Entertaining Angels

This child of mine is an adventurous soul. We've always said he doesn't have a stitch of fear in him, whatsoever. Once, when he was three, I looked out of my kitchen window and saw him dangling from his knees from the TOP BAR of the swingset. I slowly walked toward him, telling him to be still, I would be right there to get him down.

"No, mom. Watch." he said. And with that, he grabbed onto the chains, let go with his legs and swung down to about a foot from the ground and let go. "See?" he said. "It's easy."

So with that history, it's not surprising that he would be in a bicycle accident. This one was bad, though. He ran straight into a brick wall after going down a steep hill. Didn't use brakes. He was learning to use handbrakes, and was afraid he would flip. It was better to hit the brick wall, full force, or so he thought.

To make matters worse, it was our first few months in a new city. We didn't know the area well. It was also another country, and I didn't know the language well. I had some every day language, but I wasn't versed in Emergency Room vocabulary. The capper was that my husband had just left to go to a conference in another country. It was me and the four kiddos, and one was hurt pretty bad: he had a broken tooth, a huge knot on his forehead, his pupils were different sizes, and he was bleeding from his left eye.

After a flurry of phonecalls from the security guard, an ambulance was called. My son was put in it. My other kids went with a friend. I got in the ambulance. Another woman appeared and said, "I go with you."

We went to the hospital with me trying to keep my son awake, furious that drivers weren't pulling over for the siren. At the hospital, this woman went to the doctor, told him what happened, set me up in a room, walked with me to the CAT scan room, the XRay room...interpreting the whole way, buying me Starbucks because she knew foreigners like it, letting me use her phone to call my husband back home. It's a blur in many ways.

Around midnight, she dismissed herself. I thanked her profusely, asking her for her name, number. She refused. Suddenly they were moving Christopher, getting him to a private room. He was in bad shape and I needed to be there. I said good-bye.

Christopher turned out fine. He had a skull fracture. We thought there might be some broken vertebrae in there, too, but it turned out there wasn't. He spent a few painful days in the hospital, a few months of no recess or PE (which was probably the most painful thing of all) and has had no problems since then.

But through it all, I have never heard of or seen the "angel" that came to our rescue that night. I asked the building manager, but she didn't know anything about her. I thanked her that night, but that doesn't seem to be enough. I'm hoping at some point we will meet, but for now I'm content with having entertained an angel unaware.