Nick stood at the threshold of the operating room. The sign above the door read: “Peace To All Who Enter Here.”
He smiled, thinking of John up on a ladder nailing it in place.
Nick had had a restless night, tossing and turning. He knew it was, in part, because of the busyness of the full clinic the day before, the amount of pathology he had seen, and the anxiety of operating in an unfamiliar OR, but the main reason was the dream that he had about John.
Nick only remembered part of it, the part where they were standing near the summit of very high mountains in the middle of a blizzard. It was a strong storm and they were in danger. John kept encouraging him to take shelter amongst the boulders, but Nick wanted to keep pressing forward. To what, he had no idea. That’s when he woke up with sweat rolling down his neck.
Maybe the most unsettling part of the dream was that it was so real. It was as if John was alive. Nick had sat in the dark on the side of his bunk with his head in his hands and wrestled with the issue of heaven. He realized that if John existed in some cosmic realm, it meant one thing—his own love for Maggie had to remain platonic.
But could he love her without wanting to love her physically?
Nick looked at the sign above the OR. “You left big shoes to fill, my friend.”
* * *
It was mid-morning and Nick had already enjoyed a hearty breakfast of eggs, beans, homemade tortillas, and two cups of delicious, strong Guatemalan coffee. The coffee was the best part; he loved the way it infused life into his foggy brain.
He had met the local surgical team that would help him today. They worked at the government hospital in Quetzaltenango, but they had promised Maggie to take a few days off to help Nick with any surgical cases.
They were a friendly bunch—a middle-aged female nurse, a younger male scrub technician, and an attractive female anesthesiologist who was not more than five feet tall. Nick wondered about their capabilities, but with Maggie’s reassurance, he decided to proceed.
The day started slowly with only a few scheduled cases. Nick realized that even though John had put together a fully functional operating room, it lacked orthopedic implants. Nick recognized that he would have to figure out a way to get implants from the States if he wanted to do significant cases.
He looked over his shoulder at Anna. He had spent the last fifteen minutes showing her how to do a surgical scrub.
“You ready?”
He thought Anna looked cute in her surgical cap and mask that highlighted her bright blue eyes.
“Uh, I don’t know. You sure this is okay?” she said holding her hands and arms in front of her. Her mask had crept up on her nose and pushed under her eyes, and she tried to move her chin to force it down.
“Hard when you can’t touch anything, huh?”
“That’s for sure.”
“You’ll be great. I’ll get you all set, and you’ll have the best seat in the house. You’ve been in the OR before with your pre-med preceptorship, right?”
“Yeah, but never scrubbed in before. I’m pretty nervous,” she said, still trying to move her mask down.
“Do exactly what I do, and you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Remember, don’t lock your knees, and if you do start feeling faint, just sit down or step out into the hallway.”
“Oh great.”
“Come on, Dr. Anna, you’ve got this. And I need you. Our team here doesn’t speak a word of English, and you know how excellent my Spanish is.”
His humor made Anna relax. She took a deep breath, and they backed through the OR door.
The well-equipped operating room was small, compared to U.S. standards, but it was brightly lit. Nick could hear the anesthesiologist talking with the patient. Whatever she said, the old woman practically sat up. It was the woman with the torn rotator cuff.
“Dios te bendiga, Dios te bendiga.” The woman started chattering where she left off from the day before. The anesthesiologist encouraged the patient to lie back down on the OR table with her hand on her chest, but the woman continued to chatter.
Nick had met with her and her family early that morning and talked to them about fixing the torn rotator cuff in her shoulder and what to expect. He had hardly gotten a word in edgewise. He laughed to think of the twelve family members all crammed into the waiting room and more waiting outside. Obviously, there was a lot of love in this family.
Nick smiled at Carmen, the anesthesiologist, and gave a sleepy head nod, like ‘okay, time for her to take a nap.’
Carmen raised a finger in agreement and gladly pushed the plunger on a syringe, injecting narcotics through the IV. Nick was impressed. Carmen had given the old woman a technically difficult shoulder block to avoid the danger of a deep anesthetic. The woman’s entire shoulder area was numb; she would have just enough drugs to slow the chatter and give her a wonderful nap.
Nick watched the woman’s eyelids flutter closed as the narcotics hit her brain.
With the help of the scrub technician and the nurse, Nick helped Anna gown and glove. He motioned to the nurse to pull Anna’s mask down out of her eyes. He told Anna how to hold her hands, to fold them in front of her. After the nurse had finished the prep, Nick placed the surgical drapes on the woman’s shoulder.
He guided Anna up to the table and placed her gloved hands on the drapes.
“Rest your hands here.”
Juan Carlos, the scrub technician, was already busy putting the suction and cautery in place.
Just like back home. Man, it feels good to be back in the OR.
Nick used a surgical marking pen to show the anatomic landmarks and trace a line on the skin where he would make his incision.
“Scalpel.”
Juan Carlos looked at him blankly.
“Uh, scalpel.” Nick looked at Anna.
She looked stricken. “I don’t know that word in Spanish.”
Nick thought for a moment. He had seen a number of machete wounds the day before. He put out his hand. “Machete?”
That made the whole crew crack up.
“Ah, bisturi.” Juan Carlos said and grabbed the surgical knife.
Nick held his hand out waiting for the scalpel. Juan Carlos and Carmen talked back and forth.
Nick looked at Anna. “Have I forgotten something?”
There was an exchange between Anna and the staff.
She turned to Nick. “They want you to pray. Dr. John always prayed. They don’t feel right unless you pray.”
