These are a few of the friends I spent my day with today. I've known them for years so, over time, they've shared their stories with me.:
- A woman whose younger brother died in her arms when she was sixteen years old after a drunk driver broadsided the car she was driving. Years later, her infant daughter started to miss developmental milestones and began to exhibit autistic behaviors, rocking and repetitive head-banging. The doctors diagnosed her with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, and later, when she started kindergarten, with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She didn’t speak until she turned six. As if that weren't enough, at the age of forty, this woman developed pain and swelling in her right breast. She couldn’t imagine how she might have bruised herself there. Two days after she saw her doctor about it she underwent an urgent breast biopsy. She prayed for the reports to be negative because she still had three children at home, one of them with special needs. But the biopsy was positive for breast cancer. The doctors cautioned her not to get her hopes up. “Go home,” they told her. “Think about how you want to say goodbye.”
"Out of suffering have emerged
the strongest souls."
~Kahlil Gibran~
- A woman whose father abandoned the family when she was just a child. When she finally tracked him down years later, he agreed to meet with her, but she never got to see him alive. He died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack just days before they planned to reunite.
- A nurse whose son died of leukemia when he was twelve years old.
"The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade.
A calling, not a business.
A calling in which your heart
will be exercised equally
with your mind."
~Sir William Osler~
- A young man who was involved in a car crash when he was in high school. He suffered a brain injury so severe the doctors didn’t think he would survive. He spent weeks in a coma in the intensive care unit until he was transferred to an in-patient rehab facility where the doctors thought he would remain until he died. Weeks after the accident, even though it violated the hospital's rules, his family smuggled the boy's dog into his room. Three days later, he opened his eyes, and went on to complete a full recovery.
"Dog is God spelled backward."
~Duane Chapman~
I wasn't making rounds at the hospital today. I wasn't attending a medical conference. I started off this morning at a spiritual retreat. On the way home, I stopped off for coffee. Then I went to the grocery store. Proof that we encounter people every day whose stories we may never get to hear. We pass them on the street or in the store. We invite them along for a cup of coffee. We work with them every day. There is nothing unusual about the way they dress, nothing peculiar about they way they speak, nothing strange about their beliefs that would set them apart from all the rest of us.
But until we know their stories, we don't know them.
"O, what an untold world there is
in one human heart."
~Harriet Beecher Stowe~
jan
