Taking Life For Granted

“Man, he looks like he’s had a bad night,” I thought to myself, as I pulled up next to my mechanic. I yell to him through the open car windows, “I’m finally bringin her in for a check-up.” “I’ll be right in,” he says.

As he walks toward me, Michael is talking on his cell phone, “No, she’s great. She made it through. I haven’t seen her yet today as they keep real strict visiting hours. I love you too.” Now I’m starting to realize there IS a reason he looks like he had a bad night.

“When my wife was 9, she fell off the porch and hit her forehead. She broke the skull underneath…” At this point he pauses. “One day she’s sitting and watching TV, and she starts screaming, and shaking, and crying.” He calls for the ambulance and she is transported to the emergency room. They find that she has a temperature above 104, and massive infection throughout her body. It turns out that they never knew that she had broken her skull when she fell from the porch, and now, years later, her brains’ grey matter is leaking through the crack in her skull through her sinus passage and into her body.

They put her on powerful antibiotics which need to be infused through an IV. This process takes 4-1/2 weeks. Ultimately, though, they have to operate, because, as the doctor told Michael, “Brain fluid only belongs in the brain.”

The operation involves cutting open her skull, pulling down her face, and fixing the crack in her forehead. There’s a 5% chance (yes, five) that things will go well. There is a ninety-five percent chance that she’ll go blind, lose hearing, lose feeling, be paralyzed and/or all the above.

Coming out of the surgery, Michael’s wife saw him and told him she loved him. A day later she was beginning to eat and hold full conversations with him.

My pastor is fond of thanking God for “…another day which you did not promise us.” Amen.