Perspective: A Love Story
I slowly woke up in a pitch black ICU room, monitors gently beeping around me, the pain medication wearing off. I looked to my left and standing there was an achingly beautiful angel in a white, flowing robe, looking down on me with pure love and concern. She took my hand but didn’t say a word, tears filling her eyes. I realized then what I knew all along.
The nurse lifted me as gently as he could, moving me slowly over to the hard CT scanner table. The pain even then was almost unbearable, stabbing and radiating from my right chest and back each time I moved or took a breath. My breathing was ragged, shallow and fast. The CT tech told me to lift my arms over my head in a bored voice. Knowing the pain would even further ratchet up with that movement, I was slow. The tech pushed my elbows up to hurry the process along. My screams were followed by curses between gasps for air. After the scan, my nurse softly laid me back in my ICU bed for the trip upstairs, gave me some more morphine and slowly wheeled my out of Radiology. I was asleep before we made it to the elevator.
I have been in the OR an uncountable number of times as student, resident and practicing surgeon. I knew the drill. The process was the same, the nurses, Anesthesiologist and Thoracic Surgeon all performing their choreographed duties with the same precision and attention to detail required for the forthcoming operation. Although my role was different, I was comfortable. The pain slashed through me still, my breathing not able to sustain my body’s oxygen requirements, one and a half liters of pus filling my right chest cavity. The cold sterility, the harsh lights, the voices murmuring all calmed me. A tingling sensation traveled through my IV, up my arm.
The nurse came into my room, not making eye contact, mumbled the name of a medication, gave me the pill cup, no water, stood looking out the window while I whispered for some water. Her profession was no longer a calling but just a job. Punching the clock, the patients seemed to get in the way of her work. She shuffled out of the room without a word.
My family was by my side, more family calling. As I faded in an out of pain and sleep, the faces would change, but the care remained. Family: the outward expression of love and faith. Family: a source of holiday bickering, tension and old scars. I would not have been mentally strong enough to recover, to sit in that hospital without them.
Friends were already family in some sense. I am indebted to them with the explosion of love, prayer and support. They would disagree; I would only insult them by any ridiculous attempt to repay their efforts. I never easily have accepted such a focus on me, on my problems. I am recovering physically. I am learning to be a friend, to accept friendship. Lessons in friendship do not seem to come on the good days.
Common Wisdom dictates that the brain says one thing and the heart another. Logic and Faith are an expression of this paradigm. My experience with a severe illness that nearly ended my life tore down the separation between Family, Love, Work, and Friends. The logic of life is faith. It binds the separate parts of life and blurs their distinctions. What is family without love and friendship? How can work be anything meaningful without love? Friendship takes effort, it takes love, it creates family. Faith is required for everything we do. Why would we work, why would we love, why would we care without faith in our protection, in the knowledge that God’s perfect plan has already been laid for us? We are not guaranteed anything. We deserve nothing. Our lives, our love, our families and our friends are all a manifestation of Grace. While Reformed Theology is something I knew, Love can only be lived.
My wife held my hand that painful, dark night in the ICU, standing there over me in a friend’s borrowed, oversized, white terry-cloth bathrobe. Her strength and her faith kept the worry, exhaustion and fear at bay. Looking in her eyes, wet with tears, I realized then what I knew all along.
- Todd Huber 2/16/10