by Amy Newmark
The next day, I actually felt better throughout the day. I went to bed with a sense of relief, but I soon found myself in a dreamlike state. Swallowing. Dreaming. Swallowing. Dreaming. Gulping. I shot up in bed to find my pillow soaked with blood. I shook my husband awake. The next fifteen minutes consisted of a speeding car, the running of stoplights, and my husband’s pleas for me to stay upright. Soon, back in the ER, a hose dangling from my mouth transported my life sustaining blood to a nearby canister.
A nurse stood at my bedside, holding my hand and brushing the hair back from my face. “We’re waiting for anesthesia to arrive. They’re on call this time of night. We’ve paged them, and they should be here soon.”
“How long?” I managed, watching my life travel down the hose.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t think I have that long.” Her silence confirmed my fear.
The surgeon paced outside the room and glanced at his watch every few seconds, failing to mask his worry. My husband cradled our baby in the corner of the room as the nurse continued to hold my hand amidst the unspoken yet palpable panic. The nurse anesthetist from the Labor and Delivery Unit stood nearby, as a substitute, if the anesthesiologist didn’t arrive shortly. The gurney suddenly lurched forward and clipped down the hallway as a strange man in scrubs arrived and placed a mask over my mouth, telling me to breathe deeply.
I awakened to the sounds of distant beeps, hisses, and whispers. Too weak to talk, I could only listen as the surgeon stood at my bedside. This time, he wasn’t rushed and looked a tad disheveled.
“We were all praying for you in there,” he said. “The surgical team formed a circle around you, holding hands while we prayed. We nearly lost you at one point.” I nodded, somehow knowing there’d been a higher intervention.
“I need to tell you something,” he said, his voice thinning.
He must’ve noticed my questioning glance. “During the initial surgery, I nicked your facial artery, and it weakened over time. That’s why you’ve been bleeding on and off.”
I knew that he risked repercussions by telling me the truth. Perhaps he told me out of fear that I’d later discover his wrongdoing. Or, perhaps, he did so because it was the right thing to do. Either way, I respected him for admitting his error.
He then explained the harrowing night in the surgical suite: the tricky cauterization of the artery the size of a pencil tip, too short to tie off; the impending need to cut my throat from the outside in order to repair the damage if the cauterization failed—a procedure he had never performed before; the lavage to rid my stomach of the large amount of blood; and the prayers over my body as they painfully watched the clock and waited to see if the cauterization would hold.
“I kept thinking about your baby,” he said. “How would I tell your husband that you didn’t pull through and that your son had lost his mother?”
With the mention of Holden, the realization struck that I’d been so close to death.
“God listened today, and I’m thankful. I pray that you can forgive me for my mistake.” He squeezed my hand before leaving the room.
I drifted off to sleep, low on blood and energy. But I was alive. Over the next six weeks, the risk of bleeding still lurked until I had completely healed, but I knew God would not fail me now.
I forgave the doctor for the near fatal mistake during my tonsillectomy and for rushing me out of the ER the following day to return to his birthday celebration. He had stood before God, asking for His help in saving my life, knowing the burden he’d carry if I didn’t survive. Knowing my husband would lose a wife, and that my son would grow up without a mother. If God could see fit to answer the doctor’s prayers and grant him mercy, I could grant him his wish of forgiveness.
In the years to follow, my appreciation arrived at his office in the form of a birthday greeting. After all, he had saved my life when given a second chance, and he had asked for God’s help that night to ensure my survival. And each day, I’m thankful the medical team believed in the power of prayer.
~Cathi LaMarche
April Showers
Prayer requires more of the heart than of the tongue.
~Adam Clarke
“Winter storm on the way!” the radio blared. I glanced out the window. Dark clouds were already forming above our small subdivision in rural Illinois. Just then, I heard, “Mom! Mom!” In blew my three bundled-up boys and a crisp October wind.
“Mom!” cried five-year-old Robin. “There’s a cat down in the ground!”
“Oh. You mean someone’s cat’s been buried?”