Panic rose in Nick’s chest.
Except for the chirp of the heart monitor, a thundering silence stilled the room.
“Well, the only prayer I can remember right now is grace.”
Anna translated for the room.
“What do you mean grace?” Anna translated for Juan Carlos.
“You know, what you say before a meal,” Nick said sheepishly.
Anna spoke to the staff. There was a long silence.
Then everyone burst out laughing. Juan Carlos spoke, and Anna translated. “Okay, grace it is. Thank you for this food.”
Juan Carlos handed Nick the scalpel.
* * *
Maggie joined the team for lunch. They sat in their scrubs on the same picnic table as the day before. The young adults from California were nowhere to be seen. Nick assumed they were off on a project or tracking down more patients for him to see.
“How did it go?” Maggie asked Nick.
“It was great. Just like back home.” Nick paused, thinking through what he had said. “Well, except I like your OR lounge better.” He lifted his face to the afternoon sun. “And your staff is nicer.” He smiled at the surgical team as Anna translated.
“Wish my assistant was better,” he joked poking Anna’s arm, making her blush.
“Hey, I think I did pretty well,” she retorted. “At least I never keeled over.”
Anna translated for the team, and they laughed.
Nick put up his hands. “Okay. You did great.”
Maggie turned to Anna, “What’d you think?”
“It was awesome. I mean, I was really nervous when I saw that scalpel go across the skin. But I kept reminding myself that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I could really feel His peace.”
Maggie watched Nick study Anna’s face and interrupted his concentration. “You have what you needed?”
“Oh yeah.” Nick returned to the moment. “Maggie, I honestly can’t believe how well you have your little hospital decked out. I’ll need to figure out a way to get some ortho implants down for the bone cases, but otherwise, it was great.”
“Well, it’s all John. He worked tirelessly to equip the place, and it wasn’t always easy. When we first started here, people would call us and tell us they had a donation. Sometimes we would fly or drive somewhere to pick it up, and, honestly, more often than not, it would turn out to be a worthless pile of leftover junk, stuff you wouldn’t even treat a dog with. We would have to find the nearest dump and put it where it belonged. We tried not to be ungrateful, but sometimes we wondered what people were thinking.”
Maggie put her hands on her head and sighed. “I remember a wealthy woman from our community called John and was all excited about a donation she had collected for us. She was a well-known philanthropist in our area, so John went to her home filled with expectation.”
Maggie tossed a bread crumb to a colorful bird at their feet.
“Of course, I don’t do the story justice like John does. But he walked into this beautiful mansion overlooking Lake Washington. Her late husband had recently passed away and suffered with terrible sores on his legs that needed to be wrapped every day. She saved all the elastic wrap bandages they had used. It was this huge plastic bag of stained, worn-out bandages.” Maggie stood for emphasis and stretched out her arms as far as they would go, making a funny face as she did.
“I can still see John standing there with this huge bag of trash trying to be grateful,” she continued. “He said it was one of the first times he felt speechless, all the while holding this huge bag of bandages, trying to not let it touch him.”
She stretched her arms out further and spread her legs, illustrating the image. “He told the lady that her bandages were really going to help some people, all the while wondering how fast he could get the mess to the dump and wishing he didn’t have to put it in our car.”
“But you know John. He went out the next day and bought a bunch of boxes of bandages with whatever little money we happened to have then. The next time we got back here to Guatemala, every time he used one of those bandages, he took a picture and sent it to that woman to thank her for her support and told her what a great memorial it was for her husband. That was so John. No malice in his heart, always grateful. Even for the little things.”
Anna translated Maggie’s words, and the team nodded.
Nick noticed Carmen blink back a tear.
“You know,” Maggie said, “that woman ended up becoming a great friend to us. In fact, she donated the new X-ray unit and suite just last year.” She shook her head. “Amazing how God works.”
“Amen,” Carmen agreed.
“Of course it wasn’t always this nice,” Maggie said, looking around the compound, “but in John’s heart it always was. He believed you give your very best to the poor, not your leftovers.”
Everyone sat in silence, missing him terribly.
Nick finally broke the silence. “You guys have been here—”
“This is going on to our sixteenth year,” Maggie finished his sentence. “Hard to believe.”
“I remember you telling me about your mission trip in college. Was that here?”
“Well, Guatemala, yes. But I was in San Pedro la Laguna in the Lake Atitlan basin about two hours away.” She pointed to the east. “When John and I made the decision to become missionaries, we knew it would be Guatemala, but we decided on Quetzaltenango because it was a bigger town, but not too big.”
Nick looked at Maggie and then at Carmen, the anesthesiologist, and then back at Maggie. “I just noticed something. You two could be sisters.”
Maggie put her arm around Carmen and laid her head on her shoulder. “Mi hermana pequeña, my little sister.”
Carmen gave her a kiss on the forehead.
Maggie smiled. “The Maya, or maybe I should say the descendants of the Maya, are amazing people.”
Anna spoke up. “The Mayas were supposed to be one of the most advanced civilizations on the planet. We studied them in our anthropology class. They had amazing architecture, art, and science. It’s fascinating, because around 900 AD their culture vanished, and nobody really knows why.”
Nick stretched his leg and brought his foot down hard, squashing a huge cockroach scuttling across the dirt. “Maybe the la cucaracha ate them.”
The team laughed, mostly at his Spanish.
“La cucaracha. Machete. Hola. Dolor,” Juan Carlos said counting on his fingers the Spanish words Nick knew. Holding the fours fingers up to Nick proudly with a huge smile.
“Okay, okay. I’m trying.”