Back in May I posted about one of my bridesmaids, Lindsey, who was undergoing brain surgery. (See
) This morning's Washington Post included an article about being thankful for otherwise terrible events. It tells Lindsey's story; the story about the young girl who got hit in the head with a softball. And had she not, her brain tumor may never have been discovered... As you think about what you are thankful for this year - family, friends, shelter, food - thank God that Linds got a softball to the face. She might not be here otherwise.
. I have also copied it below.
There are Thanksgivings that evoke general thanks, and there are Thanksgivings that evoke specific thanks. For the Ganey family of College Park, this year it will most certainly be the latter.
And if in the middle of the table there is a softball instead of a Butterball, that will be just fine.
"Softball saved Lindsey's life," Lori Ganey said, talking about her daughter.
Here's what happened on the afternoon of April 23 at Riverdale Field:
Lindsey Ganey, then a freshman first baseman at St. John's College High School, was playing second base because the team was short on middle infielders. An Elizabeth Seton player hit a fly ball behind the bag. Shortstop Mary Liddi and Ganey each headed in that direction. The ball caromed off the tip of Liddi's glove and struck Ganey between the eyes.
As such incidents go, there was little drama. The bloodless blow dizzied Ganey, so she left the game to ice the injury. Her tears dried as the innings wore on. Later that day, as a precaution, she went to Doctors Community Hospital in Lanham for testing.
Good news and bad news. The ball to the head did no damage. The CT scan, however, turned up something.
"I got hit in the head," Lindsey Ganey said recently, "and the next thing I knew, I had a brain tumor."
Ganey underwent 10 hours of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital a few weeks later and this month was cleared to resume playing softball. She earned honors with distinction during the most recent St. John's grading period. She's thriving.
If St. John's pitcher Elizabeth Donatelli had thrown her pitch in a slightly different spot or at a slightly different speed, or if the Seton batter had hit the ball somewhere else on the field, or if Liddi or Ganey had made a clean catch, or if Ganey had been in her usual spot at first base, or if the ball had not glanced just so off Liddi's glove, or if Seton Athletic Director Candy Cage had not strongly urged the Ganeys to go to the hospital for tests, then Lindsey Ganey would still be walking around with a cavernous malformation in her brain, an abnormal growth of blood vessels larger than a golf ball.
"We're lucky that it happened when it happened, where it happened, on that field at that time," Lori Ganey said. "I'm not able to go to every one of her games, and I was at that game. Maybe if I wasn't at that game, she wouldn't have gone" to the hospital. "I don't know."
Lindsey Ganey recounted the story at the family's home with her mom; her dad, Tom; brother Jake, a DeMatha freshman; and her "unbiological brothers," friends Nathan and Matthew Smith, twin DeMatha sophomores who live down the street.
Lindsey had been having unexplained headaches once or twice a week, symptoms that, had the tumor remained undiscovered, probably would have intensified with age, perhaps even to the point of seizures or a hemorrhage, said her neurosurgeon, Edward S. Ahn.
The noncancerous growth was "in a very sensitive area in her brain," Ahn said, and was difficult to remove because it was attached to significant blood vessels and had calcified into almost a bonelike mass.
The first few days after the surgery, Lindsey was not eating or talking or lifting her head, and she would blank out during conversations. Tom and Lori Ganey questioned their decision to have her undergo the procedure. The girl before them was not the determined daughter they knew, the one unfazed by a burst appendix in fifth grade, the one who slept through MRIs, the one who caught a doubleheader the first day she slapped on catcher's gear.
Lindsey requested a visit from buddy Nathan, the neighbor whom Lori Ganey now considers a sort of divine healer. His gentle way and goofy sense of humor perked up Lindsey. He fed her Cheerios one by one as they watched TV in her hospital room. He wheeled her around in a chair. He read to her. He and twin Matthew helped care for her after she returned home.
There were so many acts of kindness. Friends and neighbors brought in meals and mowed the lawn. One neighborhood family, the Doyles, threw a pre-surgery party. Sister Catherine Mindling, Lindsey's homeroom teacher, had Lindsey's school picture as her desktop wallpaper and contacted hundreds by e-mail to pray for her, including a certain Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon.
Because of Lindsey's high marks all school year, St. John's exempted her from final exams. Her travel team, the Takoma Fire, made her an honorary manager. The St. Vincent Pallotti High softball team sent her a signed ball. Jake's baseball teammates at St. Mark the Evangelist School rallied around him.
So when about 25 members of the Ganey family gather in Olney for Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Tom's brother, Chris, they will be grateful for a lot of things, particularly a clean bill of health for their favorite softball player. She received a batting helmet for her birthday in August and is eager to try it out at clinics this winter.
"She's kind of the family superstar this year," Tom Ganey said, smiling at his daughter. "It was a terrible thing, but she's all everybody talked about. We're going to have everybody together, and there's going to be, I imagine, some tears, you know, just thinking about where we were."
Where she was was out of position, pursuing a fateful fly ball that somehow found its way from pitcher's hand to batter's bat to shortstop's glove to second baseman's troubled head.
"That hit," Lori Ganey said, "was meant to be."
Celebrating our engagement in Boston.
