It was nine years ago today.  Yet, I remember it as if it were only yesterday.

I lay there in my cozy bed, listening to the rain on the metal roof of our big old Georgia home.  Jim had left about an hour before to drive from Jasper to Cleveland, TN to meet with a pastor to discuss the Ministry Based Strategic Planning process our company provides.

From time to time, while laying there, I would have this feeling of unease, almost as if something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Now you should understand, it’s not uncommon for me – and others in my family – to have these “premonitions”.  Over the years, they have often proven to be indicators of trouble to come.

After a while, knowing that I had a client meeting over off HWY 400 to attend, I decided to get up, get my shower and get ready for the day.  I was dreading the drive of about 30 miles in the pouring rain and wondered if that was the cause of my angst.  Wondering if Jim had made it through the windy, curvy mountain roads of North Georgia as he made  his way down the mountain on HWY 136, I decided to call him.

Letting the phone ring for several long moments with no answer, I decided he was probably in a range with no signal.  Laying the phone down, I got my shower, did my hair and makeup, and got dressed in my business attire.  Ready for the day, I decided again to try to call Jim.  The phone rang several times and went into voice mail.  Glancing at the clock, I saw that it was close to time that Jim should have been getting to Cleveland, and should have had strong signal.  It was unusual for him not to answer my call, especially with this being the second time.  We have an unwritten rule that if one calls the other it is likely important and we always try our best to answer.

Frowning slightly, I ended the call, and hurried and straightened my kitchen a bit.  Somehow, I just felt uneasy about heading out in the storm for my appointment that day.  Finally, I realized that if I didn’t get going, I would be late and that was never a good thing.  I turned off the kitchen light, picked up my purse, and reached for the doorknob on the back kitchen door, when my house phone began to ring.  Now, our home phone rarely rang, and never that early in the morning.  Most people who needed to talk to us called our cell phones.

Thinking it might be my mother, she sometimes forgot and called that number instead of my cell, I hesitated.  On the third ring, I hurried to the phone and grabbed it off the hook just before it went into voice mail.  A woman on the other end asked if I was Mrs. Chambers.  Thinking it was a sales call, and knowing that I was already running late, I almost hung up on her.  Then taking a deep breath, and sighing a prayer for patience, I said, “Yes, how can I help you?”

She proceeded to explain to me that my husband had been in an automobile accident and had been taken to the Ellijay Hospital.  He was being prepared for airlift to Atlanta.  They were trying to stabilize him and were waiting for the helicopter to arrive.  Immediately I started asking her questions; what had happened, how bad was he, and all the normal things one would think of in a moment of emergency.

After a slight hesitation, she replied, “Mrs. Chambers, I am not supposed to tell you this over the phone, but Hun, I can’t even promise you that he will be alive by the time you get here.  He is that bad.”  Then she proceeded to caution me about driving in the heavy downpour and told me where the hospital was located.  Honestly, up until that moment I’d had no idea that Ellijay even had a hospital!

Dropping the phone onto the hook, I ran to my little red convertible as fast as my shaking legs would carry me.  Grateful that I was dressed and ready for the day, I whispered a prayer that Jim would be alright.  I frantically tried to call both of our children, getting no answer on several tries.  They were both self employed and were apparently sleeping in on this rainy morning.

I called our friends, Joyce and Gil Ward, as well as my friend Lynda Bennett and Frank Griffin – a dear friend and one of our IOL consultants, and told them what little I knew, asking them to please pray.  Then the kids each called me back and I spoke with them.  Both were frantic and could not believe that their father was in a life or death situation.  Urging them to be very careful on their way over to meet me, I hung up the phone to concentrate on my driving.

Arriving at the hospital, I will never forget walking into that tiny little emergency unit and seeing my husband of thirty-two years laying on the gurney, more dead than alive.  The injuries to the right side of his head and eye were gruesome.  He was strapped down to keep him from moving, and the X-ray Technician brought in some rather cloudy films, and began explaining that it appeared that every rib in his body was literally shattered.  His right lung was collapsed and they had a tube in it trying to get it to inflate.  From his waist up, he was literally broken into thousands of little pieces.  His right shoulder had been pulled almost completely off, and the bruises were covering his chest and torso with rapid speed.

