Another trip to the ER. A very different perspective.
A few weeks after emergency brain surgery, I found myself heading right back to the same emergency room.
Not because of another seizure or brain surgery.
Because of a rash.
Apparently, one of my medications wasn’t particularly fond of me.
On the way, Linda and I stopped at Culver’s. During my first hospital stay, my family had eaten at that same Culver’s while I lay intubated in the hospital.
Linda remembered it all.
I remembered none of it.
Back at the ER, I encountered some of the nurses who had cared for me during those missing days. They remembered me. They’d helped save my life.
And I was meeting them, in a sense, for the very first time.
That night, we also met a Christian family facing a very different situation. Their 89-year-old father was dying of cancer, and they were confronting the difficult prospect of hospice.
There was a remarkable peace and faith in how they faced something so painful.
Then, around three in the morning, a code blue was called elsewhere in the ER.
Another father didn’t make it.
His children stood in the hallway. They were about the same age as mine.
And suddenly, everything about my own experience looked different.
Just weeks earlier, my family had been in that same hospital, facing the terrifying possibility that I might never wake up.
Those nurses, those doctors, those extraordinary people had helped bring me back.
But not all dads get to go home.
I don’t have an easy explanation for why my story turned out differently. I certainly don’t believe that my family was somehow more deserving than another.
I do believe God is present in these moments, even the heartbreaking ones we cannot understand.
And I know something else.
I spent that night in the emergency room because of a medication reaction. But I left with a much deeper understanding of the extraordinary gift I’d been given.
I was one of the fathers who made it home.
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