Following the Crowd

Yesterday my husband had surgery.  He came through just fine.  His pain seems tolerable. The next few days could be different as the numbing trauma wears off and his body is faced with the reality of what has been done.

Something odd happened to me that I want to share.  When they came to take him out of the room, I was able to go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat.  This is not a hospital I am familiar with, so I did what I was told.  Go straight down this hall, around the elevators, and the cafeteria and vending machines will be on the left. Praise God, because I was hungry but didn’t want to eat in front of my husband. He was starved from fasting for the surgery.

So, I took the hall straight while they wheeled him off to the right, to the operating room. I wanted to cry. I wanted to wallow and meltdown right then and there. I didn’t, but the urge was strong in me. I guess this is what they call swallowing back tears.

I got to the cafeteria but it was closed. There were the tell-tale gates blocking me fron entering. Next to it was a small room with vending machines in it. While choosing my second item, a bag of cookies to wash down my multi-grain chips, the door to the room I was in closed all on it’s own. It did not slam but just ever so slightly close. The PA came on as a recorded woman said, “Fire alarm in the MRI” that’s what I heard. And small white flashing lights blinking close to the ceiling.

The other way out of this room led to the closed cafeteria. I started that way. I saw doors leading to the outside in the cafeteria. I walked toward them, but did not go out of them. My next thought was my husband is in surgery and there’s a fire in the building somewhere by the MRI. What do I do?

I went to the door that automatically closed on it’s own thinking it was locked but it wasn’t. I opened it and in the hallway were staff members walking all in one direction but no one was in a hurry. Most had masks on and I couldn’t see their faves but I knew they weren’t in a hurry by their body actions. “What’s going on?” I asked. They said to come with them. So I filed in with my wallet, my chips, and my phone in hand.

One of them said, “We don’t know if it is a drill or an actual fire.” We were walking through the corridor to the stairs. We started to climb the stairs! We climbed three floors. Being overwhelmed by the day of my husband having cancer removed and not knowing how to be there for him, I went up the stairs! When we got to the top there was a group of workers surrounding a man with a fire extinguisher and they looked at me and said, “It was a drill. Do you know how to get back where you were?” Overwhelmed and taken back I just looked at them all. The two nice women walked me.back down the stairs.

Then it hit me, the alarm and the voice on the PA was saying, “Fire alarm return to MRI” had I heard correctly I may have figured it out. Seems to me the crowd would have known. But in the end, safety and the not knowing for sure compels you to react as if it were real.

I couldn’t clearly hear that voice, and because I couldn’t, I went with the crowd in the opposite direction that I should have!

When we are not lining up with God in our daily prayers, we cannot hear His voice. That can cause us to line ourselves up with the path of least resistance causing us to walk into danger rather than running away from it with all of our hearts.

I think I will always remember the moment I started to climb those stairs so blindly. It will be a learning moment that my brain will process to use for the next time…

Thank you to you that have been praying for him. The doctor told us, if you had to get cancer, this is the one you would want to get. He said it is completely curable and that he may have been cured just with the surgical removal yesterday. So we wait and see what pathology says on the tumor. If for sure cancer, he then has blood work and scans to see if it has spread.…In the meantime, we stayed prayed up!