I believe in angels and in miracles. Many of my colleagues at Guardian Nurses do, too. While it may not be every day that we are offered proof, when we do—we recognize them and celebrate them.
Like the patient who told us how she had been noting a cut on her hand that over a few days, had evolved into something more ugly that was moving up her arm. She was too busy working and being a mom, though, to attend to it. When she arrived home after another Saturday filled with her kids' soccer games, all she wanted to do was curl up on the couch and take a nap. But in her head, a voice kept saying, "Go take a shower. Just get up and go upstairs and take a shower." So she did. Good thing.
When she got into the shower, she saw that her affected arm was swollen and red. Afterward, she called a friend, who was an RN, who came over, took one look at her arm and said, "You need to go to the ER."
Several days later, after a four -day hospital stay, another friend—who was not aware of the hospital admission, called to say hello. She said to the patient, "The weirdest thing happened on Saturday afternoon at our prayer meeting. Two of us called your name and the group prayed for you." As it turned out, it was right around the same time the patient was trying to drift off into a nap. A nap which very well could have been deleterious for a good outcome as the infection would have had even more opportunity to travel though her bloodstream.
And another good story that proves that angels are in our midst is that of a mom who told us that she "never puts her cell phone on her bedside table, but that night I did. I don't know why." An hour later, as she lay sleeping, her daughter came into her bedroom and collapsed on her bed, unconscious. Thanks to that handy cell phone on the bedside table, her emergent call to 9-1-1 produced a speedy and lifesaving response.
There are small victories every day in our work at Guardian Nurses—and we include in that an insurance company's reversal on an earlier denial of success—to make us believe that angels are not just in the outfield and miracles do happen.