08:54 PM CDT on Wednesday, August 18, 2004

By JACQUIELYNN FLOYD / The Dallas Morning News

Andrew Scott came to the phone himself when I called the hospital to ask about his baby daughter, Allie. Misery and relentless anxiety have left him exhausted, but he was nonetheless polite.

"Of course," he said, when I asked for permission to quote from his wife Jenny's extraordinary online journal chronicling Allie's fight with leukemia. The young couple has shared their emotional journey with unexpurgated candor, whether the news has been good or bad.

Right now, the news is almost as bad as it can be.

Since I first wrote about Jenny Scott and Dana Eisenberg, two mothers whose Web journals about life in a Dallas pediatric cancer unit have captivated readers around the world, their fortunes have diverged sharply.

Dana's 3-year-old son, Sam, went home Monday, only two weeks after receiving a bone marrow transplant from his twin brother, Ethan. Dana's ongoing Web log at www.caringbridge.org/tx/sameisenberg reflects her celebratory joy at the resumption of ordinary household life: shopping for groceries, cooking, watching with radiant contentment as her two sons, one still bald from chemotherapy, played and hollered and tore around the house.

Man, I forgot how much work these little guys are. But you know what? I wouldn't change a minute of it.

The news for 8-month-old Allie Scott, though, has taken a serious turn for the worse. The day the Eisenbergs took their son home, the Scotts signed a "do not resuscitate" order for their baby, who is weakening rapidly.

Scared isn't the word to describe our fear, Jenny wrote on the family's Web site, www.scotthousehold.com.

I'm grasping for straws, hanging on to any last ray of hope that there could possibly be out there.

This week, doctors started Allie on an experimental drug that they candidly called a "shot in the dark." It's a final effort, and they have warned the young parents not to get their hopes up.

One child grows stronger; another weakens.

The thousands of online readers who have followed the intertwined families' cases for so long must be left wondering, as I am, why fate can be so arbitrary and blind.

There remains so much to admire about both of these families, who were strangers before they became 12th-floor neighbors at the North Texas Hospital for Children at Medical City Dallas.

On Tuesday, Dana returned to the hospital. She slipped into Allie's room and climbed into the narrow hospital bed next to Jenny and her sick baby.

We cried, we laughed just a little and we inhaled every exhale of Allie. We talked about Jenny's fears and discussed that absolutely no decisions have to be made at this time.

It occurs to me that if there is one single thing worse in the world than enduring the desperate illness of your own child, it would be to endure it without that quality of support from your family and friends. Whatever happens to Allie, she has never known a single hour of life without abiding love.

That idea remains the powerful burning light that Jenny expresses with every Internet posting.

I want to write about my love for this child. My baby. My love. I couldn't ask for a more perfect child. She is the baby of my dreams ... Andrew says that maybe she is just too perfect for this world.

It takes a lot of strength to endure what the Scotts are experiencing right now. When theirs wavers, they have much to draw on – Andrew's and Jenny's families, their friends, the countless readers who have so readily offered up their prayers.

And Dana, of course, who understands so completely. It was Dana who offered a purely brilliant rebuke to well-meaning blunderers who make clumsy references to "God's will."

God didn't give Allie and Sam leukemia. This is not God's will. They had a white cell that went bonkers and began mutating incorrectly – that's all that happened. God doesn't give people, much less innocent children, diseases. Our bodies are not perfect.

It is as profound a profession of faith as I have ever read: We are not perfect. God loves us.

For now, the Scotts have asked well-wishers not to send gifts, but to offer their prayers. A friend of both families has established an online donation site to make contributions in both children's names to a nationwide fund raiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society: www.active.com/donate/AllieandSam.

Jenny writes that she still wistfully nurses a mental image of her daughter one day playing in a park or at a party with all the other kids on the 12th-floor oncology unit.

I was told that if there are four children up here, at least one out of the four would die. Naively, I thought that wouldn't be the case for our kids. Now, out of the four kids that have been here with us, mine is the one.

Still, she writes:

I would take these last eight months of being her mother over nothing and do it all over again anytime.

E-mail jfloyd@dallasnews.com