Joyce B. Mathison: The Resurrection Lady

THE RESURRECTION LADY

by Joyce B. Mathison

When my husband and I were young doctors, we volunteered to serve as medical missionaries for the United Methodist Church. We were assigned to a little 100-bed hospital in a very rural area of northern Nigeria, just 8° north of the equator. How rural? Well, the roads were closed nearly half the year because there were no bridges over the streams. Emergency medical transportation consisted of a bed made of cane stalks hoisted onto the shoulders of four to six men from the patient’s family and friends. And that’s how I came to meet the patient I think of as the resurrection lady.

I hope that doesn’t offend you, but I’ll always remember her that way, because – well, you’ll see. When her family carried her into the emergency examining area of that little hospital, they said she had died and come back. I knew they weren’t trying to deceive us, just relating what seemed to them to be the truth about what they had just experienced. When I first looked at her, it occurred to me that she might have gone back to being dead again. But when I laid a stethoscope on her chest, I thought maybe I heard a faint flutter. When we got IVs started, she began pouring blood, visibly thin blood, and the kind of bleeding that can’t be stopped in time without prompt surgical intervention.

A necessary moment to give the family an honest assessment: She’s in a dangerous situation and she’s already in pretty bad shape. She may die no matter what we do, but without a successful surgery to stop the bleeding, she certainly will. They said what the families always said, “Oh, please try!” I went to start my scrub while the nurses got her ready for surgery and an aide took the family over to the lab to see if any of them were potential blood donors.

She came through the surgery okay, but it was still a touch and go situation. Sometimes, when it seemed necessary, I would climb up on a gurney after an emergency surgery and give a unit of blood to help the patient through the next twenty-four hours. I frankly don’t remember whether this was one of those times, but it very well could have been. At any rate, she recovered well.

Later, talking to the nurses, I learned that when they were cleaning her up for surgery, they found sand everywhere, in all the cracks and creases. Bear in mind that this was in a very rural area of tropical West Africa in the 1970s: no refrigeration and no ice. So it was both customary and necessary for burial to occur