It was a week before Pesach. I was on the phone in heavy conversation trying to help someone with a shidduch. My phone didn’t have reception outside so I was standing as close to the patio as I could so I could keep an eye on my three little boys who were outside doodling with chalk.
Then the unthinkable happened. I heard pounding on my door, yelling and screaming. I almost went to answer the door and then I looked up to see my two-year old son climbing over the fence of our patio. I ran out but I couldn’t catch him in time, he fell two flights to the ground. A neighbor got to me before I could get to my son and told me he was crying which was a good sign. She left a neighbor watching him and told me to gather together some diapers and essentials to take with me and Hatzala were on their way.
I don’t know how I kept my wits about me but I managed to pack a few items and then dashed down the stairs as fast as my legs would carry me. My sweet little boy was lying on the ground whimpering with his head cradled in the crook of his arm. All of the neighbors were standing in the stairwell of our building to see if our son was all right. Hatzala had driven through the grass of the park adjacent to our building to tend to our baby as fast as they could. I called my husband at work in Jerusalem to tell him to meet me at the Jerusalem hospital where we were heading. The Hatzala men put my little tzaddik on a stretcher and they whisked us away to the hospital, about a thirty-minute ride away from our home in Betar. My two other boys aged four and five were wailing as my neighbors held them and tried to comfort and reassure them. They said they would watch them while I was at the hospital.
Moishy, my injured two year old, kept drifting off to sleep and the Hatzala men kept asking if he normally sleeps at this time. Somehow I didn’t realize the gravity of their question; I was most likely in shock. I kept calling to him and smiling at him “Moishy, sweetie, don’t fall asleep. Soon we’ll be at the hospital and they’ll check on you. ” At the hospital doctors sedated him so they could do a cat scan. I put my son’s life into Hashem’s hands, saying Tehillim with the most kavana I ever had. I felt a chill go down my spine when I read David Hamelech’s timeless words: “His mischief will recoil upon his own head, and upon his own skull will his violence descend” (Psalms 7:17, Artscroll Translation).
There was a man in the waiting room who gave us words of encouragement and offered to lend us money to cover the costs of traveling back and forth to the hospital. He told us that he also had a child who had sustained a fall and had recovered beautifully. He assured us that our son would be fine as well. I felt like this man had been sent directly from Hashem to give us words of comfort and chizuk. He gave me the comforting feeling that Hashem would bring our yeshuah even though the situation seemed so bleak.
The MRI showed that our son had sustained a fractured skull and a double break in the arm that he had fallen on, it was truly a miracle. That arm had saved his life!
The medical staff put his head and neck in a brace to restrict movement and he was wheeled into the ICU in a stretcher, still sleep-induced. Suddenly he awoke and he started kicking and flailing his limbs. All of the machines started beeping and nurses came running. The nurses had to reattach all of the tubes he was connected to. That was my first sign that my feisty little boy would survive.
As I was trying with all my might to restrain my son and prevent him from pulling off his tubes a second time, I got a call from my father in Seattle who always knows what to say at the right time: “So, I hear Moishy was trying to impersonate superman.” Somehow, maybe because I was so stressed, I broke out laughing and crying feeling my parents’ love and warmth from afar.
Our neighbors came to visit us in the hospital. They brought us falafel for dinner and informed me that they would take over the Pesach camp that I had been doing to cover our Pesach expenses and give us all of the earnings so we could still make Pesach b’kavod. Pesach was the farthest from my mind at this point but I was so grateful to have such amazing neighbors.
Once Moishy was transferred to the recovery ward, my normally wild and active son was somber and subdued, staring into space . I was afraid he would never talk again until I was eating his breakfast one morning (as he had reverted to nursing only during this episode) and he yanked the pudding from my hand and said, “me want to eat it.” That was the second sign I had that he would return to his old self. Amazingly we were only in the hospital for two nights and were then discharged, bringing home our energetic toddler with only a cast on his arm as a souvenir from his near-death experience.
Now our son is a feisty fifteen-year-old Yeshiva bachur. We are eternally grateful to Hashem for cradling his fall and protecting him always.