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| It was a normal Wednesday, my husband had gone to work on the early shift, my daughter was busy with her first year of college and I was just finishing up a hectic day with the three young children I watched. I got a call from my husbands boss telling me there had been an accident, Bill, (my husband) had been taken to the emergency room but it didn't look serious. He had said not to follow him there that he would be home soon. I could get no more out of his boss, so I promised I would stay home and wait until the personnel manager brought him home. Right then I knew it wasn't good. He couldn't drive his truck.
Jill dropped him off about an hour later. He walked with a limp, and looked weary and a bit sore but as I quickly counted hands, fingers and other appendages, I was thankful he was all in one piece. I made him a cup of coffee so he could take the pain medication the physician had given him and waited for him to tell me the story.
Bill is a maintenance engineer for a large laundry service. On this particular day he was the only one of the three men in their section working on the washer wheel. He had to go outside to thread a piece of pipe, and as it was November he threw his CPO jacket over his uniform and preceded to work on the pipe. Before he knew it the machine grabbed onto the tail of the jacket and wrapped it up until it was tight around his neck. There was no one to hear his calls for help, no safety pedal on the old machine for him to stop the circular motion. His body flipped over and over like a rag doll while the machine threatened to strangle him to death. He somehow managed to remain calm and with a strength that so often comes in times of great danger he managed to twist his body far enough to kick the plug out of the wall. He lay on the ground until he could catch his breath and then slowly walked back into the plant to find his supervisor. They took him immediately to the emergency room to have him checked out. That Dr. said no serious damage, and sent him home with muscle relaxers and pain medication for the pains he complained of in his neck. I sat there horrified as he told me this tale, able to visualize my husbands body being tossed end over end for what must have seemed an endless amount of time. Then I looked up and saw the red mark around his throat. I ask him if his coat had done that to him. He said no, that it had also caught the medal I had purchased for him the month before and he thought he had lost it when he freed himself from the machine. He got up and reached into the pocket of the now mutilated CPO jacket and there was the Miraculous Medal he had worn faithfully since the day I had bought it. Still latched! I ask him if maybe someone in the hospital had taken it off him and placed it in the pocket while they were examining him. He said no, that no one had taken anything from him. It had fallen from his neck into his pocket when he freed himself from the machine without being unclasped. God sent help for my Husband that day from Heaven and continued to sustain him as we discovered a month later that he had 6 damaged discs, partial loss of movement in his right leg, and some nerve damage that resulted in fusing three discs in his neck.
I put that necklace in my jewelry box just the way he handed it to me and it has not been opened since. Every once in a while I take it out and thank God for helping my husband when there was no one else there for him. He is truly a miraculous God.
Joyce Conn |
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