Free 12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 by Kathryn Casey Page A

Matt and Kari again brought Kassidy to the doctor, who again diagnosed her malady as a stomach bug. As the week wore on, however, the toddler didn’t appear any better. On Friday, Matt called Barbara. “There’s something wrong,” he said. “We’re trying another doctor. We can’t go through another night like last night.”
    That time, Matt and Kari took Kassidy to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center’s emergency room. There she was examined, but the ER physician found no reason for her illness. Explaining that he worried that the baby was dehydrated, he told Matt and Kari that he wanted Kassidy in the hospital on an IV.
    With Kassidy in the hospital and Matt and others watching over her that night, Kari met Janelle at a store, to buy groceries for a needy family in the church. As they walked up to the house to deliver them, Janelle asked, “How can you do this with Kassidy sick?”
    “This family needs the groceries,” Kari answered. After they finished, Kari returned to the hospital and spent the night at Kassidy’s bedside.
    The following morning, Barbara drove up from Kerrville and sat in Kassidy’s room, holding the child. Kari had convinced Linda to keep a commitment and fly to New York a day earlier to attend a conference, and Matt and Kari had gone to church. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving, and he was speaking at a potluck supper that evening. In the hospital room, Jim talked with Barbara, when Kassidy suddenly threw her head back, her body stiffened and shook. The child was in the throes of a violent seizure.
    “Get the nurse,” Barbara told Jim, rubbing her granddaughter’s stomach and leg. He ran from the room, while she held the child and tried to comfort her. “I know it was only a few minutes, but it seemed to go on twenty minutes or more,” Barbara would recount years later. “I kept telling her she’d be all right.”
    That night, Matt took Kensi home, and Kari and Barbara stayed with Kassidy while they waited for the doctors to figure out what was wrong. During the night, Kassidy awoke, calling for her mother in a hoarse voice. Kari went to her and held her, the child falling back to sleep in her arms.
    After a spinal tap ruled out meningitis, Kassidy was sent for an MRI. Back from New York, Linda arrived at the hospital just in time to hear the doctor deliver very bad news. Kassidy had a tumor at the base of her brain. It was growing, and left unchecked, it would be life-threatening. To save her, they’d have to operate quickly. The problem was Kassidy’s age. Children so young had delicate lungs. The operation would be lengthy, and the anesthetic was dangerous, possibly even deadly.
    The news was crushing. Hillcrest didn’t have the facilities to handle the surgery, and that same day Kassidy was transferred via ambulance to Cook Children’s Hospital, ninety minutes away in Fort Worth. On medication to suppress the seizures, Kassidy needed to be operated on as soon as possible, and just two days after arriving in Fort Worth, tests were completed and surgery was scheduled. The date was Wednesday, November 25, the day before Thanksgiving.
    The surgeon had been blunt, telling the family that there was the chance that Kassidy wouldn’t make it through the operation. That afternoon, Matt and Kari kissed their infant daughter and saw her rolled down a hallway and into a surgical suite. They then joined the rest of the family in a waiting room. Five generations of Linda’s family were in the waiting room, along with Matt, Kari, Barbara and Oscar, and Matt’s sister, Stacie, and her husband. The hours passed, and those gathered prayed. The surgery went on into the evening, before the doctor arrived to say that Kassidy was in the pediatric ICU. The tumor had been completely removed. Encapsulated, it popped out easily. But there were other concerns, including, as they’d warned earlier, the effects of the anesthesia. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to pull her through,”