumonia. While it was considered dangerous in the past, antibiotics makes pneumonia fully treatable today.
My brother received the standard treatment, but his infection persisted. Now the doctors were no longer calm. They gave him a referral to go to the emergency room, and there he was treated with utmost seriousness. After examining him, the doctors concluded that he needed to undergo surgery in order to clean out the infection from his lungs.
The problem was that my brother arrived at the emergency room in a weakened state. It hurt me to see him so pale, an expression of lethargy on his face. When the body is so weak, the surgery is liable to endanger him even more, and therefore we needed to wait for him to get stronger. It is very complicated to strengthen the body while an infection is raging inside, but the doctors tried all types of tricks to improve his situation. They gave him respiratory support along with a variety of other approaches, and so, two weeks later, and he was finally in a state where surgery was possible.
During those two weeks, someone was at his side twenty-four hours a day. The bulk of the time it was my parents, and there were other family members or volunteers who filled in. These were two difficult weeks for us, and all this happened in Elul – the beginning of the school year, during a time when routine normally sets in.
On Wednesday the doctor gave us the good news: The next day it would be possible to do surgery! He instructed us to have the patient fasting starting from the night before, and he explained that after surgery the boy would have to remain in the hospital to recover for about a week. He wouldn’t be released until Erev Rosh Hashanah.
Thursday morning arrived. We all knew that on this day the surgery would take place. We davened with emotion and hoped that finally my brother would recover fully. My mother was with my brother, keeping him occupied in order to distract him from the fast. It was not simple. Every half hour he asked for something to eat, and my mother told him it was not possible. He was in tears, but still, we could not give him anything to eat. At 1 p.m. I called to ask what was happening, and my mother said, “Baruch Hashem, everything is okay.”
“How was the surgery?”
“It hasn’t happened yet. We’re still waiting.”
Another hour passed, then another, and at 3 p.m., after a nerve-wracking wait, with my brother fasting, the doctor finally arrived. He apologized and said, “It turns out that the surgery cannot be done today. We will have to do it on Sunday.”
Why? Because the operating room was taken up with several emergency situations, and for various other completely uninteresting reasons.
My mother said something like, “So we have to quickly give the boy something to eat.” She did not get annoyed or angry, and the doctors were stunned by her calm reaction. They were accustomed to people getting angry when surgery was pushed off after they had done all the preparations.
When I heard that the surgery was pushed off I was very worried. “If the surgery is on Sunday, someone will have to be in the hospital with him on Rosh Hashanah!” I told my mother.
“If this is what Hashem determined for us, that is a sign that it is the best thing,” she said.
The next day, Friday, and on Shabbos, it was my turn to be with my brother. He was hooked up to oxygen the entire time, and on Shabbos his situation improved dramatically. When the doctor came and saw his numbers, he removed the oxygen pipe, and my brother breathed amazingly! He was also smiling and speaking normally, just as he had before this illness.
On Sunday morning the doctor arrived to check him before surgery, and he was amazed – the situation had improved in a totally unexpected way. At this point there was no need for surgery at all. It seemed the infection was getting better on its own and that he could continue intense treatment at home without any further intervention.
My brother was released from the hospital to go home that very Sunday, whereas if he’d had surgery on Thursday, they wouldn’t have released him until the following Wednesday, Erev Rosh Hashanah. We saw tangibly how my mother’s emunah, and the peace and serenity created by her bitachon in Hashem, brought the yeshuah.
