Miracles in the ER (31 page)

“Probably seven or eight. We’ll count them when we’re finished.”

His mother was standing on the other side of the stretcher, and I knew the next question.

“Will there be a bad scar?” she asked.

“It’s impossible to cut the skin without a scar,” I answered—which is true. “But this is mostly in his eyebrow and should pretty much disappear.” Which is also true. “I think in a couple of months he’ll forget it happened.” True once again.

“I hope so,” she cooed. “He’s such a handsome young man.”

Twenty minutes later, I was standing at the nurses’ station, putting the final notes on the teenager’s chart. The wound had come together perfectly and would in fact disappear in a few months. Lori was leading mother and son up the hall and Mrs. Draffin stopped beside me.

“Thank you, Dr. Lesslie.”

I turned and said, “He should do fine. Remember, the stitches need to come out in six or seven days.”

Over her left shoulder I watched as her son used his mother’s makeup compact to examine his eyebrow. Gingerly he touched the skin around it, tilted his head at multiple angles, then flicked the unruly locks of hair on his forehead back into place.

“I just hope this doesn’t scar,” he mumbled.

Jeff Ryan rushed through the triage door. “Got a bleeder here, Doc.”

Behind him followed an ashen-faced middle-aged man—Charlie Stilman.

“Trauma 3 is open.” Lori gently but firmly moved the teenager out of the way and Jeff and his patient moved quickly down the hallway. Charlie caught my eye and gave me a weak smile. I looked down at his bandaged and bloody hand and my heart thumped in my chest. It was his
left
hand—his violin-fingering hand.

Charlie Stilman was in his early fifties, and we sang together in our church choir. He was an accomplished violinist, often lending his musical gift to our worship services. Though classically trained, he frequently swapped his violin for a fiddle and played with a local bluegrass band.

Drops of blood followed Charlie and Jeff as they disappeared into minor trauma.

“Watch out, Jeremy. Don’t step in that.” Behind me Mrs. Draffin was pointing to the tiled floor and the scattered splashes of crimson. She grabbed her son’s elbow and followed Lori out through the exit.

Charlie was lying on bed C, in the back-right corner of the room. Jeff was standing beside the stretcher, carefully unwrapping the makeshift bandage—what appeared to be a blue-gingham kitchen towel.

“A fine mess here, Robert.” Charlie’s color was better and he almost looked relaxed with his uninjured hand behind his head. He looked up at Jeff. “Do I need to raise it higher? Is this okay?”

“You’re doing fine, Mr. Stilman.” Jeff reached for a handful of gauze and prepared to remove the last of the towel. He dropped it to the floor—a thin stream of blood arched a foot into the air. The nurse quickly pressed the gauze over the torn vessel and held it tightly.

“You’re right,” I said, moving over to Jeff’s side. “He
does
have a bleeder.”

“I did a good job, didn’t I?” Charlie was looking at his wounded hand.

In that brief glimpse, I had seen enough to know we had a real problem. His index, long, and ring fingers were filleted, with torn tendons exposed and dangling.

“How did this happen, Charlie?” I walked around him to the storage cabinet and grabbed a pair of sterile gloves.

“Jimmy and I were in the shop working on some bluebird houses, and I guess his hand…my hand slipped and got pulled into the table saw. It happened in the blink of an eye—that quick. I’ve always been careful, but—”

“Is Jimmy okay?” I doubted he had been injured physically. It was his emotional state I was worried about. Jimmy was Charlie’s sixteen-year-old son, and the two were very close. If he was somehow responsible for this, it would be difficult for him.

Charlie looked up at me and studied my eyes. I raised my eyebrows and waited. He smiled, nodded, and said, “I’ll make sure he’s okay.”

We got the pain under control and I was able to get a good look at Charlie’s torn and ripped-up fingers. It was worse than I had thought. There were a couple of obvious fractures and of course the lacerated ten-dons, but the blood supply to the fingers was intact.

“The good news, Charlie, is that you’re not going to lose anything. The bad news is—”

“The bad news is my fingers will never work the same again. I knew that the moment it happened.”

I was studying his injured hand and didn’t say anything. When I finally looked up into my friend’s face, he was smiling.

“I know. You’re thinking about my violin. Or maybe my fiddle—I think you always preferred me playing that instrument. Well, those days are over.”

I was trying to imagine the intricate fingering of the fretless violin, the delicate touch required to make it sing. And I knew Charlie was right. Those days were over.

“Robert, which of the Bible prophets do some people call the ‘whining prophet’?”

“What?”
Where had that come from? We needed to talk about his hand and what the next steps would be. Yet here was a Bible trivia question.

I thought for a moment and ventured, “Jonah, I suppose.”

“Good thought, but not correct. It’s Jeremiah. A lot of people just think of him as a whiner and unfortunately don’t spend much time studying
what he has to say. He
does
do a lot of whining, I suppose, but he was dealing with some tough times, and bad things were about to happen. But some of my favorite passages in Scripture come from his writings.

