On July 22, 2007, I encountered an angel.
I’ve tried to tell this story repeatedly, in various forms, but none of them do it justice. So I’ll try again, and I’ll just speak it like it happened.
A month and a half prior to that day, I’d gone for a routine prenatal visit during my first pregnancy and discovered that the baby had died. I was ten weeks along, but my body didn’t go through the normal process of a miscarriage, so it was labeled a “missed miscarriage.” What followed was a week of pain and misery as I took a medication that was supposed to tell my body what to do and extract the remnants of the pregnancy. Instead, it caused extreme pain, bleeding, and other horrible things I’ll spare you the details of.
Regardless, by July 22, I was still bleeding, still going for blood work multiple times a week to make sure my pregnancy hormone levels were going down, and emotionally, I was still struggling.
My husband was gone. He was in the Army and had left for a training course in another state a few weeks earlier. I was alone in Colorado—we’d just been stationed there after leaving Texas—and other than my new coworkers, I didn’t know anyone. When I woke up that morning, I didn’t think anything was abnormal, since I’d been bleeding all along.
By the afternoon, it was clear something was wrong.
You know in movies when a character says, “She’s hemorrhaging!” and then the person dies? I didn’t know what that meant as a kid, but I found out that day. I had been bleeding profusely for a couple of hours. I didn’t want to bother my husband and worry him if it was nothing, so I drove myself on post and went to the ER. The bleeding was so bad that even with a fresh overnight maxi pad and towels underneath me, by the time I got to the hospital, I had already bled through onto the seat.
I got checked in, and they took me back fairly quickly. They put me in a little room—just a square, gray box. The doctor I saw was young, and he admitted he didn’t know anything about women’s healthcare. He said the OB-GYN wasn’t working that day and wasn’t answering his phone, but he’d try to figure out what was going on.
Hours passed, and I lay in the bed with what I can only describe as a puppy pad underneath me and a thin sheet on top. He said he wanted it that way to “monitor the blood loss.” He did a pelvic exam with the door open, my spread legs facing the entire emergency room. I remember watching a kid with a broken arm on the other side of the ER and saying, “Would someone please shut the door???” but they wouldn’t.
No one seemed to have compassion. No one seemed to care. I lay there, for hours, bleeding out. Occasionally someone would walk in, gruffly grab my face, and yank down on my eyelid.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making sure you don’t need a blood transfusion,” they said—and walked out.
I cried when they tried to give me the same medication that had started this whole process, remembering how horrible it had been.
“I’m just freaking out,” I sobbed. “That medicine made me have to go to the bathroom a lot, and there’s no bathroom in here, and they won’t let me put my pants back on…”
They didn’t care. They simply left the room.
It was late at night. Nobody in my family knew I was there. My cellphone didn’t have any signal to call anyone. I felt like I could die and no one would bat an eye. I looked down at myself—I was soaked in blood from my chest to my knees. Thick, dark red blood. It looked like someone had tried to slice me in half. And that only made it more obvious that no one cared to help me.
It felt like not a single person in the world cared whether I lived or died in that moment. I’ve never felt more unseen.
I wasn’t a Christian. I wasn’t religious. I wasn’t raised in a faith, but I’d been to Sunday school with some friends, and I knew the Lord’s Prayer from hearing people say it in high school. I’d seen The Passion of the Christ. That was the extent of my Jesus knowledge, for better or worse.
For some reason, all I could think about was the part in that movie where Jesus is carrying the cross and falls down. It’s overlaid (or it was in my head at the time) with him as a child running into his mother’s arms. I kept seeing that in my mind as I lay there, bloody and hopeless. And out of nowhere, I had the most random thought.
This is what I was thinking in my head, talking directly to the God I’d always rejected because I hadn’t had any evidence He was real:
“It’s okay. It’s okay. If I need to die tonight, it’ll be alright. I’m okay with it.”
And I started crying—because I really meant it. I was exhausted in every conceivable way, far beyond just the pregnancy loss and my current condition. I was so tired. I had no other option than to hand it over to God, even if I wasn’t sure He was real or listening.
“Your will be done.”
I said it out loud. I said it, and I meant it. It was the only part of the Lord’s Prayer I think I had ever said and truly meant.
At that very moment, the door opened and a woman with big, black, curly hair walked into the room.
“I’m here to help you,” she said.
That’s how she greeted me. No “hello.” No introduction. No questions about who I was or what I was there for. Just: “I’m here to help you.”
She inspected me for a second, pulled a big blanket from a cabinet, and unfurled it over me to cover the blood. She grabbed my purse and my clothes and threw them on the bed, then wheeled me out of the room. I remember passing the doctor, who was at a desk on the phone in the center of the ER. He looked confused and said, “What are you doing?” but she ignored him.
She took me to a different room—a bigger one, with a bathroom. She helped me to my feet. I stood before her, naked, and she cleaned every single drop of blood off of me. I just stood there, weak, shaking, and crying. It was the first time I had encountered any compassion in so long. She never even put on gloves. She just knelt before me and cleansed my whole body.
She helped me back into the bed after cleaning it off.
“I want you to trust me,” she said. “If you want to get out of here, just do what I say. I’ll stay with you, and it’ll all be alright.”
She gave me some medicine, and I took it. She stayed in the room with me, never leaving.
After about 45 minutes, she asked, “How do you feel?”
I felt amazing. I felt like nothing had ever happened. I’d completely stopped bleeding. She smiled.
“Do you want to go home?”
I told her yes. I wanted nothing more than to get out of there.
She brought the doctor in. He was perplexed—scratching his head and kind of angry.
“I don’t understand this,” he said, irritated. “I guess if you feel like you can drive and you want to go home, you can. This doesn’t make any sense.”
She helped me get dressed, and I went home.
I didn’t have a single problem after that night.
I’m a logical person. I understand this was all probably just wishful thinking, coincidence, or something that can be rationally explained. But regardless of whether that woman was an angel from Heaven, a gift from God after my total release of will, or just a human nurse with a kind heart, she was an angel to me. She always will be.
When I became Catholic over a decade later, and people asked me why, I gave them truthful reasons. But the spark that started it all was that night. It was that woman. It was that act of compassion—when I felt like the Earth would be fine without me because no one seemed to care about my existence—that started it all. That compassion is why I chose Saint Veronica, the woman who stepped forward and handed Jesus a cloth to wipe his face as he carried the cross while everyone else cheered for his death, as my baptismal saint.
It is easy to be apathetic to those around us, or to go through the motions without thinking our disengagement affects others. But compassion goes a long way, even in small spurts. It can make someone feel like they matter—and for some, it can make them believe you are an angel.
Nicheless Wonder 
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