A little over two weeks ago I received a call that Jonah had an accident at school and I needed to bring the nurse to come get him.

We found Jonah with another parent who was keeping him away from the other children; she had wrapped a towel around his hand with a bottle of frozen water. When the nurse went to look at Jonah’s fingers I heard the parent whisper “you can see the bones”, so I carried Jonah to the car and the nurse sat in the back seat with him. I called DeAnna and told her to grab the money and meet us at the gate.

The nurse reminded me to drive slowly over the bumpy road between our house and the school.

Our first stop was the French Clinic and we were the first patient of the day so we were seen within a few seconds and after they cleaned out the wound, this came with much screaming from a child who was very calm before they began squirting water on his hand, they said we needed an x-ray and after they called one of the local hospitals they wrote the name of a surgeon on prescription paper for us. I asked if I could come back later to fill out the paper work and pay and they were fine with that so we drove over to the CNPS hospital. In case you missed it there were 3 miracles here. 1^st there was a doctor at the French clinic, 2^nd he called a hospital and found a surgeon also at work and 3^rd they trusted us to come back later and settle our account.

We entered the hospital through the emergency room; we had to walk by a car where there were many people screaming and crying and very little action happening from the hospital staff. It appeared to me that there was a dead body in the back of the car.

The ER staff first tried to clean Jonah’s hand and look at his wound again but the nurse with us just asked where the doctor was on the slip of paper from the French clinic, once we found his location we preceded to his office. There were many people waiting to see the doctor, we finally were able to show the prescription from the French clinic to his nurse when she opened the door to let the next person in to see the doctor and we were able to cut ahead of several others who had been waiting. After he cleaned it a little he gave us an order for an x-ray.

We left his office and I waited in the row of chairs while DeAnna and the nurse went to go pay for the x-ray. You have to pay before they will do the x-ray, but to pay first you need to go to the radiology department to get the code for the type of x-ray you need then you go to another window outside of the emergency room to wait in line to have your bill made and then finally you pay at another window. Thankfully the doctor’s nurse wondered where we were and she found DeAnna and the nurse and rushed them through the process.

They came back and grabbed me and Jonah, who had fallen asleep in my lap and we went to radiology where I stood behind him as they took 2 pictures of his hand. We took the x-ray back to the surgeon who said he would need to have surgery.  It was now 11am almost 3 hours since the accident and they had scheduled the surgery for 1pm.

I had to go get more money, so I left the hospital and made it back in time to help Jonah into his room and pay a large deposit on the room and the surgery.