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keep her pumped with as much morphine as necessary.
    “It won’t be long until you can tell us what’s wrong,” Sherry said, comforting her daughter. Unable to move, eat, or breathe on her own, Sherry knew that waking to a body that, essentially, no longer worked, had to be the most terrifying thing for her daughter.
    The next day, after determining that Tatum’s lungs were strongenough to breathe on their own, a group of doctors and nurses came to remove the tube from her throat.
    “Can you talk?” the respiratory therapist asked once the tube was gone.
    “Ouch” was all she said.
    Breathy whispers were all Tatum could manage for several days, and she had to go through the painful process of relearning to swallow. After two days in the ICU, she was moved to the fifth floor of the hospital, where she spent the next ten days undergoing tests and therapy to regain her strength.
    One evening, as Sherry and David watched Tatum sleep, enjoying welcomed quiet time between frequent nurse and doctor visits, Jennifer, a friendly member of Tatum’s transplant team, tapped on the door, walked in, and smiled as she passed Sherry and David. She peered down at Tatum, hoping to find her awake, and decided to share her exciting news with Tatum’s parents instead.
    “You know,” Jennifer said, smiling with childlike excitement, “Tatum qualifies for a wish from the Make-A-Wish Foundation.”
    Was there some sort of miscommunication?
Sherry thought.
Is Jennifer here to tell us our daughter is dying? Make-A-Wish is for terminal children.
    “Oh, no, no, no,” Jennifer said with one long breath, sensing the worry pouring from David and Sherry’s eyes. “Tatum is just fine,” she reassured them. “The Make-A-Wish Foundation grants wishes for children with life-threatening illnesses. Tatum can wish for anything she wants.”
    “Oh,” Sherry said, letting out an equally long sigh of relief. “Oh, good. That’ll give her something to look forward to!”
    Anything she wants
, Sherry thought, repeating Jennifer’s words in her mind. She wondered what their daughter, a little girl full of ideas and imagination, would wish for. When Tatum woke a fewhours later, Sherry gave her the good news, and Tatum spent the day thinking about it. She considered shopping with her favorite celebrity, Raven-Symonè, meeting the cast of one of her favorite TV shows,
Full House
, or meeting the President of the United States.
    “I’d like to meet George W. Bush,” she declared a few days later when a volunteer from the Make-A-Wish Foundation came to visit her at the hospital. She wanted to spend the weekend in the White House, sharing breakfasts and dinners with George and Laura Bush, sleeping in the Blue Room, playing in the gardens, enjoying fancy tea parties.
    But when she learned that a wish to meet the president would involve waiting up to two years for a three-minute meet and greet, Tatum quickly decided on a Disney wish. She would leave this hospital and visit a world where everything was perfect—a world with castles, rides, princesses, and candy.
    For the next few days before Tatum was discharged, she closed her eyes during blood draws and procedures, letting the magic of Disney consume her imagination. She grew stronger every day, with thoughts of riding rides and meeting her favorite princess, Tinkerbell—who Tatum always liked best because “she’s sassy like me”—pulling her through.
    A few nights after Tatum told her parents what she was going to wish for, David, asleep in a sleeping bag on the tile floor, woke up to quiet sobs from Sherry, who was curled up in the foldout chair above him.
    “What’s the matter, baby?” he said, sitting upright.
    “She just looks like a little concentration camp victim,” she said, looking at Tatum, who was sound asleep in her hospital bed. The look of her daughter tore Sherry apart—lethargic, bony, pale. She didn’t deserve to be any of those things. Sherry knew they would be