12
“YHWH on the Way”
When Lorraine Potter thought she’d lost her mom to heart failure, she found renewed hope in an unlikely place.
In the late evening of August 23, 2007, as most people were winding down after a long day, Lorraine Potter still faced several hours of work. Outside her living room window, wind whipped the trees and lightning flashed erratically from a band of summer thunderstorms spread across the Iowa plains.
That turbulence matched her inner mood. She was a schoolteacher, just a few days into a new year at a new job, and already problems were compelling her to question the move. Wearily she resigned herself to a late night.
She had no clue just how long and stormy the night ahead would be.
Around 9:40 the phone rang. Her mother, Emily, was on the line with an unexpected request: Could she get a ride to Mercy Medical Center? Emily, a medical professional, rarely had reason for routine doctor visits, much less an ER visit. But now she was suffering substantial pain in her chest and arms.
Concerned but not yet alarmed, Lorraine packed up her papers—thinking she’d work as she waited—and went to her mother’s suburban Cedar Rapids home. From there the drive took twenty minutes, longer than usual thanks to heavy road construction. Along the way, Emily clearly was in extreme pain.
ER personnel immediately conducted preliminary tests for a heart attack. The results were inconclusive, but the staff began prepping for catheterization—wherein dye is injected into the bloodstream to assess the heart’s condition and function. After a short wait, Emily was wheeled in for the diagnostic procedure. Lorraine settled in to the waiting room and distracted herself with work.
At 11:00 she heard a chilling announcement over the PA system: “Code blue, cath lab. Code blue, cath lab.”
While she knew this was a call for emergency resuscitation, she didn’t automatically assume it was meant for her mother. There are other cath labs here, she reasoned and tried to focus on her papers. But a few minutes later, she knew she’d been wrong when a doctor sat down beside her.
“He said they had sent the dye into her veins and immediately her heart failed,” Lorraine recalled. “She died on the table and was gone for ten minutes while doctors and nurses attempted to revive her. They finally succeeded, but the outlook for her recovery was essentially hopeless. My mom had a torn aorta, and he said there was no possibility of surgery or mending naturally from that level of damage.”
Stunned, she felt the world spin around her. Emily would be moved by ambulance to University of Iowa Hospital in nearby Iowa City. Storms outside had not abated, making helicopter transport inadvisable. The doctor stressed that, though the facility was the best in the state, this move was a formality. There was nothing any hospital could do to repair a burst aorta.
Lorraine’s husband, Don, arrived with her father, whose own health issues made it difficult for him to leave the house. They huddled in the ER exam room, where Emily lay unconscious in a tangle of tubes and wires.
“I believed this was the last time I would see her alive,” Lorraine said. “I cried and stroked her hair and told her I loved her, even if she might not be able to hear or receive it. The doctors showed us the image of Mom’s aorta and veins. He pointed out the tear and the dye we were seeing in the blood flowing out of it. I knew the outcome of the diagnosis was certain death.”
By the time of transport, though, dozens in the family’s church community had heard of Emily’s condition and were asking God to intervene.
Lorraine and Don arrived in Iowa City just a few minutes behind the ambulance. En route, the new reality of life without her mother had begun to sink in. The medical facts made her death a foregone conclusion—a matter of time. For all Lorraine knew, she’d passed away in transit. Her heart was heavy with grief as they stepped from the car and walked toward the ER doors.
Then, crossing the lot, something caught her eye. A shiny black Jeep SUV, parked in a spot reserved for doctors, had a custom license plate that read YHWH. To Lorraine, these letters might as well have been etched in stone, ten feet tall. She knew they symbolize the Hebrew word Yahweh, the name for God that frequently appears in the Old Testament.
“The assurance and peace of seeing God’s name in that moment were more than I can express,” she said. “I knew it was an unusual way for him to speak to me, but there it was, plain as day on a license plate. The Great Physician was there that night. Up to that point, I’d been only grieving the loss of my mom, not thinking of anything else. Just about everything the doctors said inspired fear, but from the moment I saw that name, I wasn’t afraid. I knew I wasn’t alone and that, whatever happened, there would be peace.”
Inside the hospital, she made two discoveries. First, her mother was still alive. Second, doctors were confused by the new imagery they’d ordered upon Emily’s arrival. The pictures didn’t match the diagnosis of physicians in Cedar Rapids. In plain English: Her aorta was not ruptured.
“But,” they hastened to add, she wasn’t “out of the woods.” There was a 90 percent blockage in one artery. They recommended immediate surgery to insert a stent to hold open the vessel and allow blood flow to resume.
Emily was whisked away for the procedure while the family, which now included aunts and uncles, settled in the waiting room for a long night.
Several hours went by. Lorraine managed to get some rest, still enveloped in the miraculous peace she felt when she saw God’s name in the parking lot.
Near dawn, the family rushed to stop a doctor in the hallway when they saw him pushing Emily on a gurney.
“He told us they’d gone in for the stent procedure,” Lorraine said. “Except there was no blockage after all. He didn’t have an explanation, but told us the procedure had not been done.”
But wait . . . there was still the issue of brain function, he advised. They were very concerned that Emily had been dead for ten minutes in Cedar Rapids and unconscious for nearly ten hours. She was certain to have suffered brain damage—the question was, how much?
Lorraine was asked to sign release forms for another round of tests. From the room where she was led, she overheard a specialist asking in a loud voice, “Emily, can you hear me?” Then she clapped and continued shouting to try to gauge Emily’s responsiveness.
“That was quite disconcerting,” Lorraine recalled. “But the doctor said they were trying to judge the extent of impairment even before she woke up.”
They didn’t have to wait long for an answer. At precisely 11:00 AM, Emily woke and instantly began attempting to communicate.
“She couldn’t speak because of the tubes in her mouth and throat,” Lorraine said. “So she motioned that she wanted to write a message on paper, even though she was lying flat on her back and couldn’t see her hands. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we read what she’d written.”
No retro-grade or ante-grade amnesia.
Before her 2004 retirement, Emily had been a sought-after speech pathologist and brain-injury specialist. Now that roles were reversed and she was in a recovery room bed, awaiting news doctors were certain would be bad, she proved them wrong by diagnosing herself.
“All I could think was, Welcome back, Mom,” Lorraine said. “And I thought about the miracles we had just witnessed. For twelve hours the doctors had not been able to touch her heart. God did it all.”
After Emily regained consciousness, hospital instruments still indicated severe heart impairment. In particular, her “ejection fraction,” a measure of the blood’s movement through the heart, was in the low teens. A typical healthy heart score is between 55 and 70; any patient with her levels should have been clinging to life and exhausted by the simplest movements. Defying medical science, though, Emily returned to mostly normal activity in less than two weeks, while her numbers remained catastrophically low for over a year.
“With an ejection fraction like that, she should have been turning blue from lack of oxygen. But she never looked or acted like a heart patient at all, no matter what the instruments said,” Lorraine noted. “She had indeed suffered heart failure. It was enlarged, and she had a little trouble with the treadmill. But other than that she went back to working harder than most people her age, even ones with no history of heart trouble.”
Emily has since continued to improve—and has continued to confound her doctors at every turn. Lorraine has gained deeper gratitude for each day spent with her mom and for the personal knowledge that the Great Physician, never far away, is always there in times of need.
“I believe that license plate was there just for me,” she said. “It was the miracle of comfort I needed to know that everything would be okay at one of the most frightening times of my life.”