The Craziest Week in which Everything Went Right (Thanks to God)

A week ago last Sunday, our missionary directors and family, Rusty, Dawn, Payton, and Keegan Zimmerman, went to Port for groceries. That night, while they were gone, we got a patient to transport. He had a broken collarbone, and we had to take him to the ¨switch¨ where the bus stops so he could get to the hospital in Waspam. He stayed overnight at our mission, and we had to pray really hard for the four-wheeler to run the next day. It´s new trick is: it´s begun to turn off randomly, sometimes while climbing a hill, but always for no good reason. As if it didn´t have enough problems.

On Wednesday night Rusty got back. The rest of his family was supposed to come later that night with the Halversons, the missionaries who run the radio station. However, the Halversons´ truck didn´t come back. So the next morning, Rusty went on the motorcycle to look for them, supposing that they had broken down on the road. On the way, he came over a hill and ran into a truck he hadn´t been able to see. The motorcycle destroyed its front half on the truck´s front tire, and Rusty flew thru the air and landed on his left shoulder. Thanks to God, another truck came along just then and brought him back to Francia.

I was on the verandah feeding the parrot when Mindy ran up yelling for Jeremy and me and looking terrified. She had been at the MINSA clinic when Rusty was brought in. We hopped on the four-wheeler and headed down. Sure enough, Rusty looked pretty bad. His shoulder was hanging way lower than any shoulder is ever supposed to go. I thought it was certainly dislocated, and maybe also had some broken bones. We decided to take him to the hospital in Waspam. The owners of the truck that had brought Rusty back offered to drive us if we would pay for gas, but, again thanks to God, the Halversons and the other Zimmermans got back just at that moment.

So we four medical people, Dawn, and Rusty went in the Halversons´ truck. We got to Waspam and went to the hospital, but they told us that the emergency doctor and the orthopedic doctor were both gone and they didn´t know when they would return. Typical Nicaraguan health care. We were walking away to find somewhere to eat and wait, but just at that moment, thanks to God, we saw a doctor we knew personally. He pulled some strings, and Rusty was seen immediately.

The X-ray showed that Rusty´s collarbone was broken, and I mean broken. It was in two very separate pieces, about three inches away from each other. The doctor in Waspam said probably surgery was necessary to repair it. For that, Rusty would have to go to Puerto Cabezas, if not Managua or the States. The next step for us then was to get ahold of the missionaries with the airplane, Clint and Marilyn, to fly Rusty to Port. We sent out a radio message for Clint, but didn´t have to wait long. In about half an hour, we heard his plane landing. You see, by ¨chance¨ Clint was already on his way to Waspam. He had been in town in the morning to drop his mother off, and the hospital had asked him to come back with his airplane because they wanted him to take another patient to Port for them. Thanks to God, he flew in at just the right time to take Rusty too.

So Rusty went to Port in the little plane and we brought Dawn back to Francia so she could catch the bus to Port the next day. She went at 6 in the morning and took her son Keegan with her. Poor kid--that day was his 11th birthday, and he had been so excited to turn 11 for so long. We hated the thought of his day being ruined, so we all got up at 5am to have a party for him. We made mac and cheese--that´s really special food here, and he loves it. He got 11 little presents from his family and a scooter from all of us. He was so happy.

After Dawn left, it was just the ten of us student missionaries with no director. We were planning for the worst scenario--that Rusty and Dawn would be in the States for a long time and we would have to function on our own. We knew that we could handle it, but it was still somewhat sobering. We had our plans worked out for getting to Port and buying food. We were planning on taking the bus to Port yesterday, because Jeremy has only driven our truck (a 1965 military deuce) once and isn´t completely comfortable with it, especially starting it. It doesn´t actually start on its own--you have to roll it down a hill or push it. Plus we just fixed the brakes, so we weren´t sure if they were working, and we had just put on a ¨new¨ radiator, which we weren´t sure would work. (At this point in my conversation with my sister, she asked politely, ¨Does anything on it work?¨ And I replied, ¨It´s actually the safest, most functional vehicle we have.¨ To which she said, ¨Awesome.¨)

Because of all these concerns, we decided that Jeremy would only drive the truck as a last resort. And then the story got interesting. :) On Sabbath, we were sitting in church and someone handed in a note from Janet, the village nurse. She wrote that there was a baby being born and that we could come help.

We figured she didn´t actually need our help, so we waited till after church and lunch, then headed to the lady´s house. The baby, a little girl (Maidin in Miskito) had already been born around 1:00. However, the mother still had a hard lump in her uterus. The placenta had already delivered, so we knew it wasn´t that. She had stopped having contractions, but she said she was in pain. All she had strength to do was lie on the floor with an IV dripping into her arm. Amelia, the midwife and Janet´s mother, told me she thought the lump might be another baby, but she wasn´t sure. I felt it, and it felt like a baby to me, and when Amelia used the Doppler, we picked up a heartbeat. It was too slow for a newborn, though, and I wondered if we could be hearing the mother´s abdominal aorta, but Janet said no.

We asked Janet if the mother´s condition was serious. --Sí, es seriosa! she exclaimed, and told us that the mother could die if she didn´t get to the hospital in Waspam. We went and asked Mike Halverson, the radio station missionary, if he would take her in his truck, but he said no. So Jeremy and Mindy bravely went to start our deuce.

Mindy pressed the gas pedal with one hand and the starter button with the other. Jeremy worked the clutch and the brakes. The truck rolled down the hill and started, and it turned out we did have brakes, which was good. They drove to the mother´s house. She couldn´t walk, so we had to get people to carry her. I was going to help Ruth get a mattress and blanket from our clinic, but Jeremy told me he was worried about the radiator and asked me to go get some containers for water. So I ran up to our mission house, grabbed two big jugs, and ran back. By the time I got to the truck, the mother was loaded and ready to go. At the clinic we filled the jugs with water and discovered they both had holes in them. We laid them in the truck hole-side-up to minimize leakage.

After loading up all the people in Francia who wanted a free ride to Waspam (this is a normal part of emergency patient transport), we took off. Poor Jeremy--he was pretty stressed. He really hadn´t planned on driving the truck anywhere by himself. He wanted to drive carefully, too, so the lady wouldn´t get bounced around on our rutted roads. He did an excellent job, however—he even handled it when the truck tried to stall in the middle of going up hills. We prayed hard for the engine, the radiator, the brakes, and eveything else—and, thanks to God, everything functioned!

We got to the hospital safely, got the lady in, and hugged Jeremy and told him we were proud of him. The doctors said the mother didn´t have another baby in her uterus, but they didn´t explain what the lump was. They said she had sepsis and started her on an antibiotic. We saw her settled in bed with her baby girl, whom Mindy had been holding for her on the truck, and then we drove back to Francia.

When we pulled in at Mission Hill, we heard a familiar voice call from the porch, ¨OK, Jeremy, you can breathe now!¨ We looked at each other and said, ¨No way!¨ But it really was—Dawn! She and Rusty had gotten back on the bus that afternoon. It turned out that the doctors didn´t have to do surgery. They just set the collar bone and gave him a brace. We spent that evening praising God for all the coincidences that we knew weren´t by chance. We felt so blessed that He kept us safe through everything. And we felt so blessed by our delicious homemade pizza! No cheese except Parmesan to sprinkle on after baking, but it was still amazing. I think pizza qualifies as a blessing straight from God, too.