At
the age of 64, I volunteered to work at a Thailand hospital for nine
months, while its only doctor, Phil McDaniel, was in America. I
closed my office in Idaho and semi-retired. For the next eleven years
I would work whenever I chose, as a locum tenens or “rent-a-doc”,
filling in for doctors who were on leave for one reason or another.
Kwai
River Christian Hospital has 30-beds, complete with lab, X-ray, and
operating and delivery rooms, and some very competent Thai
nurse-midwives. It's in a rural setting much like other Asian
hospitals I have worked in. I am not a fully trained general surgeon,
but have had a couple of years residency, plus forty years
experience. At KRCH, it would soon be tested.
Many
Thai sawmills still employ elephants to move the logs. The driver
sits astride the animal's sturdy neck, steering it by jiggling his
bare feet behind its ears. One night, after I had been at KRCH a
month, a sawmill's pickup truck brought in a 25-year-old Karen man
who had fallen off his elephant, striking his left lower ribs on a
log. He had severe left-sided bellyache.
The
situation is the same as a car accident in USA: any ER doc knows that
left-sided rib fractures can signal a tear in the spleen, a delicate,
fist-sized organ serving as a filter for the body's blood supply. The
treatment is emergency surgery to remove the torn spleen and stop the
internal hemorrhage. Trouble is, I had never done that operation, and
had only seen it done once.
In
such emergencies, I have found it useful to quietly pray as I work,
and this seemed like a good time to do so. “Please, God, don't let
this be a ruptured spleen! I've never done that operation, and there
is no anesthetist; if I operate, he'll die on the table!” As I took
his blood pressure again, the next unwelcome words came to mind
unbidden:
He'll
die if you don't.
That
made me realize that I was stalling for time, and I gave the orders
to call out the team. (No phones, but the night watchman knew which
houses to go to.) A lab tech to get blood ready, three extra nurses,
one to scrub and assist, and one to circulate, and one to monitor the
man's vital signs after I injected a spinal anesthetic, and during
surgery. The sawmill boss had brought the man and his family in; and
he agreed to round up blood donors – no easy job in Asia. A nurse
aide translated my Thai into Karen language, explained to the man
what we had to do and had him sign the permit. She asked him if he
had any medical allergies (Hkui
hpae yaa rui plaaw?) He
said no.
I
operated, with a surgical textbook on a music stand nearby, opened to
Removal of the
spleen.
Opening the man's abdomen, I found a belly full of blood and a torn
spleen, still bleeding. I carefully clamped its blood vessels and
removed it, avoiding damage to the nearby stomach and pancreas,
conscious of God's help in remembering the steps I had once learned.
(Readers wanting the details of the drama can find them in my novel
Flame Tree,
chapter
8. . . . fiction is often based on fact.)
The operation was
successful, and a week later, after 3 pints of blood, the man went
home. When they left, his wife had her small son place palms
together, the Thai way of saying thank you. He had his daddy back.
So why am I adding this
chapter to a book about pure chance versus the presence of God?
I do it to add my testimony
that I believe that God exists, cares about us humans, and offers
help when we ask and are willing to listen. In my experience, that
seems far more likely than a mythical lady luck, or blind chance, or
what-have-you. If that is true, we ignore him at our peril. Granted
we have freedom of choice, our insisting on choosing our own path is
arguably the cause of much of our ills, and those of the world's.
One
postscript: On a coffee break last week, I chanced to get to know an
acquaintance better. As often happens to a retired doctor, he turned
the conversation to a recent health episode of his own. He has been
diabetic for years, taking a modest dose if daily insulin. He
described a recent personal “aha moment”, when he discovered that
his bed-time blood sugar tested 380 for no apparent reason. He was
debating how much insulin to take, when he received an unbidden
thought: Sit on
it. Puzzled,
he continued to prepare his shot. Again came the emphatic thought,
Sit on it. Not
knowing why his sugar was that high in the first place, he
interpreted the thought to mean Wait.
He
laid the insulin aside and went to sleep. When he tested his blood
sugar again next morning, he found it to be 40, very low. Neither of
us could discover any reason why it was so low, but if he had taken
the night dose of insulin, his morning blood sugar level might well
have been even lower, low enough to produce coma (a.k.a. “insulin
shock.) Potentially fatal.
The question arises, how do
we tell the difference between a presumed message of God's Spirit, or
some other source? The first thought that comes to my mind is, prayer
and practice.
