Columns
Attending an accident
By Sheila Osburn
15, Jan 2002 - 05:46

About six years ago, while working my shift as an Emergency Medical Technician on an Ambulance the unexplained happened. At the end of our shift we received the infamous late call - pulled for a call right before getting off work. The call was out of the city and into the county. Radio reports from the county gave information "mangled person" involved in a traffic accident. We arrived on the scene out in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road, volunteers were on the scene but I did not see a "mangled" person and I did not see any cars. I was confused but I could see a young teenager lying injured in the middle of the road. I had the odd thought that she looked very short as she lay there. Yes, she was in critical condition and we called for "Flight for Life" and worked on the patient. The young girl had been riding a dirt bike, hit a bump, lost control and had gone right over the handlebars. Amazingly, she was still conscious. Throughout the whole time while we were getting her hooked up with IV fluids and preparing her to be flown I heard a quiet murmuring sound - like chanting in the background somewhere - but I didn’t pay it much attention initially and concentrated on the job in hand instead.

That's me on the right with my partner Tina back about 1995.

Soon I felt the flight nurse's hand on my shoulder. The Flight nurse and I had difficulty getting the patient's body to lay out flat on the backboard (used to help keep the spine still and to prevent further movement in case of a spinal injury). We could not figure this out until we discovered that her two feet were bent back right up by her head! She had broken both her femurs (thighbones) in half! Of course that was why she had looked oddly short to me. In addition her pelvis was turned 180 degrees, so it was facing backwards! We grabbed each other so startled with the shock but finally we managed to straighten her out and get her into the helicopter.

When Flights took off the background murmuring sound became clearer - now I heard a woman's voice say distinctly: "You now are in the arms of Jesus - lifted with care”. Looking around, the woman's arms were spread outward as if in prayer - the quiet chanting that I had been hearing all the while had been this woman's prayers. This lovely, elderly woman had a cotton print dress on with an apron. Later I asked the family who was the woman that had been standing at the side of the road, a grandmother perhaps? The injured dirt-biker and her family lived in the middle of nowhere - no neighbours nearby - out in the country. The family told me there was no grandparent with them, and in talking to others on that call no one else saw or heard the old woman that I had seen - odd, very odd!

The Flight nurse and myself were very distressed once the extent of the injuries became apparent to us. If we had realised initially how mangled she really was and seen her feet at her head we may not have been able to do what had to be done to get the girl into the helicopter. No one else saw this old woman standing and praying, so we wondered was she an angel sent to pray over the teenager and us? By all accounts the young teenager had fatal injuries and wouldn't survive - her body was truly broken - but months later this young lady left the hospital, with just a permanent injury to one arm. The last I heard she was in nursing school and has most likely graduated by now. The question remains with me - who was that woman praying? Was she an Angel? Did the power of prayer work?


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