If you check out page 28 in this issue of SOKY Happenings you will find the Faith article this month has been written by my beautiful and amazing business partner, best friend and wife, Twila. She has written about an automobile wreck in which she was involved nearly 20 years ago this month that nearly took her life.
I don’t know if you are a believer in God or not, but I always have been. It is how I was raised, and while I can’t say I have never had any doubts, they have been small and few as I have seen enough in my long life to convince me He is there and He is involved in our world and our lives every day.
But had I ever had any serious doubts, Twila’s wreck would have settled them once and for all. Twila writes about the wreck, what happened and how it affected her life. I want to note some of the interesting events that a nonbeliever might assign to coincidence but I am totally and unabashedly convinced was God’s hand at work.
First, I survived the trip from Evansville, Indiana to Nashville, Tennessee. “No big deal,” you say. In a normal world, maybe not. But I was driving Twila’s silly, old Mazda Miata and it was not really up to 100mph on wet interstate highways. But as I was flying down the interstate, my cell phone rang. It was a nurse in the Vandy trauma center. “Mr. Hurst, I understand you are inbound to us because of your wife’s crash. I’m not supposed to be making a call like this but I wanted you to know we have your wife in the trauma center, she is alive and I promise you she will be alive when you get here. Please don’t get killed trying to get here too fast.” I had to pull over because I could not see the road through the tears. That nurse didn’t have to make that call but I am convinced God had a hand in saving my life and preventing another crash that day.
Then there was me finding Vandy. In my state of mind… terrified… I was about to lose the most important person ever in my life, I didn’t bother to stop and think how in the hell I was going to find the hospital… Nashville is not a small place. Again, my cell phone rang. It was my secretary. She said, “Your big brother just called me and told me to get you on the phone and help you find the hospital because generally you can’t find your butt using both hands.” She and a receptionist from Vandy stayed on a conference call with me until I pulled into the parking structure.
Those are the funny ones. But here are a few of the other reasons. One, a guy willing to risk his life to save a stranger just happened to be the first person on the scene, just happened to see Twila open her pretty blue eyes and realized she was still alive. He stood in a puddle of gas waiting for an explosion, sticking his hand through a space between the door frame and the truck body, holding Twila’s head back so she could breathe, until the ambulance got there.
The ambulance crew realized quickly that Twila was unlikely to survive if they could not get her to a Level One trauma center in a hurry… way faster than they could do it in an ambulance. It had been storming on and off all day but a radio call was put in to LifeFlight at Vandy and a helicopter pilot found a break in the clouds and was willing to take a risk and fly to the airport in Glasgow in hopes of saving Twila.
At the wreck scene, the truck was smashed. There’s just no other word to describe the damage… no way to get Twila out without the Jaws of Life. Due to wreck location confusion, the 9-1-1 dispatcher, instead of guessing, sent both Allen County and Barren County rescue teams to the wreck and that likely saved Twila, as the Allen County Jaws of Life would not operate but the Barren County version allowed them to extract her.
One of Twila’s many horrible injuries was a shattered pelvis. I’ve seen the before X-rays and it looks like a jigsaw puzzle. The number two surgeon in the world in putting that puzzle back together just happened to be at Vandy at the time and spent hours putting Twila back together to the point she can walk, work and, sometimes when she can talk me into it, even still dance.
I was so worried through that entire ordeal because I knew Twila was already an angel and I was afraid God had decided He needed her more than I did. One moment that sticks in my mind… she had been moved to a private room a few days into this whole thing and was still in a lot of pain. She needed to be turned over for some reason and three nurses came in to do the job. As they moved her, Twila’s screams of pain could be heard up and down the halls. But when the nurses finished, before they got out of the room, Twila apologized to them for making so much noise and being so much trouble. Who can do that? Surely not me!
So, if you have read this far, first, thank you for your attention and patience… but, if you can read all this and still believe that all those good things that happened to save my wife’s life were just a coincidence, then you might want to check your heart. Thinking back to those days right after the wreck I am more convinced than ever that, truly, God stepped in repeatedly to save her life… He truly was not through with my amazing wife!
