By Walter Geiger My window is different than all the others along the pedestrian bridge that links the Medical Center of Central Georgia with the parking deck across Hemlock Street. The glassed in walkway is three stories off the ground and all but one window pane is tinted. My window has a clear pane. I figure the original glass was broken at some point and replaced before the tinted glass could be matched. That pane became my window to the world this past summer when I was hospitalized for 19 days. For the first eight days, I could not leave my bed but, once I was allowed to get up, I started roaming and soon found my window. I spent hours gazing down Hemlock past doctors’ offices to the Oconee River levee and the hills of Georgia’s lower Piedmont beyond. I stood at my window and longed to go home and be with my family. I prayed there that God would use my doctors to heal me and I would leave the hospital without being on dialysis for the rest of my life. My prayers ‘“ and those of many others ‘“ were answered and I am now healthy and enjoying life as I did before my ordeal. Friday marked the one year anniversary of what was supposed to be routine sinus surgery with a two day recovery period that launched me on the road to illness. I ended up in the Med Center where they cured me. I went back Friday to celebrate the occasion with the fine people on the renal ward who cared for me as if I were their own. There was laughter, tears and hugs all around. I promised I would never forget them and I won’t. As I left the hospital, I paused at my window for a long time. I uttered a prayer of thanksgiving that I was there as a visitor and not as a patient. I prayed that those there as patients would receive the same healing I did. And, I thanked God for delivering me from the most serious illness I have suffered thus far in my life. As I lingered, I recalled a harried man I met at the window the first day I found it. I was standing there with an IV stand at my side when he stopped and asked, ‘Why in the hell did they build a hospital on a street named for a poison?’. I had no answer. He didn’t seem to need one and ambled off toward the parking deck. Thereafter, we met every day on the bridge. I learned he had a successful business in Macon. His wife had been hospitalized even longer than I. Her name was May, the same as my oldest daughter and mother-inlaw. May left the hospital two days before I did. She and her husband whose name I never learned, stopped on the way to their car and spoke to me as I gazed out my window. ‘Be thankful, young man,’ he said. ‘You and I will have our families together this year for Christmas after all.’ Gazing back at the hospital tower where he had spent weeks at his wife’s bedside, he added, ‘So many people won’t be able to do that.’ He was right and I am so thankful. Count your blessings this holiday season and give thanks. Merry Christmas to you and your family from all of us here at The Herald Gazette and barnesville.com. Walter Geiger is editor and publisher of The Herald Gazette and Pike County Journal Reporter.
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