Pray, Hope and Don't Worry

By Leti Martelli, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania

As appeared in

Another long night in my 15-year-old son Lenny’s room. Another night with worries that kept me awake. I sat up and looked over at Lenny’s bed. At least he was sleeping soundly.

The room was quiet. No equipment beeping here. This wasn’t the emergency ward. It was a rehabilitation hospital where Lenny had been sent to recover from a severe spinal cord injury.

I’d dropped everything—my sixth-grade teaching job, life at home with my husband and our two daughters—to devote full time to Lenny’s care. Lenny had broken his neck while snowboarding with friends. He was paralyzed from the chest down. As always when I couldn’t sleep I was praying.

I’d been praying a long time, ever since that February day when my cell phone rang at the restaurant where I was having a wedding anniversary lunch with my husband, Len. “I’m with ski patrol,” a stranger’s voice said. “Your son’s been in an accident.”

At the emergency room I saw Lenny on a stretcher, his neck engulfed in a huge brace. “Don’t cry, Mom. I’m okay,” he told me. “I just can’t feel anything.”

I’d prayed all through Lenny’s surgery. Doctors took bone from his hip and fused it to the broken vertebra in his neck. I’d prayed for him in ICU and for strength to comprehend the magnitude of what our family was entering into. Medical jargon and forms to fill out and treatments to authorize came flying at us.

“Every spinal cord injury is different,” doctors kept saying, which I realized was their way of tamping down my expectations. Lenny was transferred to the rehab hospital and I prayed for good therapists and signs of progress.

But we’d been in this hospital for months, Lenny enduring grueling physical therapy for hours every day, and he didn’t seem much closer to walking.

He could jiggle his feet—sometimes. He could stand while holding onto bars in the therapy room—sort of. He could make his legs do what his brain told them to do—but not consistently, especially with his right leg.

Early in his treatment I’d overheard someone say Lenny had about a five-percent chance of walking again and making a complete recovery. I held on to that five percent.

I prayed for that five percent. I took extended leave from my job and camped out at this hospital to help Lenny reach that five percent. We were still somewhere in the other 95 percent.

I gazed at Lenny breathing softly in his bed. He was a happy, upbeat kid, fun to be around. He had probably comforted me through this whole ordeal more than I’d comforted him. But even he was getting frustrated and discouraged at his lack of progress.

Most of all, Lenny loved sports and using his body to its full potential. That’s what broke my heart. Baseball, lacrosse, football, basketball—he’d played them all. He had friends from all of his teams.

He looked up to his coaches, really responded to their mentoring. I despaired to think of him losing that side of his life completely.

I thought I had hit on the perfect motivator one day when I overheard one of Lenny’s therapists say, “Hey, Lenny, your last name’s Martelli. Any relation to Coach Phil Martelli?”