I had to make another hospital run
yesterday. One of our guys from church
was scheduled for heart surgery.
Quadruple bypass. They said he
had five blockages, but they were only going to deal with four of them, perhaps
because he also needed a new valve in his heart. That was to be the “rest of the
surgery.” Something like that used to
sound so critical. I remember when my
Dad had bypass surgery years ago. I was
in Denver when I found out, and the church up there basically told me to get
out of town as fast as I could so I could be with him. Joe’s wife said they told her that the odds
of a catastrophic result of the surgery, even with the valve replacement added
on, was only in the neighborhood of three to five percent. That’s amazing. It really helped their emotional approach to
the situation, though.
After Shirley’s family arrived, I went
upstairs to check on Uncle Jerry’s status.
He had two surgeries to remove blood clots after one leg had so much
blockage that it looked like it had gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champ
of the world – black and blue and swollen.
At one point he was scheduled to go home yesterday. When I got there, though, he was in excruciating
pain. He had just maneuvered from the
bed to the chair in his room, and his pain had jumped to an almost unbearable
level in his calf. They were working to
manage the pain, but he still faced a physical therapy session later in the
day. There was no way he would be
heading home any time soon. He lives in the
West End of the Island, so he has to deal with lots of steps just to get inside
his front door. Looks like he will head
to a rehab hospital for his next stop.
When he finally started dozing off, I headed
back to check in on Shirley and her family.
They had settled in for the long haul.
The volunteer had informed them that the surgery could take a few hours
longer than they had anticipated. While
we were talking I got a text from Chris.
She said Mom was “sitting on the side of her bed in Lala Land.” I decided to head back home to see what help I
could be on that front. Three doses of
pretty tough news to handle. Gotta
admit, it can start to wear at you.
I got into the elevator and started a text
to Chris to see how Mom was doing. A
young man in his early twenties jumped in right before the doors closed and
took up his spot on the other side of the car.
I couldn’t help myself. My people
watching nature kicked in. The guy was
hunched over and seemed kind of fidgety.
His head stayed down, but his eyes were working overtime, darting back
and forth. For the most part, his
behavior would have raised some sense of the suspicious in me, were it not for
one thing. He had this goofy grin on his
face that he just couldn’t seem to turn off.
I had a hunch I knew where he was coming from. Finally we made eye contact, and I smiled and
greeted him. His grin widened, and he
straightened up to face me. Forgetting
elevator decorum, he went right past nodding and smiling and maybe offering a
polite “hi.” He went straight to “I just
had a baby.” That’s what I thought. For the rest of the brief ride I got an
earful of his origins (“I live in Alvin that’s where I met my wife and we got
married there and now we have a baby”).
I did manage to ask two questions, “Is it a boy or a girl?” (“It’s a
girl and she’s really healthy and that’s all that matters and she has ten
fingers and ten toes”), and “What’s her name?”
That brought the widest smile of all as he proudly declared, “Rose
Marie.” Perfect name for a country girl
from Alvin.
The elevator doors opened and he went off
in the other direction, grinning and mumbling to himself. I walked toward my car with a new bounce in
my step, humming and pondering the events of the day. And I was amazed at how three bits of rough
news could be put in perspective by this one simple announcement, “A baby has
been born.” Finding out about a total
stranger’s baby girl had quite an effect on me in the midst of my bad news
day. Kind of sheds new light on God’s
decision to explode into history as a baby rather than as a superstar. He was concerned about affecting people’s
hearts, not so much their politics.
Matthew 1:22-23 says, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the
prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they
will call him Immanuel’ -which means, ‘God with us.’”
Father, thank you for baby Rose Marie. Guide her to a special place in your
kingdom. Amen.
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