True Love
The Power of True Love
It was an extraordinary story he told, but I was not surprised. I called my old friend Mike having heard that he had had some serious health issues in the last couple of weeks, and those I had spoken to had confirmed that he was lucky to be alive.
Mike and Millie have been sweethearts ever since the brash young tar was impressed by the dimples on the pretty face he found himself standing next to among the spectators at a football match. They have been together ever since that first meeting, except when Mike was chopping through the high seas on HMS Ladybird.
Four heart attacks in less than a week had Mike thinking seriously about his funeral service and Millie’s widowhood, and the same dark thoughts troubled Millie as she held his hand in the dim quiet hours of the hospital ward that long night knowing that she must be braver than she felt.
The last attack resulted in Mike struggling to hold onto life as his ambulance raced down the hard shoulder of the M62 to Leeds, blue lights flashing, the insistent siren demanding clearance, giving the lie to the nurse who told Mike there was no emergency but Mike knew better, seeing, as it were in vision, his funerary service, and Millie weeping inconsolably and alone.
The heart surgeons at Leeds Infirmary hit Mike with clot busting chemicals and took him down into the bowels of the hospital where they pull off their everyday miracles. He saw his heart on the screen pounding reassuringly, saw the murky puff of radio-opaque dye squirted into his arteries, endured the surprise of the hot flush start at his head, rolling down his body, and exit through the soles of his feet as he wondered what the heck it was!
As the surgical team talked amongst itself, seemingly insouciant to the patient, a slender wire snaked its way through the hole they had punched into his femoral artery and wriggled into his heart, aiming for the stenotic section of cardiac artery plainly detailed by the contrast fluid.
A miracle of micro engineering called a stent sat at the end of the catheter and, when in position, the balloon inflated spreading the expanded metal keeping the cholesterol plaque apart and restoring circulation to the coronary arteries.
A check by the eminent surgeons and a second stent was shunted up behind the first to secure the site from closure, then, after a night in the Coronary Care Unit, Mike was on his way to recovery and eventually a more leisurely return trip by ambulance this time sans siren and lights to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.
Millie entered the room with apprehension. She did not know whether Mike was going to make it or not and after so many years even the fleeting thought that her best friend and husband might not survive pushed her heart up into her mouth causing her to tremble with fear.
She scanned the glimness, finding Mike in a futuristic glow surrounded by tubes and machines that interpreted and reported his condition, peeping and chirruping like a battery of anxious birds accompanied by a multitude of frantically flashing micro-lights playing like festive stars in the gloom of the ante-chamber of death's dark vale.
The sight of her sweetheart laying unconscious surrounded by the ghastly array made Millie's heart rise into her mouth as if it would choke her. In silent but searing panic she gasped for air. What was happening to her beloved, and would he ... ? But, Millie could not frame the question, even in her thoughts.
The nurse technician scrutinized the screens and illuminated displays, his face betraying his anxiety, as he perceived some behaviour in Mike’s heart that should not be. Two nurses were holding Mike’s hands, one either side of the bed, as Millie fearfully drew near. One reached for Millie’s hand, placing Mike’s hand in it as her counterpart laid Mike’s hand on the bed and left.
At the very moment Mike and Millie touched hands, the nurse gasped and exclaimed that all the screens and signals had changed his readings, and they were now exactly as they ought be.
“Let go of his hand and let me check it when you are not touching him!” he said, his voice betraying his sense of urgency.
Millie laid Mike’s hand on the bed and the machinchecked the screens again. Mike’s heart went back to the gallop, but otherwise his vital signs remained steady. Millie took her sweetheart's hand in hers again, and his heart rate immediately slowed down to normal, and everyone relaxed. There was muttering and head scratching from the disbelieving care team at what they had witnessed.
The touch of the hand of Mike’s True Love had calmed his troubled heart. He had lain passive and terrified among hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment designed and built by human genius. Nursing, medical and radiological experts who had jointly spent more than two hundred years developing their skills and cunning had treated him.
He had received hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds worth of wonder drugs to calm him, break up the clots that had caused the death of parts of his heart muscle, medicines to stop the pain, calm his anxiety and prevent the formation of new clots, and while all these had been essential in bringing him back from the edge of the grave, it was a miracle that no individual brilliance can reproduce, no drug can imitate, and no machine can generate: a miracle only achievable by the touch of the hand of one who is truly loved and who truly loves.
Emma Rae McKay wrote to her husband, David:
How much have I remembered you?
As much as night and day!
Not any thoughtful moment have you
Ever been away.
From sunlight to moonlight, and
From darkness to the dawn,
Your image and my love for you
Have always lingered on.
What more could I have done, dear one,
To show my feeling true?
What more is there in life, my love,
That I can offer you?
Maybe there is nothing more that anyone could offer – except, perhaps, life itself through the touch of a healing hand when only True Love can initiate the miracle, because the God of Miracles wrought the greatest wonder of all when He sent His only Son to save us so that we should not die, and He did it because He is the God of True Love.
Copyright © 2009 - All Rights Reserved
Ronnie Bray
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