Health & Hospitals
My Doctor Was an Angel
It was May, 1995, and 44-year-old Denise lay in the recovery room at Yale University Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. She had been very ill with throat cancer for over a year. Radiation hadn’t worked, and surgery had been her only option. Now her larynx and lymph nodes had been removed, to halt the disease’s [...]
Helper in the O.R.
Bruce Kueck, an editor at a well-known magazine, needed to have a “no big deal” operation. “So, off to the hospital I went,” he says, “showing up for my one-day, in-and-out surgery at the appointed time. As it turned out, the surgeon wasn’t quite as punctual. But, since he was reportedly merely delayed by traffic, [...]
Healer Angel
Several years ago when Rob Yeske was about 18 years old, he was diagnosed with a case of mononucleosis and told to rest and stay home from school for at least a week. Rob was very ill, as it turned out—“a couple of days after being diagnosed, I was waking in a pool of my [...]
Friendly Visitors
Marti Stafford is a Licensed Practical nurse, and has three natural children and two stepchildren. Life has been a struggle primarily against poverty, but Marti has kept her faith and recently things had begun to change. Then in January, Marti became ill with a “mystery disease,” not too many symptoms but enough that she missed [...]
Answers from Heaven
When Cassandra Lockhart was a child, her grandmother Ruth probably had the most influence on her. “She taught me to pray, and was always there to support and guide me,” Cassandra recalls. But when she was sixteen, her beloved grandmother died. Cassandra was angry with God. Why had he taken her grandmother away, especially now [...]
Angels Round the World
Some, people, like Deirdre West, never think about retirement. Right now, Deirdre is 78 years old (by Indian or Chinese reckoning – they count the day you were born as your first birthday, she says) and we met via email because she is busy setting up a library for the patients in a hospital in [...]
Angel in the Waiting Room
Karen Baldonado-Hensley had loved Ronnie for fifteen years, although he had hemophilia and life was difficult. “His life had been racked with illness and operations,” Karen says, “and he was HIV positive too. In 2000 he got extremely ill and we knew that the end was not far away.” In January of 2001, Ronnie entered [...]
A Father Suffers for His Son
“There is no easy way to tell you,” the doctor looked at Anibal and Lillian Zambrana. “Your son Raul has Hodgkin’s disease.” It couldn’t be happening. But it was. Their youngest boy, the delight of their lives, had become a victim of an illness Lillian had only read about. “Will he be all right?” she [...]