“No, Mom! Please! Come see! She needs help!”
Six eager hands pulled me outside to the curb. “Can’t you hear it?”
Yes, I could—a very faint meow, floating right up from the storm drain!
Chat, almost four, squinted down into the darkness. “Maybe we could drop her a rope.”
Two-and-a-half-year-old Jay started calling, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”
By now a crowd of neighborhood children had gathered around. “This storm sewer drains across the street,” one of the older boys explained. “If we go down to the opening and call, maybe she’ll come out.”
At the culvert opening, the children took turns shouting, “Kitty! Kitty!” Finally, when Jay called, out she came. Muddy, wet, bone-thin, with a woefully deformed tail. But alive.
“Whose cat is she?” I asked.
“No one’s,” piped up one of the girls. “Her old owners kicked her down there to get rid of her.”
“Well, she’s ours now,” Robin announced. “ ‘Cause Jay’s the one she came out for.”
Back at the house, we wiped the pathetic creature off the best we could. Then, looking around for something to feed her, I filled a bowl of milk.
She ignored the bowl completely and sat and washed herself all over. Now we could see that she was a longhair with striking black-and-white markings. Only when she was immaculate did she turn to the milk. Even then, instead of gulping it down, she sipped daintily, stopping to clean her whiskers from time to time.
“Look at that!” my husband Don exclaimed. “A real lady!”
And that’s how Ladycat came to be with us.
Just in time, too. For all night long we were hit with wave after wave of pounding rain. By morning it had changed to snow.
But inside, our home glowed with the joy of a new playmate. For hours on end, Ladycat would play balls, blocks, and cars with three enchanted boys. She blossomed under this love. But two things about her sad past remained: her deformed tail (perhaps broken in that kick down the storm drain), and her need to go outside and hunt for at least an hour every night.
From then on, frozen days rolled into frozen weeks of 10, 20, and 30 degrees below zero. Then on Valentine’s Day all three boys got chickenpox—Chat so severely, he went into a coma and had to be hospitalized. His brothers begged me not to let Ladycat out that night, in case something happened to her as well.
But the air that evening was spring-like, with just a little drizzle. “Don’t worry, she’ll be right back,” I assured them.
Quickly, though, that drizzle turned into a wild rainstorm. And for the very first time, Ladycat did not come back. All night long, I listened for her. But I only heard the rain. Until it stopped and everything froze.
The next morning, Don’s car slid all over the glass-slick road as he headed off on his long commute to work. But I couldn’t call him to see if he got there okay. I couldn’t even call the hospital fifteen miles away to check on Chat. Or turn on the radio. Or lights. Or heater. For under the weight of that ice, all the power and phone lines had snapped. Our furnace and water heater were inoperable. In fact, nothing worked but our gas stove. Soon it was so cold inside, the boys had to be bundled up in their snowsuits all day long. It was complete misery with those itching pox!
By evening, both boys had bronchitis. But sick as they were, they kept going to the window, looking and calling for their missing pet.
In the middle of the night, Don woke up in excruciating pain and a grossly swollen abdomen. Even though the house was freezing cold (it was 20 below outside and not much warmer inside), his whole body was afire.
“Don!” I gasped. “I think you have appendicitis!”
Normally I would have called the doctor or 911. But with the lines down, I couldn’t even call my neighbors next door. Don needed to go to the hospital right away. But Robin and Jay were far too sick to take out into that frigid air. Don would have to go alone.
As quickly as possible, I packed him in ice, covered that with towels, threw a winter coat over his pajamas, and sent him out into the bitter night—praying he’d be able to make it to the hospital without passing out. Or ending up in a wreck.
By the next day, Robin, Jay, and I all had pneumonia. But so did almost everyone else for miles around. Only the most critically ill could be admitted to the local hospital. In fact, Don had to sit in a waiting room all that night—with a ruptured appendix, peritonitis, and double pneumonia—before they could even find a bed for him.
But finally, after a week, the power and phones returned. After two weeks, so did Don. And after three weeks, Chat did, too. But not our missing cat.
