Full Circle

The late John Lennon is attributed with saying, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” That’s pretty much been my life: plans for school and career, plans for family, plans for home, and a gazillion little plans in-between all the big ones. Yes, I am a planner. I pick out my clothes for the coming day, the night before. I always leave my desk at work set up and ready for the next day. I like to believe that all my planning and thinking ahead will give me some level of control; will help prepare me for whatever the next thing coming down the pike may be.

So, there is that confession: I am a compulsive planner. Spur of the moment events and changes to pre-existing plans can leave me unsteady, insecure, and worried. My second confession should come as no shock; I am also something of a control freak, which is how I legitimize all my fierce planning. When traveling with family or friends, I’m always, “I’ll drive!” “Let’s take my car!” I try to make it sound magnanimous, but in reality, I just want to be in control of the journey. On a flight across the Atlantic once, my husband turned to me and asked, “What? You’re not going to offer to fly the plane?” I elbowed him and smiled, but I was thinking, ‘I sure wish I could.’

So hold onto all that: Type-A Planner and Type-A Control Freak. Sure, I would be dishonest to say that all my years of planning and seeking control have worked. I have had my share of surprises, both good and bad ones. And I have known moments when I was so NOT in control it was laughable. As I have grown older and hopefully wiser, I have even come to understand what an illusion control is; nonetheless, I find myself doing my best to maintain that illusion. My life of planning and seeking control took a severe beating on March 3rd, 2020.

I was on my way for my routinely scheduled monthly haircut (planning). I had left the house in plenty of time to make the trip and arrive a little early for my appointment (control). I had taken a pair of flip flops in preparation for a luxurious and much overdue pedicure (planning). What I had not planned for, and what I had no control over, was the pickup truck that suddenly and with great speed came into my lane and struck me head-on.

I do not remember the crash or the next week or so. Family and friends have since told me that week involved a helicopter ride to the Sydney Marcus Trauma Center at Grady Hospital in Atlanta; multiple frantic phone calls between my husband, family, and friends; wondering and worrying about me. Sleepless nights and wearying days, numerous surgeries to repair 28 broken bones; ICU, a chest tube, rib plates, an external fixer, splints, catheter - this is the abbreviated list. What goes without saying is, I had not planned for this, and yes, it was all way out of my control!

What I have not told you about myself, yet, is that I am a Presbyterian minister. I have been for 23 years now. I have served three churches, all in Georgia: Greenville, Carrollton, and LaGrange. I hesitate to tell you that I am a Christian minister because it makes all my control and planning seem antithetical. Remember, Jesus? “Consider the lilies how they neither toil nor spin. Yet, God takes care of them! Why do you worry?” I confess that when it comes to considering the lilies, I am chief among sinners.

To say that our life was turned upside down by my accident is only partially true. It was turned upside down, sideways, inside out, and still spinning. While my husband, family, and friends told me over and over how grateful they were that I had miraculously survived the crash, most days it was hard to feel grateful; I was literally trapped in a body that I could no longer use, much less a body I could no longer control or plan for. I realized just how out of control I was one night when I was too warm and wanted to remove a blanket, and I absolutely could not get it off of me.

The one thing that hospital patients get to help them have some control is a call button to alert the nurse. Well, imagine this, I could not press the call button! Talk about being out of control. My family and friends knew how terrified I was, so my sister devised a schedule where someone would be with me 24/7. Lucky for me, I had a sister with some planning/control issues of her own.

I stayed in the hospital for 17 days, but because it was March 2020, the world was in the grip of the COVID 19 pandemic. My family decided it was time to get me home. Within a few hours of that decision, I was headed by ambulance to a newly delivered hospital bed at our home in Whitesburg, GA.

While it was a great relief to be out of the hospital, suddenly, I had no more nurses to attend to my medical needs, which were numerous, and my personal needs, which were, well, all of them. The life that I had planned so hard for was no longer available to me. The only thing I had any control over was the thoughts in my head, and honestly, I did not have much of a grip on those; they ran wild. I was sinking and wasn’t sure how far I had to fall to reach the bottom.

Just before we left the hospital, I asked my sister to get my phone and call my friend Jwyanda. “Who?” my sister asked. “Jwyanda Norman. Her number’s in there. Call her and see if she can help us out when I get home.”

Jwyanda and I met around 2012 at a meeting of Circles of West Georgia in Carrollton. If you are not familiar, Circles is a nationally recognized program that teaches self-sufficiency alongside building positive relationships.

To use their marketing: “Circles is an innovative, community-driven way to affect poverty. It is different from simply providing assistance to people in need. Circles’ mission is to inspire and equip families and communities to thrive and end poverty.”

A Circle is a supportive, reciprocal, befriending relationship made up of one Circle Leader, Jwyanda, and two to four Circle Allies, who are local volunteers willing to help participants reach their goals.

Carrollton Presbyterian Church, where I was serving at the time, committed to providing weekly childcare for the Circle’s program so that parents could focus on learning. Of course, I was proud that the congregation was stepping up to serve in this way, and I wanted to be a part of it too. Jwyanda and I did not work together in this program, but we did talk most weeks over dinner. She immediately drew me in.

