Robert B. Simpson: The divine miracle of human connectedness

The person sitting at this keyboard tonight is not the same person who sat here three months ago. Same general appearance, same name, same birthday. But the understanding of life has changed and won't ever be quite the same again.

It began -- and I've written about this before and so will be brief -- on June 1, when I underwent surgery to remove a chunk of the ascending aorta right above the heart that had enlarged and threatened to burst, and replace it with a man-made substitute. This is a massive intrusion, especially for an old guy, but I survived it and had made good progress in recovering when the surgeon, 7 weeks later, said I could resume all my normal physical activities. We would wait a few months and then surgically repair a similar enlargement, in the descending aorta, beside the heart. I was feeling unusually bad that day, but the surgeon and I both thought I simply had caught a bug.

Within a few days, I was feeling sicker than I've ever felt before. My blood pressure was breaking records. An ambulance hauled me to the St. Francis emergency room, where I hoped to be given some pills and sent home. It was not to be. My kidneys had shut down and I was suffering from congestive heart failure. I was admitted to the hospital.

I've been a member of my church for 31 years, and have never doubted that I was accepted, appreciated, and supported by my fellow church members and Sunday school class members. But during the period starting with preparation for the first surgery, I had rapidly come to feel bound more closely to those folks than ever before. And not just they, but people I'd never heard of in all parts of the country were praying for me. Now, back in the hospital and faced with major new threats, gasping, hurting, and afraid, I felt a special kinship with these fellow humans who, despite their own personal worries, were taking time to pray and to reach out to support me in any way they could.

I was started on dialysis. The experts still didn't know why the kidneys had failed, as there was no clear sign. Then two very smart guys figured it out with a combination approach that revealed the answer. They told me that layers of the interior lining of the aneurysm in the descending aorta were splitting off and going down, or sending blood clots down, into the kidneys. The only solution, they said, was surgery. A few phone calls revealed that my cardio-thoracic surgeon in Atlanta was away, but his team members were available. I would be sent to Atlanta immediately.

My pastor said members in church that evening would be praying hard as I departed Columbus. I said goodbye to my wife, thinking that, given my age and the impact of two such surgeries so close together, I might not be coming back alive. But as I was strapped onto the gurney and hauled away, I knew there was nothing more I could do. I would rely on the prayers of all those masses of people and on the mercy of God to either bring me through it all or let me go. I relaxed.

In Atlanta, the key number reflecting my kidneys' ability, the creatinine level, was more than 10 times normal. A nephrologist advised my daughter, who had just arrived, that if I lived I would be on dialysis for the rest of my life. The surgical team leader came in, with the other team members still arriving from home, and outlined the procedure he would use on the descending aortic aneurysm. But, he said, "I have no idea if I can save your kidneys." At 1 a.m. I was taken to the operating room. A few hours later, a nurse shouted me awake to tell me the operation was finished.

Within a day, the creatinine level had begun to drop. Within a few days, it had gone all the way down to normal. The doctors expressed amazement. An experienced nurse in that area told me he'd never seen someone whose kidneys had been so drastically damaged have them recover so completely.

Don't misunderstand: It was a miserable hospital stay, despite kind and professional care. I was, and am, black and blue all over, sore, weak. A lung collapsed when the chest tube was removed. The site then bled repeatedly for days, defying all corrections and requiring repeated blood transfusions. Where during the first surgery and following, I had been virtually pain-free, now I hurt a lot, sometimes in waves of pain that sent me back to the edge of infantile shrieking. But through it all I knew I was making progress and I knew there were people reaching out, wishing me well, sending cards and letters, praying, helping me to receive something I'd not earned and could not believe I deserved.

I came home, mercifully, after a total of 10 days of hospitalization, weak, tottering, gasping. While considering the miracles that had befallen me, I learned that, statistically, forty per cent of those who have an aortic aneurysm in the process of doing such damage to the kidneys don't live to make it to the hospital. Yet I had performed some extremely strenuous physical labor while all this was going on, silently, inside my body. And survived. When I stopped to consider how many people had cared, I was overcome with emotion. And I realized that my world was different than I'd thought, and that I would not see it the same way again.

I'm not a preacher. I am the father of one and the father-in-law of another, but that's not my calling. I don't do much trying to explain God's word or His will. There are people who have those skills, but I'm not one of them. I know only that there is a connectedness throughout humanity that, when exercised and allowed to flourish, makes life rich, sometimes even possible. You may tap it through prayer, or you may have other means of access. But whatever the method, to care for each other is key. I wish I could explain it better than that, but I can't.

I also can't explain why some good people have terrible things happen to them, while others who've done nothing to earn it receive the reward. But I'm trying to stop questioning the gift and just accept it, awed by its source. I was moved in this direction by the hospital chaplain. "I don't deserve this," I said. "God thinks you do," she said.

Robert B. Simpson, a 28-year Infantry veteran who retired as a colonel at Fort Benning, is the author of "Through the Dark Waters: Searching for Hope and Courage."

This story was originally published August 15, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Robert B. Simpson: The divine miracle of human connectedness ."