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

the surgeon said.
    When they first saw her, Kassidy looked small and helpless, tied up to a maze of tubes and machines, but she held up her hand to her parents. Thankful that she had survived, at the suggestion of the doctor, the family went to dinner. When they returned, however, it was to bad news: Kassidy’s chest was filling with fluid. “Kassidy had pulmonary edema,” says Linda. “Her lungs were hardening. They fully expected her to die.”
    Thanksgiving Day, church members from Williams Creek, ninety minutes away, brought dinner to the family as they held a vigil inside and outside Kassidy’s hospital room. In what was described as a “last-ditch effort,” the surgeon cut a tracheotomy in Kassidy’s throat to insert a tube for a respirator. They also put the child into a medically induced coma. “The idea was to see if her body would heal itself if it had nothing else it had to do,” says Linda.
    For one week, Kassidy lay nearly motionless, then she was allowed to awaken, but her condition remained fragile. The coming months were agony. Matt came often, and Kari was almost always at her daughter’s side. The anesthetic had also weakened the muscles attached to one eye, allowing it to drift, and affected her gag reflexes, so that she had to be fed through a tube. When they weren’t there, Barbara, Linda, or Jim sat in the hospital room, talking to Kassidy, rubbing her soft arms, telling her to hold on and stay with them. There were nights where it seemed her tiny little body was ready to give up, but always the doctors were able to bring her back. “Death was in the room with us those nights,” says Barbara. “You could feel it.”
    As difficult as the times were, Kari and Matt both seemed to hold up well under the pressure. “We can handle this,” Kari told one of her friends. “We just have to do whatever we have to do, and then Kassidy will get better, and she’ll come home.”
    In more private times, Kari wrote in her journal, as on December 3, eight days after Kassidy’s surgery: “My little Kassidy is fighting so hard. There are times where I think how much longer will she fight. It is so hard to understand why this has happened, but all I do is pray . . . Matt is being so strong. He is so solid. I have never wanted this to be over more than I do now. I want my family back. I miss my little Kassidy’s smile. I want to hear her giggle. I wish I could put myself in her spot. I hope I have the strength to keep going because Kassidy and Kensi need me.”
    In January, Kassidy was still gravely ill in the pediatric ICU when Lindsey asked a friend who worked with her at the Cracker Barrel in Waco, Erin Vendetti, to drive to Cook Children’s with her. Erin had never met either Matt or Kari, and in the car, Lindsey talked about Matt, including his bizarre history with women, describing what happened that summer at First Baptist. “You have to be careful around him. He’s a little flirtatious,” Lindsey warned. “Sometimes, he says and does strange things.”
    “He’s a preacher?” Erin marveled.
    “Yes,” Lindsey says. “He is.”
    An attractive twenty-year-old, Erin brushed it off. “He’s not going to hit on me in the hospital with his daughter maybe dying. No one would do that.”
    Lindsey didn’t appear convinced.
    Once they arrived, they found Matt and Kari outside Kassidy’s room. To protect Kassidy, whose immune system had been wiped out by chemo, only two visitors wearing sterile gowns and masks were allowed in at one time.
    When Kari and Lindsey left to see Kassidy, Erin claimed a chair in front of a television in the game room and began playing a Mario video game with a young boy, a cancer patient who’d lost all of his hair. Before long, Matt sat beside her.
    “I’m so sorry about your daughter being so ill,” Erin said. “I hope she gets better.”
    “You know,” Matt said, leaning in toward her, “you’re a beautiful girl.”
    Erin concentrated on the computer