The gift of life

Tonight I can either read or write. While I my body is screaming, "Lie down and open the book!" my mind is whispering, "please, tell this story."

It is about this lady from the emergency room. She makes me think of the woman in the Bible. That one who touched Jesus' robe and he knew, yet the risk this woman took was coming to the emergency room. She almost passed out at work. Bleeding for three years, she has been afraid to go to the doctor. At least that is the story I got when her daughter translated for me. Her blood count or hematocrit is 21%. Normal is 40%. She is not bleeding much now and the transfusion is running into her arm. Two units of packed red blood cells. The gift of life. There are T-shirts all over my house with this slogan on it.

Yet, the blood is not going to be the gift of life for this woman. She needs more extensive medical care which could have prevented such a precarious situation in the first place. I guess when you are in this country illegally, working a minimum wage job, all ways afraid of being deported, daring to get medical care is a bit like trying to touch God. Hopefully her story will work out as well as it did for the woman two thousand years ago.