A daughter's love

At 11, Patti was a kind little girl who liked to play with her friends, and above all loved her parents. One day, she was playing with her father when he suddenly collapsed with a heart attack.

Patti was shocked. But she held her father's limping hands with her little fingers and called her mother. Among tears, she kept calling, "Father! Father! Please get well".

Patti's father Chet Szuber had a weak heart. She often saw her father sitting exhaustedly on the sofa. She felt sad to see him like that.
"Come and see what I have drawn", she asked her father one day as she arrived from school. It was the picture of her father. He leaped to his feet, and laughed heartily and played with her.
Besides the love of his caring wife Jean, it was the unconditional and innocent love of her daughter that gave him the strength to live.
Over the years, he rejoiced in seeing Patti grow taller and prettier. But his heart condition was becoming worse. He had massive heart attacks. He grew weaker and had to undergo repeated bypass surgeries.
Patti kept saying, "Father, please don't die".
"When I grow up, I will become a nurse to take care of you. Please promise me that you will not die."
He promised to live. And Indeed Patti too became a nurse as she promised. She cared for him. A loving daughter as she always was.
But by then, her father had to undergo his third bypass surgery. The doctor said to him, "This was your last chance. We cannot do any more bypass surgery if you have another heart attack."
He was very sad to hear this. But Patti cheered him up saying, "Father, you can still live if you have a heart transplant. All we need is to find a donor."
On the following New Year, she wrote in her card to her father, "A new healthy heart", with a big drawing of a heart.
Patti was now 22. It was spring and she wanted to take a trip to the mountains with her friends. She said good bye to her parents and went. It was going to be a long drive.
In the middle of the night, the phone in Mr Szuber's house rang. Jean Szuber picked up the phone warily.
"Hello, is this Mr Szuber's house?"
"Yes."
"Your daughter Patti had been in a bad car accident. She is in a hospital in Knoxville."
Jean cried. She didn't know how to break the news to her husband as she was afraid that he might collapse due to his weak heart.
Among sobs, she told her husband that Patti had been in a small traffic accident in Knoxville.

When they reached Knoxville, Patti was literally dead except for the breathing from the Life Support Machine.

Her father cried holding her unconscious body, "You are the one who asked me to promise to live. Please don't die before me".

The doctors explained that she had no chance of reviving.

As Jean and Chet Szuber tried to recover themselves from the shock in another room, a woman approached them. "As Patti has no chance to live anyway, you can have her heart," the lady said to Mr. Szuber. Patti had signed an organ donor card months earlier which would make it possible.

Chet Szuber turned it down immediately. He had never considered it or thought about it. It sounded ridiculous.

But moments later, he felt something that he could not explain. He could feel Patti pleading with him to accept her gift deep in his mind. He knew it. And at last he decided to accept her daughter's gift.

Heart transplant was a highly delicate and risky operation at that time. It still is. But thanks to the unconditional love and the prayers that Patti's spirit might have said as she watched the operation from above, the transplant surgery went successfully.

Today, more than 10 years down the line, Chet Szuber at 67 is healthy and strong. He runs a berry farm, Christmas tree farm and keeps a special place set aside: Patti's Park. And with every beat of her heart in his chest, he remembers Patti.

- Written for the blog by Cigay. (A True story I wanted to share with you all).

Here is a link to the real news report on this story: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/19/earlyshow/living/main637069.shtml