To Heaven and Back (4 page)

I intended to apply for medical school upon completing my undergraduate studies, so I mainly focused on my schoolwork, though I also competed as a member of the varsity swim team. Absent any encouragement to think about the spiritual aspect of my life, I gave little time or thought to God in
those years. I was basically living in a spiritual desert until I discovered scuba diving.

As an undergraduate, I routinely donated my blood plasma for pocket money. Donating plasma was easy and lucrative, but the more often I donated, the more I began to wonder about the sterility of the donation center, located in a very dirty part of the city. I also thought about the statistically increasing odds that I might accidentally receive someone else’s returned red blood cells due to a mistake in the lab. I began to look for other employment options and found a weekend job in the local scuba diving shop. I have always loved everything about water and I spent hours marveling at the images in the underwater photography books sold in the shop. I was awestruck by the beauty and intricacy of God’s underwater creations, and quickly fell in love with the abundance and variety of animal life and the brilliance of the colors found in these photos.

I completed my first scuba course and became passionate about the sport. I gave up my paychecks and began working in exchange for equipment. When the shop sponsored a trip to the Florida Springs, I couldn’t wait to go. The drive from Lexington to Florida was long and our group arrived long after dark, but the water was beautiful, calm, and inviting that evening. We novices were so eager to make our first open-water dive that we compelled our instructors to break the first rule of
night diving: Never dive at night where you haven’t yet dived during the daytime.

We impatiently donned our equipment and enthusiastically jumped into the water. Once under the surface, I stuck to my instructor like glue. We cruised along the bottom and I was thrilled with the splendor of the fish, and the variety of the colors and shapes of the coral. My first open-water dive was living up to all of my expectations and, too soon for me, the air in our tanks neared empty and it was time to surface.

When we inflated our vests and kicked toward the surface, we did not pop through the water’s surface as expected, but solidly struck rock. We swam in another direction, and again struck rock. We had inadvertently entered a cave, to which the exit was not obvious.

My instructor and I searched for the opening, but the visibility had been diminished when, in my inexperience, I kicked the bottom of the lake with my fins and raised a cloud of silt. We were running out of air and the tank alarms were echoing. That’s when I remembered to pray. I called out to God and I was immediately filled with the feeling of God’s presence and the knowledge that He would show us the way out. He would see me through.

When I speak of experiencing God’s presence and knowledge that He would show us the way, I don’t necessarily mean that He, God, was planning
to personally escort us out of the cave. I’m surely not that fanciful. I mean that I felt the manifestation of God’s love and grace, and knew that one of His messengers (a spirit, an angel?) would somehow show us the way. This knowledge allowed me to slow my breathing and pray for my instructor’s wisdom.

The silt began to clear and we saw several fish darting back and forth before lining up together, swimming in the current. They seemed to beckon us to follow, which we did. We made one last dive down to the bottom of the cave in the direction of the fish, then swam upward and broke through the surface of the lake just as my instructor’s air tank emptied completely.

My instructor and I discussed our shared experience at length. He was entirely focused on himself, and was distraught at having lost control of the situation. He felt responsible for the mistakes that were made and what he thought was his poor judgment. He believed that we had survived because of pure luck. He judged himself a failure and proceeded to drink himself into a state of oblivion. For my part, I had a profoundly different response to our survival. I did not believe that luck was involved. I had experienced a profound sense of calm and a knowledge that God was with us in the cave. I believed we had survived because God intervened, even though we had been such knuckle-heads and He essentially had to push us out of the cave.

The experience in the Florida Springs stimulated a reawakening of my spiritual being. I had the intense feeling of being sure that we are all on earth for a reason, and that I had survived because my work on this planet was not yet complete. This left me with a sense of responsibility to seek God’s will for my life, and to follow, as best as I could, the path that was being laid before me. This time, I was determined not to relegate God to the background of my life, but to consciously keep Him present in my thoughts and actions.

Upon graduation from college in 1980, I moved to Los Angeles, California, to begin my medical training at UCLA. My time in medical school was, predictably, stressful and demanding. The first two years of medical school were spent primarily in the classroom, which was interesting but not very enjoyable. Clinical training began in the third year and I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent learning about the many areas of medicine and surgery. I soon discovered that I was much more interested in the surgical fields than the medical ones, as I liked to “fix” problems more than I liked discussing them. I elected to spend a block of time learning about orthopaedic surgery and quickly found that
I had discovered my niche. I enjoyed the mechanical aspects of orthopaedics and relished the idea of restoring patients’ function and increased activity. It was also a fortuitous choice, as I met my future husband while spending time with the orthopaedic team.

