Judy, my generous, funny, intelligent, compassionate, and determined friend and colleague, hasn’t showed up to work for three months. I miss her. I told her that just yesterday.
She spent part of her last day at the office, a Friday, shovelling the most recent batch of heavy snow from the sidewalk in front of our workplace. We take turns doing that.
At home that day, clearing out our own driveway, I thought of Judy at work. I wondered if she’d bothered with the office snow. I hoped she hadn’t. I knew she’d seen her doctor the day before and the reason concerned me.
For the previous two weeks at least, I’d heard cheerful complaints from the opposite side of the office. “Man, I need a massage,” she’d said a few times, rubbing her shoulders. But then she talked about little sharp pains in her chest.
“Go to the doctor, Jude,” I’d told her – joining the chorus of other friends and family urging the same thing. But Judy, unconquerable, laughed it away. Acid reflux, shoulder tension, indigestion... she knew all the usual suspects from her nursing and medical background years earlier.
She called me at work the next Monday morning, her day off. “I might not be in tomorrow,” she said, sounding only slightly less cheerful than usual. “I’m at the hospital.” Then she explained. Her GP had ordered tests. She didn’t visit the lab for four days. When she did, things happened fast.
I wasn’t with her, but I can imagine the questions after the technician saw the result of her ECG. “Did you realize you’ve had a heart attack, Ma’am?”
“I... WHAT? No way. You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
They never allowed her to go home, not even to pick up a toothbrush. The next day, she rode an ambulance to a hospital two hours away for an angiogram. Two days following that, she lay stretched out on a surgical table, her chest cavity splayed open, ready for the surgeon’s expert scalpel. He repaired five major blockages, harvesting veins from her leg and neck to create bypasses for her demolished arteries.
Those of us who love her are beyond grateful God chose to spare her life. “Guess he’s not finished with me yet,” she said, on one of my visits after she returned home. Neither am I.
Spring has arrived. Finally. The earth has absorbed most of the snow and the rest has formed temporary puddles, ponds, and lakes. The sun rises earlier and further south. These things – the changing of the seasons, the position of the blazing orb outside my home office window – these things are predictable. Heart attacks, not so.
“Lord, thank you for letting Nana stay with us for SO LONG,” one of my grandbeans prayed at bedtime the other night. I chuckled, but she was right. Each day, each moment, is a gift from God. No matter what else they hold, we can be sure of one thing: the promise of his presence. Invite him along, lean hard, and trust always.
