You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The power of prayer.
The wife sits before me as if she doesn’t have a care in the world.
Surrounded by 3 grand babies and a nervous daughter, the matriarch of the family exudes a calm that puts everyone at ease.
I look around the lobby at Vanderbilt Medical Center. People of every shape and color are seated in a haphazard array of nervousness. People clutched coffee cups and tap their feet and fidget in their chairs thinking about their loved ones in the floors above us.
Vanderbilt Medical Center is the bulls eye on the medical dart board when it comes to trauma. This is where the sickest of the sick come to get fixed or die or something in between.
It is with this realization that I am interviewing a 56 year old woman in the lobby. The woman tells me about her husband who left work and decided to walk to the restaurant they would meet at. She says he began crossing the street, but never got to the other side.
Somewhere between lane 1 and 2, a car traveling 50 mph drives through him. He is obliterated.
A witness will tell me that the man is launched 20 feet in the air doing a somersault and a half before crashing to the pavement.
The man says by the time he stops his car and rushes to the victim’s side, he is bleeding profusely with blood spurting out of his left side.
The witness describes it like a fountain of blood spurting and spewing, staining the street red.
The good Samaritan was a boy scout once upon a time. He says he takes off his belt and ties a tourniquet around the victim’s arm which is apparently dangling by some skin and tendons.
The man is rushed to Vanderbilt medical center leaking blood like a 65 mustang with bad rings leaks oil.
The doctor will come to the waiting room that night and tell her that she needs to make some harsh decisions about pulling him off the ventilator, about allowing him to die peacefully.
That’s up to God she will respond. My husband is strong. He is a fighter. He will live for his grand babies.
That was 13 days ago.
She is right.
Since then, the man run over in the street has had 8 operations. He has opened his eyes. He has spoken. He is not paralyzed. He has no brain damage. He is far from ok, but he will survive.
They call him the “miracle man, she says beaming. “His grandson calls him Turbo Man,” the woman will tell me, an aura of positivity floating around her.
He has no left arm. The family has no insurance. They face months of rehab and life altering therapy.
She is brimming ear to ear telling me she will celebrate every day of her husband’s life.
He calls me sweet cakes, she says. She tells me how they we were high school sweet hearts who went their separate ways. Both married someone else, then got divorced. Years later they would go on a blind date and fall in love all over again.
That was 18 years ago. She says they never had a wedding or a reception so she says next year, that is the plan.
She becomes serious. “He said he didn’t have a left arm so he couldn’t wear a wedding ring. I told him, oh no. You will be wearing a wedding ring, around your neck, some place.”
Then she laughs out loud.
I did too. The power of prayer and positive thinking.
Her husband should have died in the street. Instead, he will get re-married and watch his grand babies grow up.
“God wasn’t ready for him to come home yet,” she says.
Apparently not. We can all learn something from the lady with the power of positive thinking.
Life’s Crazy™