A heartfelt surprise that I received from kind strangers when picking up my son’s birthday cake this fall is one that I will never forget, and was a moment that also brought joy to my family and friends when they learned of the gesture during his party that afternoon.
I tried to hold back tears and many emotions flickered through my mind on that Sunday in September as I meandered through the aisles at Wal-Mart in Bellefontaine after stopping by the bakery for the Lion King cake that my 5-year-old birthday boy, Everett, had selected.
When arriving at the bakery counter, the worker flashed me a big smile and she went to retrieve my cake. Then she brought out the packaged cake and I noticed that it was accompanied by a card and Post-it Note. The bakery employee informed me that that cake had been paid in full the previous evening and urged me to read the card and note.
I stepped back and checked out the Post-it, which said, “A very nice young couple came in tonight and asked about ‘paying it forward’ by paying for the next cake for a child. I showed them this one and they paid for it. Congrats to this family!”
The benevolent couple, unknown to me, had also picked out a card especially for Everett, featuring a “5” on the front along with lots of glitter and aliens in a space ship, and the inside was signed “A gift from God. Happy Birthday.”
When I looked up in shock, I realized that the bakery employee was still watching me and awaiting my reaction. I was nearly speechless, but told her, “I just can’t believe it. That is so nice; they even got him this card.”
The weight of the kindly gesture and also the extra meaning behind my son celebrating his fifth birthday this year really started to hit me as I left the store and headed to Mary Rutan Park to deliver the cake to his party. I appreciated the reminder that God is still looking out for our Everett, as He did in a major way two years ago on Nov. 1, 2017.
On that day that will forever be entrenched in my mind and an anniversary that we will mark this weekend, my then-3-year-old little guy underwent open heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., for a procedure called a myectomy as a result of an inherited condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
While his surgery was a resounding success, just two hours into his post-operative recovery, Everett encountered his first major roadblock.
He went into cardiac arrest at 3:08 p.m. that day, shortly after medical staff had tried to extubate him. Our surgeon rushed from another area of the hospital to Everett’s bedside in the ICU. In an emergency procedure, he re-opened Everett’s chest and literally massaged Everett’s heart to help it start beating again.
It’s still hard to fathom the miracle that God orchestrated in that moment, giving our surgeon the ability to perform this task and in time to save Everett’s life.
For three days afterward, Everett was supported by the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, and then was weaned off ECMO, but was still sedated and intubated for a total of 10 days.
In the week that followed the surgery, Everett suffered a second cardiac arrest (that fortunately was aided by an implanted cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) that had been installed after his first cardiac arrest) and also a stroke.
While his recovery wasn’t an easy one, we witnessed God’s healing power through each step that Everett was gradually able to take during the next several months, and in the improvements that had been made to his heart function once it had recovered from the initial shock of the surgery.
Along with the many fun milestones of childhood, including attending preschool and becoming a big brother last year, Everett has thoroughly enjoyed marking his fourth and fifth birthdays since his medical crisis that occurred two years ago.
Still to this day, I haven’t figured out who the kindly couple was who so graciously paid for my son’s birthday cake. But I’m hoping they will happen to read about the little boy and his family whom they blessed through their gesture, and I pray that they are abundantly blessed in return.