Carley

I met Carley back in late May of this year. It was a chance meeting, and an even chance-r conversation. She was one of the physical therapists filling in on my unit in the hospital, picking up a weekend shift as a very part-time employee. I overheard her speaking with one of the patients near my desk about vertigo and dizziness and balance. 

When she came out, I asked, "Do you do some vestibular therapy, too?" 

I haven't really had many conversations with our part-time therapists. Almost none, actually. And for the most part, I tend to keep my personal medical needs out of my work relationships. Yes, I work in medicine; no, that doesn't mean I get to cash in for free. (Most of my coworkers know the battles I'm fighting, but I'm not soliciting them for help.) 

I wasn't really soliciting Carley, either. I had done vestibular therapy a few years prior, and it wasn't the best experience for me. That is, it was the one round of physical therapy that I'd had that hadn't seemed to have done anything. But I was trying to establish connections with my coworkers, to be more diligent about reaching across departments (something that had come up in a recent conversation with my manager), and I thought...here's something we can talk about. 

I told her I'd done some vestibular therapy myself. It hadn't really worked for me, but I understood it as a very neat specialty, and it was cool that she was into that. 

As it turns out, not only was she into that; it was her job. Like, her regular job. She worked at a specialty neurological/vestibular therapy center, so this was the kind of patient she saw all day, every day. She was more than happy to give me her contact info and tell me to try it again, to come see her, to check out the advanced stuff they had there that I might not have had in my previous experience. 

I kept that post-it note on my desk for months. 

But I never made it to see Carley. A week or two later, I met the surgeon who was supposed to fix my vertigo; a few weeks after that, had surgery; a few weeks after that, was doing amazing and was learning to drive again. I always appreciated that she had reached back out to me, but things were finally seeming to turn and it looked like I wasn't going to need her. 

Until things turned again and I ended up more crippled than I'd ever been by my vestibular issues. 

By that point, my hospital had hired Carley. She had begun seeing patients at our outpatient center. And when I followed up with my surgeon and he suggested more therapy to help me get back on track, I mentioned that we'd actually just hired one of the therapists that used to work closely with his patients. 

"You have Carley!" he exclaimed. "You've got to go see Carley." 

So I went to see Carley, who I had not seen, not even once, since that one shift when I had tried to be better about reaching across departments, and Carley remembered everything about our one conversation. Not only that, but she brought her amazingly specialized set of skills to bear on my situation, and now, we're working together toward all the things that seemed like only a dream just a few months ago. 

It reminds me that no encounter in our world is random. God puts the right persons in your life at the right time, and you may not even know it. 

And not only that, but He puts you in the lives of others at just the right time. Have you ever stopped to consider that? 

Who would have thought that one chance encounter on one weekend shift with one new person I had never met would turn into the hope that I so desperately needed just a short breath later? 

I don't know if Carley knows that she is that one new person for me in this season. But then, I don't know who I am that one new person for in this season, either. Whose life has God put me into for such a moment as this? 

Because of one seemingly-random conversation before I even knew what was happening, I am living with eyes wide open to that possibility. For perhaps we are all somebody's Esther.