Crossing the Centuries
In October 1996, I was a second-year medical resident at In His Image in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My wife and I had a six-month-old daughter, Olivia, with severe health issues. Our little girl’s first sign of illness was a five-minute whole-body seizure followed by a fever of 105. Even worse, she stopped breathing whenever exposed to a single drop of milk. I was working eighty-hour weeks surrounded by sickness and death and doing research, too. The strain overwhelmed me.
In my sleep, I sat bolt upright, lunged toward my wife, and pressed on her belly with both hands. “She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding!” The trauma of the day pursued me into the night, and I wondered if becoming a doctor was worth it.
One patient, World War II veteran Hobert F. Allen, brought blazing light into my deep darkness. Just days before he died, he gave me this 8.5 x 11 black-and-white photo. He inscribed it for me in blue ink: “To Dr. Troy A. Thompson & Family . . . This was taken in 1945 at Brooks General Hospital—[I was] there for 2 years.” A 2,000-pound bomb had crushed him, but he had lived through it and kept on smiling.
The woman in the photo was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. With her hand on his shoulder and her eyes toward his, she ministered hope to Hobert F. Allen, the same man whom I knew and cared for in 1996. Her name was Helen Keller.
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