Angel over my Shoulder

It's Christmas, so I might as well tell you about the time an angel came to visit me. 

It's a long story, and to tell it properly, we have to go back to the afternoon March 16, 1995.

I was a junior in high school and at my surgeon's office for a final appointment before I was set to have knee surgery.  It was to be a fairly standard arthroscopic procedure the next morning to fix a torn meniscus and remove some wayward cartilage I had suffered from a bad triple jump landing in track practice. 

But the doctor entered the room with a frown carrying my MRI results.

He had noticed a small abnormality that no one had seen when they first got the results back.  It might be just a smudge, he said, or it might be partially hidden tear of my ACL.  Either way, he said, he needed to cancel my surgery in the morning. 

They couldn't know exactly what was going on in my knee until they went inside, and if it was a ligament tear, the swelling would need about another week to subside before it could be operated on. 
The doctor suggested rescheduling my operation another week so that they could fix whatever it was they found. 

This was bad news on multiple fronts. 

An arthroscopic surgery was a fairly minor deal from which I could recover in a matter of weeks.  My track season would be over, but I'd be just fine long before basketball season next year, which is what really mattered to me.

A ligament tear meant full reconstructive knee surgery, months of rehabilitation and a strong chance I'd never fully recover.  This possibility was devastating to my high school mind. 

The world seems smaller in high school, so I was just as concerned with what the news meant in the short term.  I'd been hobbling around my high school on crutches for 8 days.  The foam in my crutches had absorbed my sweat from the exertion and was starting to smell bad.  My classmates had grown beyond tired of helping me carry my books.  Another week of begging for mercy seemed excruciating. 

Plus, I had told the world I was having surgery in the morning, and one of my teachers had gone to great trouble to videotape a "Get Well Soon Party" in my absence. I was going to have a lot of unwelcoming explaining to do if my surgery turned out to be a false alarm. 

I couldn't face it. I had to have surgery tomorrow.

I begged the doctor to go ahead and do the operation, just in case they were wrong about the ACL tear.  He explained that it could lead to lots of unnecessary trouble if it turned out that I had to have another surgery a week later.  And I didn't have insurance, so my dad was looking at the possibility of two $10,000 operations rather than one.  It made no sense to do the operation. 

So the expression on my face must have been one of abject misery, when, against all logic, both my dad and the surgeon relented and allowed me to have an operation the next day, even though I might need another one just one week later.

I went into the operating room nervous, not just because I was 17 and had never faced anything like it, but because the next year of my life, my promising basketball career (and a whole lot of my dad's money) was at stake.  I would wake up from the operation either a couple weeks away from being as good as new, or I would wake up facing another surgery, a chorus of "I told you so," and months of rehab before life seemed normal again. 

I didn't sleep well the night before, but once I was prepped for surgery the nurses gave me the happy drugs. I quickly fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, my eyes groggily half-opened to see a figure standing over my left shoulder.  "Your surgery was successful," a woman's voice told me. "And you don't need another one." 

I wanted to scream with joy, but I was barely awake and couldn't yet respond.  I saw her disappear behind me and didn't have the strength to move my head. 

After a minute or two, I managed to gather my wits and fully open my eyes, but the nurse in the room with me had her back turned across the room.  

"That's great news," I managed to say. 

"Oh, you're awake," she said, although her voice suddenly sounded very different from the one I had just heard. "But what are you talking about?" 

"My surgery.  That my ACL wasn't torn.  You just told me I didn't need another surgery." 

She had no idea what I was talking about. 

The nurse had been assigned to the room I had been wheeled to to let the doctor know when I was awake, but she knew nothing about my procedure or my results.  I asked if another nurse had been in the room, but she said it had just been her and I in the room for the last half hour.  I looked behind my left shoulder in the direction where I had noticed the woman disappear, and saw nothing but a cinder block wall. 

The only door to the room was on the other side beside where the nurse was standing. 

A few minutes later the doctor came in.  I met him with an exclamation: "My ACL isn't torn!!!! I don't need another surgery!!!!"

"Oh, it was torn," he said, as my heart began to sink. "But the tear was so small we could fix it with the laser.  You were right about having the surgery."  After a moment's pause he then asked:

"But how on earth did you know you wouldn't need another surgery?"

I hadn't had time to process what had happened, so I just shrugged off the question.  But, in fact, there was no earthly way I could have known my surgery results.  Instead, an audible voice that the nurse in my room didn't hear had accurately described my surgery and then disappeared into a wall. 

Sounds reasonable, right?

It sounds even crazier considering that I don't know why it happened.  I would have found out the same news from my surgeon five minutes later, so I never understood the point of this visit.  And when I had a colonoscopy earlier this year that found three polyps, I was disappointed my Guardian didn't visit again when I came-to, forcing me instead to wait five days to hear whether or not I had cancer.  

I haven't shared this story much because I couldn't come to grips with the point of it all.  On one hand, there was no rational explanation for how I knew my surgery results before anyone at the hospital had told me.  On the other hand, while I believe in the theoretical possibility of divine intervention, I couldn't grasp the point of it coming to give me a five-minute heads up on news I would have heard anyway. 

No, an angel didn't come to tell me my surgery results.  There would have been no point in that.  As I consider it now, a much more likely possibility strikes me, though.  My Guardian had been there for my whole surgery.  She just happened to tell me my results on her way out the door. 

Or rather, her way out the wall.

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As it turned out, I never fully recovered from my slightly torn ACL.  My left leg is bigger than my right one, and I have back problems from the lack of cartilage in my right leg.  I could never run as fast or jump as high after my injury as I could before it, and I didn't score as many points in my senior basketball season and I didn't get that basketball scholarship that I had dreamed of.

But now, every time my right knee barks at me when I run in the cold or don't stretch before working out, I'm reminded of the time that God sent an angel and proved he loved me. 

All in all, that's a pretty good trade.