I wrote this as I had a few hours to fill in at Auckland Hospital while Chris had a heart procedure done to try and fix his Atrial Fibrillation. What amazing places hospitals are! I could sit all day and just watch people coming and going, each of them caught up in their own life drama…
I’m sitting by the empty bed in Chris’s room making use of the hospital’s free wifi. What an amazing place this is. A world of its own. Suffering, love, compassion, duty… As Chris lies unconscious on the operating table with dedicated surgeon, nurses and anaethetist working on him, the remarkable world of hospital swarms around me. I’ve talked to the lady who is waiting hopefully for her heart and kidney transplant; I’ve shared a lift with a man and a woman and a weekend bag, and it’s not until she gives a tiny moan and leans against him that realise she’s in labour; I’ve laughed with the lady in the opposite bed who’s a bit worried that her surgeon is called Mr Heaven; I’ve chatted to a tiny fragile girl with bone deformities in a wheelchair who is beaming because a stranger has just given her a bright green balloon. “It’s exactly the same colour as your top!” I tell her and she beams at me too; I enter the lift again and hum one line of the song my mother used to often sing- Beautiful Dreamer – and the large Pacific Island woman with a bright orange artificial flower tucked in her hair starts to sing the next line. “Is that the song?” she asks me. I nod and we sing it together until I reach my floor. And the whole time I’m lifting my darling husband up to the Lord and praying that he sleeps deeply while they try and fix his heart.
Oh yes…a song came unbidden to me while I was waiting for the lift and it wasn’t until I’d sung a few lines that I realised how appropriate they were! “Wounded Healer, put your hands upon his heart…touch his heart, Wounded Healer.” 🙂
POSTSCRIPT:
Chris came back from theater at five that night, very tired but otherwise in good spirits. He was discharged the next day with the encouraging prognosis of an 80% potential success rate. 🙂 And this last week has seen him feeling better than he was before the operation, thanks to the doctor halving his medicine. Great rejoicing!