Kathy Hendricks offers talks and retreats across the country and overseas on spirituality and family, and is a contributing writer for many of the programs published by William H. Sadlier. She and her husband, Ron, live in Larkspur, Colorado, and are the parents of two young adults, Eric and Anna.
Stop and Fix
Driving to the emergency room in the dark with a bloody tissue in my lap ranks in the upper echelon of my stomach-churning experiences. An hour or so earlier, I was awakened by the intermittent cough that had plagued me for a couple of months. Attributing it to Colorado’s dry air and the residual effects of a nasty cold, it never occurred to me that it could be anything serious. I coughed up what I thought was phlegm, but a trip to the bathroom revealed that it was blood. It set off every inner alarm bell in my possession.
The doctor in the emergency room told me that coughing blood was not, in and of itself, a sign of the worst possible scenario. I had seen enough medical dramas to think differently, but tried to keep from fast-forwarding to my funeral and to await, instead, the results of a chest X-ray and CT scan. When he then informed me that I was to be admitted as an inpatient, I started picking out the hymns.
Over the next few hours, as the antibiotics took effect and various tests proved negative, I calmed down. I learned that my bronchial passages were infected and, after a day or so, I could go home. I tucked away the funeral plans and started to reflect on my blessings. Such experiences, brief as they generally are in my life, tend to whap me back into reality and a humble appreciation of all that I have. Once I move past the guilt over self-pity taken to dramatic heights, I recognize how precious and sometimes precarious life is. One moment I am rinsing the dishes, and the next I am watching my own blood spill down the drain. The brevity of my hospital stay revealed my good fortune. The man in the next room took to the hallway on a regular basis, making his way with slow and painful steps. I could hear an anxious family member coaxing another nearby patient to eat. Reminders that not everyone has their physical fate resolved in forty-eight hours surrounded me.
Percy Ainsworth, an eloquent preacher whose insights into Scripture stay pertinent even one hundred years after his death, wrote that true faith has to be for the long haul rather than for particular circumstances. Otherwise it turns into calculation. This is tricky business when biding the early morning hours in an ER. All of the in-between time that comes with hospital experiences—the post test/pre-results minutes and hours—permit a certain amount of reflection. My husband, Ron, stayed with me throughout the ordeal, as he has so many times during our thirty-two year marriage. We recalled other tenuous moments and marveled at how, in time, each worked itself out.
My son and daughter both called and hearing their voices from across the country steadied me. Anna said that there are “stop and fix” moments in our lives and this seemed to be one of them for me. It’s so easy to barrel on with our day-to-day activities, ignoring the persistent cough or suspicious lump, bump, pinch, or twinge. We figure we’ll stop someday or that the problem will fix itself. When a mid-night stint at the ER forces our hand, we are left to ponder what could be and then how we might deal with it. We can calculate all we want but, in the end, have to surrender to reality, harsh or otherwise. A retrospective view places us in a context, one that nudges us into faith in the overall movement of life. “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well,” the great 14th-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, wrote. At stop-and-fix moments this can be the best mantra of all, a way to trust in a God who abides and in the way in which things do, in time, work out.