Bill graduated from Stanford University’s medical school and although he had intended to stay at Stanford for his surgical training, his girlfriend’s job lured her, and thus him, to southern California. That story has its own set of “coincidences”; suffice it to say, he was meant to move south. Their relationship dissolved by the time he came to UCLA for some of his orthopaedic surgical training, where my friend, Peggy, and I had been assigned to his same surgical team. I found him to be quite charming and when I was no longer on his surgical team, we began dating. I soon knew that I would be spending the rest of my life with him.

Before completing medical school, I was accepted into a prestigious orthopaedic surgery training program in New York City. This program required two years of general surgical training elsewhere before starting their focused training program to become an orthopaedic surgeon. My relationship with Bill was flourishing, so this arrangement worked well and I was happy to be chosen to stay at UCLA for my first two years of training.

My general surgical training was very intense and left little time for eating or sleeping, let alone for something not directly related to my work. Although I continued to listen for God’s will, tried to follow His lead and live according to Christ’s directives, it was easy to let God drift into the background of my life. I just really didn’t have time for Him.

It was as if I consigned God to the backseat of my car. I wanted Him to be present, but didn’t want Him to distract me and I certainly wasn’t ready for Him to drive the car. Thankfully, God is patient and God is faithful. He sits in the backseat just waiting for our invitation to move up to the front so that He can steer and press the pedals. If we give him the car keys, He will take us on an unbelievable ride.

That is not to say that there were not small glimpses of God along my journey. Although the medical profession has recently, and somewhat tentatively, recognized the spiritual component of healing and of dying, patients have experienced this connection throughout the ages. I encountered many patients during my training who wanted to tell me about their spiritual experiences. It was usually done apologetically and with a tone of embarrassment, as they did not want to offend me and did not think “medical people” would listen or believe. Science and spirituality were presumed to be incompatible.

I remember Jennifer, a girl who suffered complete liver failure at the age of fourteen. When
I began to care for her, she had just undergone liver transplantation. This was at a time when liver transplantation was still being developed, so her prognosis was poor. There were many complications after her surgery and her new liver was not yet working properly.

An important function of the liver is to produce factors that help a person stop bleeding by forming clots, which effectively plug the “breech in the levee.” Without these factors circulating in the bloodstream, a patient does not stop bleeding from raw or cut surfaces. In the 1980s, we did not have useful alternatives to these factors, so while we waited for her new liver to start functioning, we gave Jennifer repeated transfusions of whole blood and factor-rich plasma. We returned her to the operating room almost daily, trying to find and control points of significant bleeding. Keeping her alive was not an easy task and she soon grew tired of the process.

One day Jennifer told me that she was not afraid of dying, but was afraid of what would happen to her parents. Apparently when her liver had initially failed, she tried to explain to her parents that God was with her and loved her, and that He wanted her to “come home.” Her parents refused to accept this, so she agreed to undergo liver transplantation.

One day as I prepared her for yet another trip to the operating room, she told me that she would not be coming back. She thanked me for everything
we had done for her and told me that her angels were with her so I should not be sad. She told me she was sad for her parents, but it was time for them to “let me go.” I listened and accepted the truth of her words. Still, my tears flowed freely later in the day when her heart stopped beating.

My time at UCLA was passing quickly and when the time for me to go to New York and begin my specialized orthopaedic surgical training neared, three things were clear:

We both decided it would be best if I could stay in Los Angeles for my orthopaedic surgery training. The one problem with this idea was that positions in orthopaedic surgery training programs were highly sought after, were filled long in advance, and were rarely available at the last minute. We met to discuss this with a friend of Bill’s family who, at the time, was the chairman of one of the orthopaedic surgery programs in southern California. He was understanding and gracious, but assured me that there would not be any positions available and that my best option would be to complete my training in New York as previously arranged. Bill and I were quite disappointed and left that meeting feeling gloomy.

I did believe that Bill and I were meant to be together, yet I also knew that I did not want to abandon my plans for further surgical training. I gave my worries to God and asked Him for guidance. A few days later, I was told that one of the young surgeons in the orthopaedic training program at the University of Southern California was unexpectedly taking a leave of absence and there might be a position available. I immediately called, sent my résumé, and was subsequently invited for an interview.

One of the questions asked by the panel of interviewers was, “What is the last book you read?” This is a pretty standard question and one that most people, including me, would usually try to answer in a way that might show some intellect or
highlight an unusual interest. I had recently been vacationing and read
The Hobbit
or some such book of fiction. Try as I might, I could not think of any other books that might seem more impressive to the interviewing panel. I sheepishly told them the title of the book and made a comment to the fact that I had been on vacation and that the book was “nothing important, just fantasy.”