This book is the diary of a devoted mother who records, day by day, the long journey she and her son Nicola undertake from the moment they learn he has leukemia. On the day their difficult and painful struggle toward healing began, she decided to set down on paper the trembling of her heart.
She succeeds brilliantly in bringing back all the emotions that flood you when you receive devastating news you never imagined hearing. Why my son? He is only a year old, with so much left to discover and learn.
You find yourself reckoning with survival percentages that doctors thrust at you in brutal terms. You begin to think about death and wonder if healing is even possible. You are told of a period harder and more painful than you can conceive: rounds of chemotherapy with their devastating side effects, repeated bone marrow extractions, fevers, infections, an immune system collapsing toward zero.
So this young and courageous mother, driven by instinct to survive, begins her diary. She tells the story through metaphors of battles and invasions—what is happening inside her little boy's body—trusting that one day he will read these pages as a healthy, strong, healed man. Brilliant is her image of a castle (the body) under siege by invaders (the diseased cells) in a war that must be fought.
It is not easy to write to your own child and describe what he is living through, day after day closed in a hospital room. The "little lion with golden eyes" will surely never remember fighting so hard with teeth and nails to defeat the invaders—those runaway cells spawned by the marrow (the blasts, in medical terms). When it is finally over, when you leave behind those days of pain that are carved into your mind and that no one can ever make you forget, you begin to cherish the simplest things of daily life: a sunny day, a walk in the open air. And at last, when the battle is won and healing comes, this tender and strong mother reflects that "it is not a miracle to recover from illness; it is a miracle to live without being ill." Every moment you must thank God for giving you the strength and energy to fight and win this hard battle against disease, because without prayers and the help of the Lord it is impossible to LIVE a second time. The author closes her account by noting that she has told the story of a miracle. But it is the simplest and most wonderful miracle of all. It is the story of living—not merely surviving.
Anna Testa, 2007
