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Believing in Miracles
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"Diana should have left me over and over and over," Denny says. "She prayed for 17 years that the Lord would save me."
Diana says: "I believe in a commitment."
His spiritual conversion began in the early 1980s, when their young son was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. Within a few years, his would be a shift of living as dramatic as any New Testament disciple's. He and Diana sold their house and moved so he could minister to young people in a tiny Ohio community. He went on to lead a struggling church in Prince William County.
Seven years ago, looking for some part-time counseling work, he turned onto the long main drive of Youth for Tomorrow. Former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs had founded the residential program for at-risk adolescents and placed it on a pastoral sweep of land outside Manassas. Denny drove around to the basketball court to see who was there.
He realized almost immediately, he told chief executive Gary Jones, that the Lord had directed him from the moment he entered the campus. He would take any position available. Hired as a counselor, he was soon being greeted as "Pastor Denny" and regularly drawing the teens as well as staff to learn more about Jesus.
"You know it's got to be something kids want to do if, on a Friday afternoon, 35 of them show up for Bible study," Jones says.
Denny was absent from work for months after the accident. These days, he tries to work at least a dozen hours weekly, usually driving in exhaustion the 80-mile round trip from Diana's hospital in Northeast Washington. But if she is having a bad morning, anxious or in pain, he goes nowhere, or he waits until late at night to leave, making as quick a ride as possible to their house in Stafford County to retrieve clothes.
His boss grieves over the agony they have endured. Denny is 62; Diana, 59. Jones believes just one thing has sustained them. "You walk away marveling at how Diana shows such courage, such grace, and how Denny is always by her side," he says. "He's set a standard of walking in faith. Both have."
Their Imperfect Miracle
After this much time, Room 2-007 feels claustrophobically small and cluttered. The Gluskos have stayed long enough that it has taken on elements of home. Amid the suction machine, carbon dioxide monitor and other medical equipment, a fabric angel that Diana sewed adorns one wall -- everyone attests to the beautiful crafts she used to make and sell -- and Denny's jacket hangs in the bathroom. Extra silverware is in the shallow cabinet behind the mirror; condiments sit on a windowsill.
Denny tries to flavor up the meal trays that arrive with monotony three times a day. Much is never touched, and Diana has lost more than 30 pounds. "Now tell me," he cajoles one evening, sprinkling Parmesan cheese on a plate of noodles. "Doesn't that look like the Olive Garden?"
Several blocks east of Capitol Hill, the Specialty Hospital of Washington is their third hospital since May 6. First was Inova Fairfax, where Diana was taken by air-ambulance. Next was the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, the New Jersey hospital that treated actor Christopher Reeve after his spinal injury.
When Diana left Kessler in August because her health insurance company decided she wasn't making adequate progress, she still was not breathing on her own and doctors there gave her little hope for ever doing so. Less than 24 hours after she arrived at Specialty, Leslie Kingslow promised her otherwise. The doctor kept his word.