“One of those came to mind as Jimmy drove me over here. I know you’re familiar with it. It comes from the twenty-ninth chapter—not sure which verses. I can’t quote it exactly, but it has to do with the Lord having a plan for us—a plan for something good. I thought if Jeremiah could say that with the Babylonians breathing down Israel’s neck, who was I to complain about a table-saw blade? I know he has something planned for me, something good.” He paused and raised his wounded hand a few inches from the arm board. “This is just a detour, and a small one at that. Like you said, I’m not going to lose anything. But even if I did, it wouldn’t matter—not really.”

Jimmy walked into the room and over to his father’s side. “Are you going to be alright, Dad?” He glanced down at the gauze-covered hand and quickly looked away.

“I’m going to be fine, son.” He reached out and took his boy’s hand in his good one. “We’ll both be fine.”

Six months passed. Charlie had been singing in the choir, his hand slowly healing from three separate surgeries. His thumb was fine, as was his little finger. But the other digits were stiff, useless. One Sunday morning he didn’t join us in the choir room before the worship service.
Odd.
I had seen him earlier and knew he was at the church.

We filed into the choir loft without him and our organist nodded, signaling for us to sit. Then he looked to his right, over the curtain behind him, and nodded again.

I could see heads turning in the congregation, necks straining, eyes searching.

The sanctuary was silent, and I heard soft footsteps approaching the raised platform and podium. Then a head came into view, then an upper body.

It was Charlie Stilman. He stopped just behind the organist and nodded. His eye caught mine. He smiled and gave me a wink.

The organist began his prelude, something majestic and triumphant. After a few measures, Charlie took a deep breath and raised a bright,
shining trombone to his lips. He began playing, and the sanctuary was filled with the mellow, rich tones of the instrument, expertly played.

How had he learned to play this in only a brief six months?

His right hand deftly and gracefully handled the slide, while the only requirement for his left hand was to steady the instrument.

It was beautiful and amazing.

As the last blended notes of the organ and trombone faded into the far reaches of the sanctuary, one lone, vibrant voice from the back of the church uttered what was in all our hearts.

“Amen.”

“I know the plans I have for you,” declares the L
ORD
, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

J
EREMIAH
29:11

Outside Looking In

How many times had I seen the two of them walking up the hill of the ER parking lot? How many times holding hands, slowly getting into that ’82 Oldsmobile station wagon and driving off?

“It’s different now, isn’t it?”

Virginia Granger startled me, and I turned to face the head nurse. I was standing in the medicine room, gazing out the window as Ed Reynolds disappeared into the inky midnight blackness of the ER parking lot. Alone.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “It’s different.”

“He seems okay.” Virginia moved beside me and stood hands on hips, looking out the large window. “But he’s what? Almost ninety? They were together a lot of years.”

“He’s ninety-two.” Lori Davidson walked into the room and dropped the clipboard of the cardiac room on the counter. “That’s what he just told me. Julia was ninety, and they were married sixty-five years.”

“Sixty-five years,” Virginia quietly repeated. “It
is
going to be different now.”

“Make yourself comfortable now, Mr. Reynolds. This is going to take awhile.”

I had first met Ed Reynolds twenty years earlier when he came to the ER with a Skilsaw laceration of his left hand. Actually there were three separate lacerations of his fingers and palm. He was lucky—there was no tendon or bone injury.

“I’ve always wondered why they call it a ‘
skill
’ saw,” he chuckled. “If I had any skill, I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

Ed and I hit it off from the very beginning. He was my father’s age and seemed to have the same outlook on a lot of things. Maybe it was a generational thing. Maybe it was their shared experiences as veterans of the Second World War that drew me to him.

We talked continuously while I put his hand back together. Initially it was about the weather and sports—nothing very deep. He liked the Dallas Cowboys and I liked the Washington Redskins, and I threatened to not use any more lidocaine if he needed something else for the pain. He asked where I was from, and about my parents. When I told him about my father and about his college career being interrupted by the war, Ed grew quiet. He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and I focused on his shredded index finger.

“We landed in Normandy,” he said quietly. “There were six of us, close friends. And we fought together all the way into Belgium. It was during the Battle of the Bulge that…everything changed. They say it was the bloodiest American battle of the war. All I know is that only two of us survived the fighting.” He grew quiet again, and his head slumped on his chest.

Julia had been sitting on a chair near the door. She got up, stepped over to her husband, and put a hand on his shoulder.

Ed sighed and raised his head. “That’s where I got my medal.” He patted his right thigh with his good hand. “A piece of shrapnel from a tank shell almost took my leg off. Still have it in there somewhere—wouldn’t let them take it out. When the weather changes, or it gets cold, it starts to hurt. And I remember.”

“Tell him the rest, Ed.” Julia was grinning now, and she patted his shoulder.