Courage on the Midnight Express | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Courage on the Midnight Express | Previous Challenge Entry
By LINDA GERMAIN
06/12/14
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She didn’t remember exactly how she ended up in the baggage car of the train bound for the big city nearly 200 miles from her small hometown. She wasn’t sure how she came to be on the little bed hauled aboard by strong men she didn’t know. Uremic poisoning from a massive kidney infection was raging against her normally healthy young body. All she could do was hang on and pray that she would return to her three little boys. It was the early 1920s. Her name was Ira. She was pregnant. She was my grandmother.

Riley, her husband, sat beside her the whole way. The doctor had given him little hope that his beautiful wife would live long enough to reach the destination hospital--her only chance of survival. The clack-clack-clack as the train barreled eastward made it hard to be heard, but he knew she was moaning softly and that the slight movement of her lips meant she was consulting the Great Physician.

In her sharing of those amazing events of the past, she had little recall of her arrival at the station where more helping hands waited to transport her to the well-respected hospital. Specialists, knowing a nearly hopeless case was in transit, were waiting to begin their heroic attempts to save this lovely wife and mother.

The best doctor in the field of Nephrology quickly concluded, “Surgery to remove a kidney is her only hope, and even that’s not a guarantee.”

With few tools to fight against massive infection (before antibiotics) and the post-operative trauma so inherent in nephrectomies in those days, precious Ira slipped into a coma.

“I heard everything they said,” she told me decades later. “The nurses talked right over my bed about how I had no chance to live, just like my unborn baby who did not make it.”

After many weeks held captive by her sickness, the doctor took Riley aside to share even more bad news.

“She’s paralyzed and will never walk again.”

Her response to that grim declaration was, “Oh, yes…I will!”

Back home and happily reunited with her little boys, her resolve to move her legs never wavered. She would hold on to the back of a chair and drag herself inches at a time across the floor. She would laugh and make a game out of it when she fell in front of the children. Little by little, she began to have feeling in her legs. One day she let go of the chair and walked. She never looked back.

Her favorite part of that desperately challenging time was how shocked her physicians were. In the re-telling of it, her blue eyes would sparkle and she would clap her hands and smile with pure delight.She seemed to beam with a joyous spirit.

“They just didn’t know the God that I serve.”

There were plenty more tough times; including keeping her family fed by back-breaking work in her garden during the long depression years when her husband had no job. Ever the Christian soldier, onward she marched, sometimes in pain and very often exhausted.

Even though the medical powers-that-be had pronounced that her child-bearing days were over, she gave birth to five more. A little boy died as a toddler. Her last three were beautiful daughters…one being my mother who is still going strong and full of sassy determination just like her mother.

When I’m stopped at the railroad tracks to wait for a long train to pass, I often think about the untold parts of my grandmother’s story. The logistics in transporting a very ill young woman in such a crude way would be unthinkable today. At that time and in that place, there was no choice.

As the locomotive cars rush by, bound for mysterious places, I picture Ira on her little bed, probably frightened, but praying and believing she would live to raise her boys. I’m thankful for her enduring legacy; that spunky spark of grit and faith she had that ignited the flame in her daughters…and in their daughters as well.

In the end, it’s not what we’re told will happen but what we believe through prayer and blessed assurance.

The moral of this story: You can put a pitifully sick and dying woman of uncommon faith on a rumbling, stuffy, fast-moving baggage car and watch it disappear down the tracks into the darkest night…but like Rocky, don’t be surprised to see her come back to fight again!
___

*True story

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