After a Calamitous Spill, an Epiphany as to Why Readers Crave This Column

Can it be that only special people work in hospitals? Or does working there bring out in people the loving nature that you and I pray resides in all of us?

I awakened to familiar faces, friends hanging blimplike above me, and drifted off to sleep with their smiles. Friends who had never come closer than a handshake held my hand for an hour. Comrades from the triathlon club dropped by. One day, most of the bike racing team assembled outside my room.

Friends I have yet to meet filled three Internet bulletin boards with prayers and encouragement.

Much closer to home, two gutsy young kids hung tough at the sight of their dad pinned to a hospital bed.

And that stereotype of busy surgeons devoid of bedside manner? That they cared showed on their faces.

Four hours later, the fingers still wiggled.

Imagine your greatest possible expectation of close friends, then multiply it by 10. The force of their love has been a counterweight the worst pain cannot surmount.

Not allowed to go home alone, I was swept from the hospital and nursed over day and night. When finally they delivered me to my own house, it had been made fresh from top to bottom. The door stays open and friends troop through, spoon-feeding me at first, changing dressings and bathing me, filling the house with so much fabulous food that I try to feed each new wave of guests with some treat left by the last. They have taught me that everyone folds laundry differently, that the purest friendship flows from a bottomless well.

I have been thrust into that world you yearn to read about, awash in the kindness of strangers, overwhelmed by the love of friends.

If you've followed this column of late you know that "paying forward" a kindness seems to be catching on all over. The last two weeks leave me with a lifelong debt to repay, and I will find joy in doing that once the last surgery is out of the way.

-- Ashley Halsey, staff writer