At least that’s what Ida Marshall said, and she should know. She had celebrated her ninetieth birthday a bare two weeks before she fell in her garden while tending her tomato plants. She came into the ER by ambulance with a smile on her face, her hands folded over her chest, and her hip fractured and displaced. She would be in the operating room later that night.
“Do you need something for pain, Ida?”
I had known her for more than a dozen years. She and her husband had operated a small restaurant in town and I used to take our kids there for breakfast before school. She had to give it up a few years ago after her husband died, and I had missed seeing her.
“I’m OK right now, if I stay real still.”
I didn’t believe her, and nodded to Lori Davidson who was standing by the counter, drawing up some pain medicine into a syringe.
“Well, there’s no reason to suffer needlessly,” I told her. “I know that hip must be hurting.”
“What I really want to do Dr. Lesslie is get this thing fixed.” She gently patted her right hip. “Let’s get the show on the road. I’ve got a garden to take care of, and cats to feed.”
Lori chuckled and walked over to the side of the stretcher, grabbed the IV tubing trailing from Ida’s left forearm, and prepared to give her the medication.
“I could probably use that.” She nodded at the syringe and smiled up at Lori. Then she reached up, took the small silver cross hanging from her neck, and began to slowly rub it between her thumb and index finger.
We talked some more about her accident, how she had slipped on some wet grass, lost her balance, and fell onto her side.
“It happened so fast,” she said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t catch myself.”
She looked up at me and smiled again. “But you know, stuff happens. And you just have to deal with it.”
Ida was right. Things happen, and that’s a fact of life. She knew it, and so did Ansel Smith.
Ansel had been working out in his shop, making a dollhouse for his five-year-old granddaughter. The piece of wood he had been working with slipped and he jerked around, trying to catch it. The table-saw is no respecter of persons, or digits. His right index finger was severed at the base, badly mangled and beyond repair.
“Mr. Smith, I’m afraid there’s not much we’re going to be able to do with your finger, expect close the wound and help it heal. It can’t be re-attached.”
“I knew that as soon as it happened, doc.” He glanced down at his bandaged hand and shook his head. “Just careless, and I know better. But sometimes things just happen, and they happen fast. Haven’t figured out how to make the clock go back a few minutes and redo things. That’d come in handy, wouldn’t it?”
I glanced around at the other beds in the minor trauma room, and at the other injured patients waiting to be treated. Then I looked back at Ansel.
“You’re right. If we could undo time, just a little, we could fix a lot of things.”
“Well, we can’t doc, and that’s OK. Let’s get this thing sewed up.”
Ida was being wheeled down the hall by a couple of OR techs. They rounded the far corner and disappeared from view.
“Quite a lady,” Lori said. “And quite an attitude. I just hope I have that kind of peace when something bad happens to me, or someone in my family.”
She sighed and walked over to the nurses’ station.
Lori was right about Ida’s attitude, and about her peace. I knew where that came from – the same place that my grandmother had found her peace and comfort when bad things happened to her or her family.
I stood in the hallway, and the words of one Grandma’s favorite hymns came to my mind. Its message is clear and strong – and unchanging.
“Be still, my soul; the Lord is on thy side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul; thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.”
Catharina von Schlegel (1697 – ?)
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