She is a tall woman with kind eyes and a flashing smile. She has a quick wit and a great sense of humor. She also has an intense focus and drive. Maybe I recognized something of myself in her, or her in me. However, this I knew: If anybody was going to succeed in Circles, it was Jwyanda Norman. She was a quick study and soaked up information and applied it to her vision of the home care company that she wanted to create. She was the child of entrepreneurs and had already been taking care of people with physical needs for over 30 years. More recently, she had begun to develop her own empathic way of caring for people. Jwyanda believed she could teach other caregivers how to provide superior care for their clients and build a business out of this more client-focused method of care-giving.

Fast forward. By the end of Jwyanda’s time in Circles, our relationship had moved beyond my role as pastor/helper and hers of learner. We became friends and continued to dream together about the business she wanted to build. But as too often happens, we got busy, and our friendship floundered. Jwyanda started building her caregiving business - Need It Most HomeCare. I retired from full-time pastoring but still wanted a place to serve, so I became an associate pastor, working part-time at First Presbyterian Church LaGrange.

Now, circle back to leaving the hospital. My sister found Jwyanda’s number and called to see if she could help us when I got home. She was surprised to see my number pop up and expressed relief that I hadn’t been killed in the accident. Jwyanda juggled some things around and came in a couple of days. When I heard her voice at the door, I had to fight back the tears. When I saw her, the tears just came. It was a relief to have Jwaynda caring for me. I felt hopeful for the first time in weeks.

Jwyanda told me later that she was overwhelmed and a little intimidated at first. She arrived to find a house full of family-caregivers; a doctor brother, a nurse sister-in-law, a sister, niece, and friend who had been caring for me in the hospital for the past two and a half weeks, and my husband. He was the gentle ring-master over this whole circus. It was a team effort to roll me onto a bedpan because:

(1) I could be of precisely no help, and

(2) I had a lingering case of vertigo that made me sick with every major movement. I may have been the most fragile client, or at least the most broken client, that Jwyanda had encountered in her career.

Remarkably, she did not let my over-planning, over-controlling family throw her. She knew what to do. She had cared for broken people before. And she knew what to say to someone who was broken in body and spirit.

For three months, I was non-weight bearing on all extremities. Non-weight bearing means I could not push myself up in bed, nor could I roll over. My hands and arms were of no help, my right leg was completely broken, and I had rods stabilizing my pelvis. Even with the bed rails up, I had an irrational fear of rolling off the bed. I was out of control, and no amount of good planning was going to change that. If I was going to get through this, I was going to have to learn to trust, God of course, but Jwyanda in particular.

The first month she stayed with me 24-7. She fed me, bathed me, brushed my teeth, positioned me in bed, saw that I took my medicines on time, and yes, toileted me. She watched me like a hawk. She cared for me in all things, working hard to help me keep my dignity, and laughed uncontrollably with me when dignity was just not a possibility. She knew when to push me and when to leave me alone. She knew when to be silent and when to speak. She let me cry without cajoling. She did not call attention to the many contradictions that I was becoming, and she encouraged me in ways that didn’t feel shallow, but that gave me a little more confidence.

Slowly, slowly, day-by-grueling day, I gained strength. My husband, Jerry, and our family and friends continued to help out as much as possible, but when I needed the bedpan at 3:00 AM, it was Jwyanda, sometimes Jerry, that came running. Also, don’t forget we were in the thick of COVD-19 by now. Jwyanda made a hard and fast rule that no one came into the house or began the day without having a temperature check, hand washing, and masking up. She supervised all of this and was fastidious. She was single-mindedly determined that I would keep moving forward toward health and healing with no hiccups.

I was terrified the first time she helped me sit on the side of the bed to strengthen my core muscles. We borrowed a Hoyer Lift to allow me to be lifted out of bed to sit in a chair. Jwyanda would oversee the move from bed to chair, but Jerry was the only one that I ever allowed to control the hydraulics. I didn’t want a crash landing. There’s that control again. Most days, I was frustrated and depressed, and I cried a lot because I was not progressing like I thought I should. That’s when Jwyanda would gently remind me of just how far I had come.

On June 12th, a little over three months after the wreck, I was allowed to bear weight on my legs and arms, and I went to Encompass, a rehab hospital in Newnan, for two weeks of learning to walk again. Jwyanda and I cried that morning when I left the house. We were both going to have to trust now. She had to trust that this next step of healing would further all the hard work she had poured into my recovery. I had to trust that the staff at Encompass would keep me safe from COVID and from falling.

Eight months later, I can do most things for myself, but I still need help with some things. I limp when I walk. I can not make a bed. Some might say this is a blessing. Jywanda and I see each other fairly often. We drink coffee and laugh. She gushes over how good I look and how well I am walking.

Currently, she is working with investors on buying and staffing a personal care home nearby. I’m still working part-time at the church in LaGrange, and yes, I still like to feel some level of control, but I know with greater certainty that it truly is an illusion.

I know my body will never be the same again; neither will my head and heart. I am grateful for the hard-won insights I’ve gained. We just never know. After all the best planning in the world, life can turn on a dime.

I’ll never be able to explain the whys or the hows, but I’m still here. Many people tell me that I am a miracle - the fact that I had no internal injuries, the fact that I am recovering after so many broken bones. While I am reluctant to claim such miracles for myself, I sure will claim the miracle of a caring family and great friends, and the miracle of a friendship that came full circle, and that surely God used to help heal me.