By the noon that day, Jim had been airlifted to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta where they treated him for severe head injuries and stabilized him further.  We were told numerous times throughout the first two or three days that the medical staff did not even know why he was still alive.  At one point, I had to almost get into a fight with the emergency room staff at Grady to get him taken up to ICU.  They were so convinced that he was not going to make it that they literally left him lying in the ER for something like seven hours.  Finally, at my and Joey’s insistence, they put him ICU.  He was there for the next seventeen days.

What follows is a very long story, encompassing about eighteen months of four different hospitals, numerous medical procedures and surgeries and more doctors, interns and medical staff than I could ever begin to remember.

Finally, they released him to go home from Grady on day seventeen, and even with me arguing that he was not ready to be dismissed; they released him and told me to make arrangements to get him home.  I remember that it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in April.  Joyce and Gil came and drove us home in their big comfortable car.  Jim was nearly delirious with pain by the time we got him to bed.  While they went to pick up his prescriptions, I tried to get him to eat something and got him settled as comfortably as I could in our bedroom.

Later that evening I realized Jim was running a very high fever, and he appeared to not be breathing well.  I called a friend of ours who was a former respiratory therapist to please come check on him and help me decide if I should get him to a hospital.  Darrell arrived and seeing how absolutely exhausted I was, he urged me to lay down on the couch and rest while he sat with Jim for a bit and tried to access his situation.  While I was sleeping, Darrell checked Jim’s oxygen level and found it to be at 21% de-saturation.  Realizing that Jim was in distress mode, Darrell tried to wake me.  I was so exhausted that he could not get me awake.  Frantically, he called our son Joey to come over – Joe lived about six miles from us at the time.

Joe and Darrell together got Jim into my little car and drove him the five miles to Piedmont Mountainside Hospital.  Just before leaving, Joe shook me awake and literally shouting at me, told me that Jim was going to die if they didn’t get him to the hospital.  Getting myself awake, I realized that I had no way to get to the hospital!  They had taken my car and both had taken their truck keys with them!  I called our friends, Loyd and Judy Biswell who had come down from Kansas City to see Jim, and asked them to please come get me – they were at a hotel up the road in Jasper.

Long story short, that night and over the next two days, Jim nearly died from the infection raging through his body.  He went in to congestive heart failure from the fluid on his left lung.  It was life or death for several hours as the staff of PMSH did emergency surgery on him.  Following the surgery, he continued to run a dangerously high fever, with hallucinations and trying to throw himself out of the bed.  They had our daughter, Amanda, and I to come into the ICU room and bathe Jim with ice water from head to toe for several hours.  We prayed over him, sang hymns and did everything in our power to get the fever to break.  The head nurse told me that if the fever didn’t break he would go into shock and die.  Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the fever broke and he calmed down and went to sleep.

From there they took him by ambulance to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.  It was there that they realized he still had a broken rib imbedded in his right lung.  Another surgery was scheduled and they did thoracic surgery on both of his lungs, removing a portion of the upper right lung and several liters of infection from both lungs.  His body was riddled with infection, pneumonia had set in and he was very, very ill.

He was at Piedmont in Atlanta for the next ten days – most of those spent in ICU.  Finally, finally, they decided he was on the road to recovery, and sent him home to continue healing.  It was on May 2^nd that we finally took him home again.  Almost a month after his auto accident.

I remember all the things that went on during that time, and for weeks and months afterward.  God was with us so many specific times, and in every way.  Family, friends, and even strangers were such a part of our healing process.  There were so many phone calls, so many prayer chains going, and so much encouragement and support that we knew God was going to answer prayer and heal Jim completely.

It was some time after he had been home, when it suddenly struck me one evening as I sat on our big front porch.  Except by the healing power and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, I could have been a widow at barely fifty-two years of age.  I am grateful for every extra day and every moment that we have been given in these nine years since the accident.  God knew we needed this time together.