February blurred into March, one storm following another. The same with illnesses.
“It’s all because Ladycat left,” Robin sobbed one day. “Doesn’t she love us anymore?”
“God knows where Ladycat is,” Chat replied weakly. “I’m going to pray and ask Him to bring her back home to us for Jay’s third birthday!”
On April 2nd, just a few days away? What an impossible prayer!
The last day of March was as white, cold, and dreary as ever. But the wind shifted. And on April 1st, the skies opened up.
“Look, children!” I cried. “April showers! It’s raining cats and dogs!”
“Cats?” Jay cried. “Is Ladycat here?”
“She will be,” Chat assured him. “For your birthday. God will bring her back.”
Changing the subject, I asked, “So what do you want for your birthday tomorrow, Jay?”
“Ladycat. Just Ladycat.”
That evening the rain finally let up. Then at the dinner table, Robin suddenly asked, “Who’s at the front door?”
“Ladycat!” Jay shouted.
All three boys ran to the door, flinging it open. A biting wind roared in—followed by a tiny, mud-covered creature, barely able to move.
Don jumped up. “Quick! Get her some food!”
But as feeble as she was, the cat slowly, painfully cleaned herself all over. Only then would she eat. Ladycat was back.
The next morning we retraced her tiny footsteps in the mud — all the way to the culvert where we had first found her. Ever since the ice storm—that night she had disappeared—the opening had been completely frozen over. She had been down there the entire time, subsisting on mice and snow, until finally freed by the previous day’s warm April showers.
Arriving home just in time for Jay’s birthday.
Just as three little boys and God knew she would be.
~Bonnie Compton Hanson
Irish Angels in New York
I’ve seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
~Tracy Chapman
As my husband, Doug, stood on the curb doing his best to hail a cab, I huddled under the hotel awning with my daughter, trying to angle her stroller away from the cold December rain. When I knelt down to check on her, I wasn’t surprised to see her watching the busy New York scene with curiosity. I tucked her pink security blanket tighter against her legs and kissed her cheek where bluish veins crept up the side of her tiny face to her temples.
Frustrated and wet, my husband gave up his attempt to flag down a taxi. Walking back toward me, I saw defeat and complete exhaustion in his expression. I knew the feeling. Just after her first birthday our daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain disorder. Since that moment, Doug and I felt like runners in a marathon race where the finish line kept disappearing.
Doug forced a smile when he saw me looking his way. “It’s cab-crazy over there,” he said. “I thought I was loud but this Kansas boy can’t out-yell these New Yorkers.”
We stood for a moment in silence watching people pour out of the hotel, some walking briskly under umbrellas while others joined the cattle call at the curb.
“How’s she doing?” Doug asked as he pointed to the stroller. It was a question that was fraught with mine fields, but I knew he was only referring to the chill in the air, not the tangle of arteries and blood vessels that slowly robbed our daughter of the typical toddler experience.
“She’s happy as can be. You know Katie, always up for an adventure,” I replied. And it was true. Though she had every reason to be willful and fed up with doctor visits, blood draws, echocardiograms and CT scans, she rarely fussed, flinched or expressed her displeasure. Each new doctor meant a different set of toys in the waiting room and the promise of M&Ms on the way home.
A clap of thunder caused my tired, anxiety-ridden body to flinch as the rain intensified. We had been in the Big Apple barely twenty-four hours and spent the previous night trying to pretend we were merely tourists trekking from the Midwest for a fun holiday getaway instead of brain surgery. We ate New York-style pizza for dinner and even stopped at a bakery for black and white cookies, an homage to the famous Seinfeld episode. Thirty minutes later, Katie paid her own tribute when she proceeded to vomit the black and white cookie all over my chest.
With only two weeks to go until Christmas, twinkling lights and other decorations were festooned across the city. We marveled at lighted snowflakes hanging from street lamps and animated nutcrackers in shop windows just long enough to forget why we were there. But the enormity of it was always with us, ticking in the background like the countdown clock on a bomb.
