He nodded, and more tears fell. Vicky felt a wave of pure empathy.
“Can I look?” she signed. “I’ll be very careful, I promise.”
He hesitated, fear flickering in his eyes. Doctors had hurt him so many times before. But then he leaned forward, trusting her. This child, who had been poked and prodded for years, trusted a housekeeper.
Vicky swallowed the lump in her throat. She gently turned his head toward the light and looked inside. There, deep in the ear canal, it was clearly visible.
Something dark, dense, and hard. Her breath hitched. The blockage was larger and clearer than she’d realized.
How could the doctors have missed this? How did the scans not show this foreign object? Vicky’s memory flashed back to her cousin, Mark.
He’d had a similar blockage that had muffled his hearing for years. A simple procedure had changed his life. Vicky’s hands shook even harder.
“Mike,” she signed slowly. “There is something in your ear. Something that shouldn’t be there.”
His eyes widened in surprise.
“We need to tell your dad.”
Panic immediately took over the boy’s face. His hands moved frantically:
“No! No doctors, please! They hurt, they always hurt, and they never help.”
Vicky’s heart broke. She understood. Eight years of procedures and pain with zero results. He had learned a terrible lesson: help meant suffering.
She took his small hands in hers and looked him straight in the eye.
— “I will never hurt you,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear but hoping he would understand. — “Never.”
He watched her, and gradually his breathing slowed. But the fear remained. Vicky sat with him until his tears dried.
Then she went back to work, but her mind was racing. She knew what she had seen. She knew what it meant.
But what could she do? Tell David? He would just call the same specialists who had failed the boy for years. Do nothing? Watch the boy suffer in silence?
That night, Vicky didn’t sleep a wink. She stared at the ceiling, her grandmother’s voice echoing in her head: “God doesn’t always send help in a fancy package, honey. Sometimes He works through plain people with steady hands.”
Vicky closed her eyes. Her hands were ready. But did she have the nerve to use them?
Three agonizing days passed. Vicky couldn’t eat or sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw that dark mass blocking the boy’s life.
On the third night, she sat on the edge of her bed with her Bible open, but the words were a blur. She thought about her brother, Danny, who had died at fourteen. He’d been sick for months, complaining of pain, but the family didn’t have the money for the right specialists.
Vicky had watched him fade away, watched him try to say final words that never came out. He had died in her arms, in the same kind of silence Mike lived in. That day, she had promised God she would never stand by if she could help a suffering child…
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