I giggled to myself yesterday. It is just like God to close a circle with
comical but quiet certainty, leaving his smudgy fingerprints all over an
affair. Yesterday Asa had his port a
cath removed (see prior post). It was
pretty uneventful in every way, not that a toddler and anesthesia are ever a
cakewalk, but we didn’t have any extraneous hospital blips like insufferably
long waits for strange and unknown reason, no hunger cries or cookie tossing, just
too much coffee and an overactive toddler running tripping up doctors with push
toys. Into that normalcy came a sweet
realization.
Tony and I were talking the night before and I mentioned to
him that the surgeon was a Dr. Nuchtern.
You don’t get your druthers when it comes to surgeons for minor stuff,
so in my mind, this fact was just another of many unimportant details in a drawn
out affair, but hiding in the foggy recesses of my head, in the hundreds of
professionals we have encountered in 9 months, I knew this doc was somehow in
the story in the past. I just don’t have
the memory of an elephant that my spouse has.
And he reminded me. This sweet, kind, soft spoken, unassuming man
in the OR waiting area, who shook my hand and grinned so gently, was the chief
of surgery, the man who got us rushed through the door of the ER months ago,
the man who had operated a miracle on another friend’s child years before. How like God to wind the piece to resolution
with a rework of the intro melody!
I don’t think that story’s really told here entirely, though
parts of it are. http://graceinspades.blogspot.com/2014/09/and-so-it-begins-feb-18-2014.html I think early on we were still too busy
drowning in facts to relish the details, much less repeat them. The evening of Allen’s birthday, February 11,
we were interrupted at dinner by a phone call from Tony’s neck doc saying there
was an opening the next day. This is a
neurologist you wait months to see, weeks and weeks if you are an established
patient. How odd to get an after-hours call? Knowing we were headed heck or
high water to the med center the next morning anyhow to deal with Asa, we took
the appointment.
We awoke the next morning, expecting our pediatrician to
have instructions as to exactly where to go with Asa. We didn’t get a call, except to say she was
working on it and working on it. So, we
threw the little boy in his car seat and drove to his daddy’s appointment. As we sat down to visit with the neurologist
about Tony’s neck, my phone rang and I rudely excused myself. The pediatrician called. Instead of negotiating an immediate oncology
clinic appointment, she really was running into a brick wall, being told that
an appointment would be weeks out and that our only other option was to head to
the ER, which we knew would be a horrific undertaking with atrocious
waits. As the neurologist listened to
the interruption and continued to speak with Tony, Tony pulled up Asa’s shirt
and showed the doctor his belly and the world stopped abruptly and began to
swirl in an entirely different direction.
Sometimes we don’t know we are in the right place in the
right time, but in God’s economy, we always are. Nothing is overlooked. No detail too small. We found ourselves in a whirlwind with a doc
on a cell phone making calls, calls to too many guys who happened in surgery
that morning, but still, the right calls, a doc whose nurse assistant “just so
happened” to have been a season nurse at Texas Children’s in years prior and knew
the right folks. Within the half hour,
we walked down Fannin St. from Methodist Hospital med center Houston to Texas
Children’s hospital, waltzed into the ER, greeted by one of Dr. Nuchtern’s,
head of surgery, residents. Don’t pass
go. Don’t collect $200. Escalated straight from the entrance of the
ER to full surgical and oncological evaluation.
By the end of that day, though we didn’t understand what they meant yet,
the medical team had the numbers they needed for a diagnosis.
We never met Dr. Nuchtern until yesterday. Unlike one of the liver specialists who spent
hours and hours on Asa’s assignment whom we’ve never met in person, whom I
think I would wonder if he even existed if I hadn’t seen him in the halls, I’m
not sure it was important that we put a face with a name, but I’m glad we did,
not just to offer thanks to a kind man, but to close the loop, tie the melody
of God’s goodness off soundly, left lingering in our head.
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