The Doctor No One Knew

The Doctor No One Knew

I believe I may once have encountered an angel without knowing it.

It happened on 27 April 1978, the day after my nineteenth birthday. I had met Michel only a few weeks earlier.

I had been involved in a motorcycle accident in the centre of The Hague, on the Spuistraat. I was not riding along the road at the time; I was walking my motorcycle across the street when a car struck me from the side. My motorcycle and I became trapped underneath the front of the car, and the driver travelled several metres before stopping, right in front of the offices of the Haagsche Courant.

I was injured and taken to hospital. At first, however, they could not find what was seriously wrong with me, and I was sent home.

But my breathing became more and more difficult.

Eventually I went to a doctor, who immediately told me that I needed to return to hospital and have an X-ray of my chest. I travelled there alone by tram and got off at the Rode Kruisziekenhuis on the Sportlaan in The Hague.

After the X-rays were taken, everything changed.

The surgeon told me that I was not even allowed to take another step. There was a very large tear in my diaphragm, and organs from my abdomen had moved upward through it. I needed major surgery.

The operation lasted for many hours.

Afterwards, while I was in recovery, the doctors discovered another serious complication: my left lung had been punctured.

A chest drain was inserted into my side and connected by tubing to a large glass drainage bottle partly filled with fluid. In 1978, that was the type of chest-drain system being used for me. The bottle stood beside my bed, and whenever my bed had to be moved, the bottle had to be moved with me.

I was extremely ill, surrounded by tubes and machines.

When my father came to see me, he cried and walked out. Then my mother came in and she began crying too. Michel came, and he cried as well.

I could not bear it.

I was frightened that if the people I loved could not cope with seeing me like that, then I would be left alone. I began pulling tubes away and insisting that I did not want to stay in intensive care.

Eventually, because I was so determined, I was transferred to a normal ward.

The doctors continued to watch me very carefully. A portable X-ray machine was brought to my bedside several times a day to check my chest.

At one point the chest drain was removed.

But that same afternoon, during visiting hours, a whole group of doctors came into my room.

I knew immediately that something was wrong.

They told me that my lung had collapsed again and that the chest drain had to be inserted once more.

I was terrified.

The first procedure had been so painful that I begged them not to do it again. I told them I could not face it. I even said that I would rather die than go through it again.

But they told me they could not simply leave me untreated.

So once again a tube was placed into my chest and connected to the large glass drainage bottle beside my bed.

For the next couple of days I was very sick and very sore.

Then one day the portable X-ray machine was unavailable.

A nurse came to take my entire bed downstairs to the X-ray department.

She lifted the glass drainage bottle from the floor and placed it on the bed so that we could travel through the hospital corridors.

As we were moving toward the lift, a man approached us. He was wearing a white doctor’s coat.

As he came toward my bed, he reached across toward the upper pocket of his coat and looked at the tubing.

Then he stopped us. He asked whether the tube had been clamped for the journey.

It had not.

He told us that it needed to be clamped. He explained that if the bottle fell and broke while the tube was left open, it could become very dangerous for me.

Then he clamped the tube himself.

At that moment, I simply thought it was fortunate that this doctor happened to pass us and notice. The nurse continued taking me downstairs. The X-ray was taken.

When it was finished, she lifted the glass drainage bottle back onto my bed. But as we prepared to leave, she forgot to raise the side rail of the bed. She turned the bed.

And the bottle fell. It smashed onto the floor.

I can still remember that moment.

Only a short while earlier, a man in a white doctor’s coat had stopped us in the corridor and explained exactly why the tube needed to be clamped.

Now the very thing he had warned us about had happened.

The glass bottle had fallen. It had broken. But the tube had already been clamped. I was protected.

That was the moment the warning stopped being a theoretical explanation and became something terribly real in front of me.

The danger he had described had actually happened. Except the one safeguard he had noticed was already in place. Afterwards, I wanted to find him. I wanted to thank the doctor who had stopped us.

But nobody seemed to know who I was talking about.

Even the nurse who had been with me did not know him. She said she had never seen him before.

And I never saw him again.

At nineteen, I did not think: “I have just seen an angel.”

I thought he was a doctor. It was only afterwards, when I tried to find him and nobody seemed to know who he was, that I began to wonder whether something much more extraordinary had happened.

Nearly fifty years later, I can still remember that hospital corridor.

I remember the white coat. I remember him looking at the tubing. I remember his warning. And I remember the sound of that glass bottle breaking not long afterwards.

I cannot prove who that man was.

But I believe God sent help to me that day.

And there is a verse that has become especially precious when I think about what happened: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” Hebrews 13:2

Those last words mean so much to me: without knowing it.

Perhaps God’s angels do not always look anything like the angels in our paintings.

No visible wings. No shining halo. No heavenly announcement.

Sometimes, perhaps, the person simply looks like someone who belongs exactly where they are.

A traveller. A stranger. Or even a doctor walking down a hospital corridor.

And if God did send an angel to me that day, then the angel is not the hero of my story.

God is.

God knew what was about to happen before I did. God knew that bottle would fall. God knew what needed to be done first.

And help appeared before I even understood that I needed it. That is what I want children to understand when we teach them about angels.

We do not worship angels. We do not pray to angels. We do not command angels.

We pray to God.

And Scripture tells us that His angels are His mighty servants who obey His commands.

Perhaps on a hospital corridor in The Hague in 1978, God commanded one of His servants to help a frightened nineteen-year-old girl.

I will not know for certain this side of heavenBut I believe.

And I have never forgotten that man.

And so I have never forgotten the God who knew exactly what I needed before I even knew I needed it.

Angels are servants. God is Lord. And all the glory belongs to Him.

Jesus & Mimi 🦋