At 2am a nurse slipped into my hospital room and just as quietly slipped away.  On my legs pressure cuffs alternated their gentle pneumatic squeezing on my legs and my room-mate, in another corner of the room behind hospital curtains, was gently snoring.  Down the darkened hallway I could hear my friend Bill singing “Way Up Over the Rainbow.”    It was all just another night in the Inpatient Rehabilitation Center.

Two weeks earlier I had fallen down a flight of stairs and suffered a what was judged to be severe traumatic brain injury.  I awoke in a dim haze in the hospital, having already spent a largely unconscious day in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. Several days later I was transferred to the Rogue Valley Medical Center’s Inpatient Rehabilitation Center, a twelve-bed wing of the hospital dedicated to intensive therapy.For several days I could not move my legs nor sit upright unaided at the edge of the bed. I was repeatedly asked my name and date of birth.

The world was a gray fog and I was adrift in a little life boat in an uncharted sea.There was no pain or sense of direction. But after nine days my anti-seizure medication was reduced, my mind began to clear, and by day eleven I was able to read my greeting cards and have memories of my visitors.  Hampered by a loss of balance and stamina. I required a walker and an assistant to ambulate.  Others on the ward were in far worse condition. When I asked a tablemate what he had done for a living, he replied “I don’t remember.”

I moved through daily rounds of physical therapies in a cloistered world whose patterns never varied. Mostly there was calm, but occasionally the hospital loudspeaker announced a code blue, calling out the room number of some distant location where a patient was in distress.  Closer at hand, my friend Bill had his own dark terrors. From time to time could turn on a nurse with violent language.  After he was gently returned to his room the recorded sounds of “Lullaby and Goodnight” could be heard wafting down the hallway.

In this sequestered, secular environment, there was also religion. Behind the curtain that divided my room the daughter of another patient visited daily and read scripture to her deeply impaired father. At the lunch table one day, my friend Bill had a well-worn Bible beside him.  We did not talk about religion but that day he sang a Christian hymn. One evening, a staff member recited a decade of the rosary with me, and over time my room took on the aspect of a little shrine with crucifixes, flowers and religious cards.

Countless friends, in word or writing, assured me that I was in their prayers. There are far too many to name, and some whom I barely knew.   My wife Alice carefully recorded and the list goes on for pages. It is said that “The nicest place to be is in someone’s thoughts, the safest place to be is in someone’s prayers, and the very best place to be is in the hands of God.”  But the visit of friends was akin to all of these elements wrapped in one.

The high point of a day was the arrival of a priest or parishioner bringing viaticum, “food for the journey”. How do you explain that your Christ is physically embodied in a Communion wafer, and that through that single piece of bread we dance with the Church, the Saints, the Virgin Mary, the prophets, the worshipping community and the great sweep of salvation history. It was not an experience that could be easily shared.

There was an inexorable flow to life in the hospital. One patient would leave, the room cleaned, and another individual — invariably in a worse state of health – would be delivered. Each patient was welcomed like a long-lost friend, as the work of rehabilitation began anew. I later noted: “The only poetry here was the balm of laughter and cheerfulness.  There is little music but in its place the rhythm of service, the sound of alarm bells, and the footsteps of response.”

My stay in the ward lasted almost a month.   In its own way it was a time of blessing. Day after day one enjoyed the good humor and kindness of staff. As much as things changed during this period, there was also reassuring sameness. At the end of each day, nurses prepared us for sleep and then silence descended upon the ward. But in the middle of the night I could hear Bill singing “Over the Rainbow.” For the moment, at least, all was right with the world.