A Glance Back – Back

Um, no, the title is NOT a typo, and the picture? Let me explain.

In December 2007 my husband Neil, a high school principal, had begun his first day of Christmas break. He was silently celebrating that he had only one chore left to accomplish, and then the next two weeks were his to do as he wished: read his new Christmas novel, spend time with family, catch an afternoon movie with his wife, check out his snowmobile, eat fudge, eat turkey, eat pie…

That one left-to-do chore was applying heat tape to prevent ice build-up in the gutter on our back porch. The porch roof is about ten feet from the ground. He set up the ladder, affixed the heat tape, and was done. Hooray!

He remembers swinging his foot toward the first rung of the ladder, but the next thing he remembers is lying on the ground in fetal position, his head on my lap. I’d been in the kitchen, and I heard him fall.

In the days he spent in ICU, we learned that he had 11 broken ribs on his left side (all but the top rib) 4 of those 11 were crushed when he landed first on the edges of our porch steps and then bounced to the snowy patio bricks below. He broke a vertebra, damaged his hip socket and his left shoulder, and suffered a partially collapsed lung. It’s likely he also had a green stick fracture of one of the bones in his lower left arm. The doctors didn’t worry too much about that. They were too busy trying to keep him alive.

He did live,  and he did recover, and the miracle of all that was that he returned to work for part of a day just two weeks later. As one of his students put it, “He’s a tough old bird.”

If you’ve ever had injuries that serious and extensive, you know that everything just doesn’t work the same way afterwards. For these past 6 years, Neil hasn’t been able to raise his left arm above shoulder level when the arm was extended to the side. That’s not terrible if you consider what could have been the final outcome, but it’s been bothersome. He’s an active man. He loves the outdoors; he loves woodworking; he’s responsible not only for the repairs and upkeep on our house but for his elderly father’s home as well.

A few days ago, Neil was working on a project in our storage barn. He was only a few feet up on a folding ladder when the ladder suddenly folded out from under him. He landed on his back on an upright 2-foot-high wooden bracket.  That bracket caught him right in the area of his back where the 4 ribs had been crushed, and it hurt like blue blazes. The photo above is the resultant bruise.

My husband is a man of faith, but over the next couple of days as he said grateful prayers that the injury wasn’t worse than a bruise, I was sending up prayers of complaint. Why that fall, Lord? Why that injury in that particular spot?  But the day before yesterday, Neil came up to me with a grin and said, “I think I’ve had a miracle.” He held out his arms perpendicular from his sides, and said, “Watch.” Then without a hitch, he lifted both arms straight up over his head in that classic make-a-snow-angel mode. Something he’s not been able to do for almost six years.

So this week, my Glance Back is filled with gratitude for a small, sweet miracle. Another reminder that angels do watch over us, and God does work in mysterious ways.

Blessings!

Sue