Three stories from UT Med
A Sunday in 2014 — I've done thousands of Sundays in my life. This one feels a little different because I've just moved into a green room in an orange house on Deadrick Avenue. Eric Dier scores in the 93rd minute to give Tottenham a Matchday One victory over West Ham. I'm about to get ready for church.
The phone rings: Mallory, my roommate's girlfriend.
"Sam, you need to get Josh and Tyler and you need to get over here."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"His O2 levels were only up because of the medicine," she gasps back a sob. "He’s not going to make it."
For how emotional of a person I am, I'm good in a crisis if I have a task. Maybe I'm so used to intense emotions that I can set them aside to do what I know I need to do at the moment. I needed to get Josh and Tyler and get to UT Med.
I’d done the same thing last night when Mallory called to tell me our roommate Gavin had been in an accident at Big South Fork and had been airlifted to the hospital. I'd driven straight home, picked up my roommates, and gone to the medical center where we heard about O2 level being around 60 and that being bad, not terrible, but not close to good. We left that night hoping when Gavin came to, he wouldn't have brain damage.
Now he was going to die. I spent the rest of the day at the hospital thinking how strange the buildings looked; I walked around the serenity or prayer garden and had nothing, I had no task, no purpose, so I just sat on a bench and listened to people scream at God and then eventually, I took the West elevators up to his room and said goodbye.
He died that evening.
The next time I spent more than a couple hours at UT Med, my daughter was born.
I stayed there for two nights, the first waiting and the second staring at the ceiling, thinking how strange the tiles looked in this new world I lived in. That tiny baby my mother is holding with its strange belly button peaking above her diaper (the first one I've ever changed) is mine. I named her Abigail. It means "My father's joy." I used the West elevators to get tacos downstairs because my daughter was born on Cinco De Mayo.
The morning she was born is vivid and missing from my memory. I remember our nurse Helena taking Abigail, nodding to my wife saying “She’s going to rest, you’re going to go downstairs and get breakfast.” I got biscuits and gravy and sat by the window as sunlight streamed in and I thought about how much the world had changed in a few hours.
Last week, I stayed at UT Med again. My wife was all kinds of sick. We stayed the night, so I went down to the cafeteria for breakfast to the same spot where I’d had my biscuits and gravy. I looked outside the glass windows were the serenity and prayer gardens, the same benches where I sat ten years ago the day Gavin died.
And I thought about God's goodness. Every day, I wake up in a strange world and wonder where I am. Some days, that strangeness just stays out of my ability to comprehend, like the night before when the doctors had more questions than answers about my wife's health. With the morning came answers, and they were encouraging. She's going to be OK.
We'll go home soon.