Into each life some fractures must come. And they’re not all metaphorical.

Mine came like this. It was Friday May 2nd. Jerry and I were due to speak at a Theology Without Walls group. We were standing in the foyer of an old Administrative building on the picturesque grounds of the Princeton School of Theology. It being time to get over to the building where we were to give our papers, I stepped out the front door to what appeared to be a veranda continuous with the indoor floor level but was in fact an unmarked step with no banister about five inches above the concrete veranda below. 

Crash.

I knew when I hit the concrete that this was gonna be trouble. The ambulance took me to a fine Princeton hospital. Within a day or two the providentially gifted surgeon had replaced a broken whatever in the hip joint with a titanium one. There were a few days of on-site recovery in the post-operative phase. Then a long ride to a Rehab facility not too far from where we live. Since I’ve been pronounced a star patient (everybody has to be good at something) I was out of there after a little more than a week and home for the long slog back to full functioning.

Now for the high points, for good and evil. Mostly the care at the Rehab facility was kind, caring and competent. One exception stood out. I take eye drops for a condition clearly unconnected to my hip fracture. The drops were part of the stuff Jerry had brought me from home. One kind has to be taken morning and evening; the other kind in the evening only. The drops are taken to ward off an unlikely but irreversible condition: blindness. 

The evening after my admission to the Rehab, I rang for the nurse to bring the eye drops. And rang. And rang. Suddenly (and up to that point exceptionally) my inner voice kicked in. Call it what you will, that inner prompt, but for me it’s generally authoritative. What it said was: get in fighting mode. You’re gonna have to fight. She doesn’t want to bring the drops and doesn’t care about the possible consequences to you.

Oh, I thought. Okay. Forget about your Miss Nice Guy appearances. Hang in and fight for the eye drops you need. They aren’t optional.

When Nurse Cruella finally came in, she was just as my inner guidance had anticipated. First, she accused me of inconsistency in having failed to ask for the drops directly after emerging from surgery. Then she accused me of inconsistency in not having asked for the twice-a-day drops earlier, that is, in the morning, as well as now, in the evening.

I rejoined that you don’t have your wits about you when emerging from surgery and only after an interval can you recall other medical needs unrelated to the fracture.

Since meanness is contagious – especially if it appears to carry authority – her nurse’s aid now piped up to say that I had wanted these drops hourly! 

     “That’s not true,” I said promptly. “That’s a lie.”

I did report the incident when I finally met with the official whose business it was to hear such things and Nurse Cruella was taken off my case.

Sometimes in life you have to fight for yourself and it’s a blessing if – at least – you can.

One other incident, of quite the opposite kind, stands out in my mind. By the last evening at the Rehab, one of my two kinds of eye drops had run out. The staff would be required to go through all kinds of rigmarole before its replacement could be authorized. I knew that blindness was a remote possibility, absent the drops, but the thought of it was certainly disquieting.

At that point, a nurse came in with another announcement. The Monday after my Friday discharge tomorrow from the Rehab, I’d be expected at the surgery in Princeton to have a piece of attached equipment removed and be evaluated by the surgeon. Immediately, I wrote down the relevant information (time and address) in my notebook at hand. Then I thought to write it in another place as well, on a note I could store in my purse.

The nurse got my purse down from the closet and brought it over to my bed. I opened the purse and put the additional copy of the needed information inside. Then I noticed it.

An unopened bottle of the very eye drops that had just run out. Had I not thought to safeguard the surgeon’s address and time of appointment with a second copy for my purse, I would never have found it in time! 

It’s hard to convey in words what this wordless event meant to me. For the agnostic, of course, it would have gone down as a lucky coincidence. But for me it had the staggering effect of a miracle. Not the kind that requires suspension of any known laws of nature.

Just a startling sense of

the Providential surround.