Summer Reflections...a little late

Hi All,

I've been encouraged to spend the last part of my night studying writing a long-overdue blog post. I last wrote this summer while I was doing my externship at a hospital. It was all BRAND new when I started and it's surprising how comfortable I was when I left. It's also bizarre to work a full-time real-person job for about 3 months and then up and leave. I had some experiences I wouldn't care to repeat (depressed patients, crying patients, angry ones, end-of-life experiences, etc.), but I also had some pretty neat experiences too.

One I don't think I will ever forget was with a patient who, after experiencing a massive stroke, was left pretty much without language. She could tell me her first name and do some automatic tasks like counting, but even had difficulties with yes/no questions right at first. However, if you didn't know, the brain is an AMAZING thing! God really knew what he was doing when he created it. It can reorganize and heal itself in pretty dramatic ways. I worked with Elva for about a month. We worked to get her eating regular foods (her swallowing was effected after the stroke too), and also worked on language as much as possible. During the time we saw her we saw initially a lot of progress, but we also saw her go into about a week of depression, and come back out of it after some medical intervention. I was blessed to get to walk through the process with her, hold her hand, encourage her to try and talk, and try my best to learn about her family and interests through her limited communicative abilities. (On a side note, being able to walk with people in their most vulnerable state truly makes you humbly appreciate the skills you never really even realized you had--talking, eating, communicating, etc.) She was one of the only patients I got to consistently see by myself. At first I was scared to death of working with her. ME?! Force this poor woman to talk, when all she seemed to want to do was sleep?? But the more I got to know her, the more I felt I was giving back to her each time she answered a hard question or got something out about herself.

ONE day, the day after I had given her a little motivational speech about "the more you try, the easier it will get," I walked into her room and something had changed. She was TALKING! I mean, before, I had to pry and pry to even get one-word answers. She was making mistakes, but she was answering me in SENTENCES! It was incredible. I felt like a door had been unlocked and I was finally able to connect the dots about her life and clarify running questions about the things that went unanswered. But the most precious of it all was when she grabbed my hand and said:

"Sometimes, the light reflects off of you."

It brings tears to my eyes to think on it. Maybe she was simply referring to light coming in from the window (although I doubt it because her shades were always down), but it reminds me of one of my all-time favorite verses:

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday."

Praise God that he allows me to serve him. May I never forget my purpose!