I don’t really know how to tell this story. I don’t have all the details, but what I am confident of is that it’s true. The surgeon who told it to me is a good friend of mine. Our dads were good friends. We go way back to the days of acne and long hair. I would trust him with my life, which means that I trust his story.

This story begins not too far from Charlotte, North Carolina, probably 35 years ago. The midmorning sun was shining on a huge construction site. Men with hard hats and high viz vests carried tool belts. The smell of diesel filled the air. Acres of earth had been scraped raw, and new water lines were being laid.

Our main character is a man I’ll call Marvin. Marvin was a pipefitter. He had worked pipelines for most of his adult life. He lived down in the ditches on sites like this one. Diamond cutting tools. Torches. Welders. You name it. If there was pipe to be put together, Marvin was your man.

His job on this day was to tie the new line into the existing water main. The main line has to be shut down in order to relieve the pressure. Cuts are made. Flanges are installed, and wah-lah, the new line is operational.

Easy-peasy. Marvin had done it a hundred times.

He got down in the ditch with his tools. The typical gathering of construction guys stood above the ditch to watch Marvin do his magic. He fired up the cutter and leaned into the pipe.

When something goes terribly wrong on a construction site, it’s usually because somebody forgot to do their job. It’s one thing to leave a shovel laying where somebody might trip over it. It’s something altogether different to forget to shut down the water main. Everybody thought somebody else took care of it.

It was a big pipe. Big enough that Marvin sat down and straddled the pipe to make his cut. When the blade went through the wall there was an explosion that sent men running like chickens from a fox. Marvin was hurled twenty feet into the air and landed in a heap on the ground outside the ditch like a ragdoll.

The geyser of water turned the dirt into mud and Marvin was laying right in the middle of it. The slush around him was starting to run red. There was no time to waste.

They guys on the crew wrapped him in an old jacket, loaded him in the back of a truck and took off for the local hospital. The doctors in the ER were amazed that Marvin was still breathing, but they were not equipped to deal with his injuries. They cleaned his gaping wound, packed it in ice, and called for the Life Flight helicopter.

If Marvin was gonna have any chance of surviving this, he had to get to Charlotte.

The call came into the Charlotte ER that the helicopter was on its way. Two minutes out, Marvin went into cardiac arrest.

My friend tells me, “That’s not good.”

As he tells it, when there’s a puncture wound, like with a knife or a bullet, and the patient goes into cardiac arrest, nobody worries too much. Nearly every time, you can get them back. But with a severe blunt force trauma patient cardiac arrest usually means it’s over.

The gurney wheeled into the ER. “It was one of the worst messes I’d ever seen,” my friend says. His pelvic area had been splayed open. Nothing was in the right place. Some of the very personal pieces of his anatomy were missing.

My friend was a fourth-year surgical resident. Not yet board certified, but with plenty of experience. The attending physician asked him, “What are you gonna do? This is your case.”

The young doctor thought for a minute. There was no discernable pulse.

“I could call it. Or I could make a slit in his left chest wall and put a clamp on his aorta and see what happens.”

The attending smiled. “Go for it.”

I’m gonna spare you the details. Partly because the details are quite graphic and not suitable for the real purpose of this story. But mostly, I’m skipping over some things because the medical lingo got way over my head, and I’d probably come off sounding like a buffoon trying to get it right.

The short of it is that Marvin survived the surgery. The surgeon had done all he could do for the time being, and Marvin was rolled off to ICU.

Over the next two weeks, the surgeon checked on Marvin every day. His stats were stable. Other surgeons got involved. It was going to be a long haul.

When it came time to remove the trach tube, the surgeon could tell that Marvin was wanting to say something. He pulled the tube out, stuck his finger over the hole and nodded for Marvin to speak.

The man on the bed held out his hand to shake the doc’s hand. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Marvin Powell, pipe fitter.”

Marvin spent the next several months in the hospital. Tests. Skin grafts. Resections. Reconstructions. He was mostly in the hands of other doctors now, but the surgeon who met him in the ER kept an eye on him.

One day, Marvin was lying on a gurney out in the hallway. The nurse had left his chart lying on his chest while he waited. The surgeon noticed Marvin reading through his chart, thumbing each page, taking a hard look at his own medical history.

A few days later they caught up again. The surgeon stopped and talked to him.

Marvin said, “I saw what you did for me back in the ER and I want to thank you.”

The surgeon thought, “No way he saw anything that day.”

Marvin insisted. “It was like I was out of my body watching. I heard you tell that other doc that you wanted to try. I heard you tell the others not to give up yet. You saved my life.”

The surgeon tried to shrug it off, but he couldn’t. He went back to the chart and read it for himself. Word for word. Twice. And the things that Marvin had told him about that day were not things written in the chart.

“Well, what do you think about that?” I asked him.

“I believe him.”

Some cases stay with a man his whole life. He told this story to me as if it was yesterday.

“I don’t see how any surgeon could ever be an atheist,” he said to me. “It took me a while to realize it, but I never healed anybody. All I did was put what pieces I could back in the right place so that they’d have a chance to heal. God takes care of the rest.”

Marvin should have been a dead man. God had other things in mind. And He used a surgeon to get it done!

Gheez! The same guy that worked with me one summer at Food Lion in Griffin bagging groceries.

I’m proud to know him.