Flashback 1994: Keeping a last promise.

Michael Thurson before surgery (Photo by Robert A. Davis; used with permission)

     I had rotator cuff surgery Wednesday afternoon, and will have my left arm in a sling for about the next six weeks. As for EGD, it doesn't seem a good idea to park myself in front of the computer right away, even to give you good folks something diverting to read, pecked out with my right hand, or dictated, if I can make that work. 

     Luckily, I have both a deep bench, and the ability to plan ahead. We're going to be reading chestnuts mined from the archive for a few days, and then some of my media pals will pinch hit. My apologies but, heck, you get what you pay for. 

    Regarding today's topic, naturally I first thought of surgery. This is from the days when I worked with the great photographer Robert A. Davis. I still remember the shock of standing in that operating room, learning ... well, you'll see. As for the end, that was all Bob, going the extra mile, a practice that has taken him very far.

     Eloise Heatherly made a promise.
     A registered nurse at Wyler Children's Hospital, she became friends with Michael Thurson, a slight 15-year-old boy with cystic fibrosis, struggling to breathe and looking forward to a better life with a new set of lungs.
     We'll toast with champagne, Heatherly said, when you turn 16.
     Michael was a kid who needed a promise, a reason to look ahead.
     Dragging an oxygen bottle around St. Francis de Sales High
     School, lying on a board while his mother pounded his back to loosen the phlegm that was suffocating him, his average day wasn't a cakewalk.
     It was a long wait for lungs — at 4 feet 6 inches tall and 71 pounds, not many pairs would fit his narrow chest.
     He was already sick, taking treatments at Wyler, when lungs became available after an accident.
     Around midnight Jan. 29, Michael was awakened by a nurse who asked him what his greatest wish was.
     "I want to see Jordan," said the sleepy boy.
     The nurse told him that no, Michael Jordan wasn't here. But his new lungs were on the way.
     "One out of two ain't bad," he said.
     The operation did not go as smoothly as it could have. The lungs were caught in traffic.
     "Where are they now?" a surgeon asked. "Naperville," somebody holding a telephone replied. Two nurses gasped in unison: "Naperville!?!"
     "We probably opened the chest too soon," Dr. Alvaro Montoya said afterward. "We should have waited two more hours."
     But Michael survived the surgery. He clung to life for 10 days.
     "I'm going to wait until I heal, then work out a lot, so I can get better at basketball," he had said.
     Michael Thurson died Feb. 9 from complications following the surgery. He never got the chance to improve his basketball.
     When the news hit his school, students were so upset that classes were dismissed early. The basketball team, for whom Michael was a scorekeeper, wore black bands on their jerseys and headbands reading "Mikey" for the rest of the season.
     Saturday, Michael would have been 16. Heatherly kept her promise.
     Heatherly, Michael's mother, his sisters and a few friends gathered at his grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City. They took birthday balloons, flowers and, yes, champagne, the good stuff.
     Michael would have loved it.
             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 1994