Even though Katie wore an ever-present smile, we knew she was running out of time. Despite the gnawing in my stomach telling me something was wrong and my continual pleas for doctors to look at her, really LOOK at her, it had taken months before we received a diagnosis. Finally we had a name for the disorder, vein of Galen malformation, but the prognosis was not good. The surgery to treat her condition was so precise that only a handful of specialists in the world were qualified to perform it.
Now, when it was time to check into the hospital where a brilliant doctor was waiting to save our girl, we were huddled under an awning in a strange city in the rain, waiting to catch a break and trying not to break down.
“Pardon me? May we offer you a ride?”
I turned in the direction of the voice and noticed a middle-aged woman in a long white fur coat looking at Katie and then back at me. Midwestern pride kicked in before I could think and I replied, “No thank you. We’re just waiting to grab a taxi.”
“It’s really no trouble. My husband is bringing the car around now,” she countered. It was then I noticed her thick Irish brogue, an accent that warmed me like hot soup.
When a black SUV pulled up moments later, she ushered Katie and me into the back seat before we could protest further and instructed her husband, a tall gentleman with broad shoulders and a full head of snow white hair, to help load our suitcases into the hatch.
Doug and I sat very still trying not to get the expensive leather seats wet with our rain-mottled clothes and checking our feet for mud even though we had been standing on concrete.
As the man pulled away from the curb, the woman asked where we were headed. We knew from our brief time in New York that people preferred short, to-the-point answers so we simply said, “Roosevelt Hospital, please,” and settled in for the ride.
I don’t know how she knew, maybe it was mother’s intuition, or maybe she spied the veins or the dark circles under Katie’s eyes, but the wife asked, “Are you going for the baby?”
I nodded my head, choking back a tiny sob as the floodgates opened and we poured out our story. We were only a few block
s away from our destination, but it was a cathartic release and the couple listened intently. Their children were grown and had kids of their own, but the previous evening, the entire family gathered in the city for a holiday dinner and Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall.
At the hospital we thanked them a dozen times for the ride. While I was strapping Katie back into her stroller, the woman called Doug over and placed a laminated card in his hand. On one side was a picture of Mother Teresa, on the other, a simple prayer. She quickly scratched her name and e-mail address on a piece of paper and asked us to contact them about Katie’s recovery.
The woman hugged me one final time. After the embrace I noticed her face was wet with tears and shrouded in worry. She promised to pray for us. Then they were gone.
We would never forget that single moment of kindness. As the double doors of the hospital opened with a “whoosh,” we took a deep breath and looked down at our girl. It was time to find her miracle.
After three more visits to New York and two more brain surgeries, Katie is cured. During the frenzy of that first trip we lost the e-mail address of our kind Irish angels, but we still have the laminated Mother Teresa card. It sits prominently on our refrigerator as a constant reminder of a tiny ray of light delivered on one of our darkest days.
~Dani M. Stone
My Two-Second Miracle
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
~Matthew 5:4
“I saw him! I SAW HIM!”
I excitedly told my husband the news as he asked the obvious question, “You saw WHO?”
“I just saw Donnie!” was my reply, as tears rolled down my cheeks.
I had to sit down. My husband Don looked at me with half a smile but mostly wide-eyed disbelief. We both knew very well that our twenty-eight-year-old son Donnie had died in an auto accident in 1999, and it was now 2007!
As I sat down at our dining room table, I tried to recall what had just happened. Dinner was ready, and Donnie’s cat Audrey was on the back of our green easy chair. I had placed the casserole dish on the table and turned to call Don to come and eat when I glanced at Audrey out of the corner of my eye. She was about to jump down from her perch on the back of the chair. She usually joined us in the dining room when it was dinnertime, so it was not unusual of her. What was unusual was the misty form of my son, Donnie, hovering over her with one outstretched arm to pet her! It only lasted a couple of seconds, but he was instantly recognizable with a very big smile on his face! As she leaped down, the vision was gone. Gone in seconds, so that I had to sit and think about this. Did it really happen? YES! I knew it had happened!