Into every life, a little rain must fall.

I was hospitalized this year for the first time in 30 years, the first time ever because I was sick. My previous hospitalizations were in my childhood for orthopedic surgeries to correct problems associated with my cerebral palsy. I always hated hospitals. Looming doctors declaring the scare of the day. Nurses with needles. Bedpans!

When my doctor told me I needed to go, right then, straight from her office, I cried like a baby. I was very sick. I was much sicker than I realized. My tears had no effect on her.

I had a raging infection. My temperature the night I was admitted was 104.5. I was given IVs, one after the other. Nurses fussed over me like I was a baby chick. I don't really remember much about that night, except the IV lines being put in my arm and floating on a dose of morphine. I had been ordered not even to try to get out of bed on my own.

Every need I had, large and small, was taken care of for me. One of the night nurses noticed that my gown was damp with sweat and changed it without a word, smoothing my brow after she did so, as I have often done to my small daughter. Far from scary, I mused as I floated, this was heaven, and I had a thousand angels looking after me.

I heard them, in fact. I heard what sounded like angels singing. It was harmonic. It vibrated in my body. I could feel how it wrapped not only me, but the entire hospital. I fell asleep listening to that song.

It took a couple of days before the doctors diagnosed what was wrong with me. This was because I had masked the pain in my kidneys with the doses of ibuprophen I was taking for arthritis pain, and then for fever. I had a kidney infection, and one of my kidneys had completely shut down.

The third day in the hospital, I heard the angel song again. Lying in a half sleep, I heard a harmonic swell and saw flashes of light and faces of people. The faces I saw were not angels; they were the faces of all the people of the earth, and then I saw the earth itself wrapped in angel energy. I wanted never to leave that consciousness—except that I could feel my body healing. I knew that I would have to take this consciousness with me, in some approximation, back into my life with my family, back into my work.

By the end of my hospital stay, I was in tears, awestruck about how the love and caring of other human beings had lifted me back to my feet. They didn't know me except as another human being on the planet who was too sick to care for herself. They took me away from myself for a time and gave me back to myself whole, except I will never be quite the same person I was before this happened to me. Thank you, God.

I now know how deeply we can care for one another, and it has changed me.

Into each person's life a little rain must fall. Isn't that what we say when the shit's about to hit the fan? But, isn't rain good? Rain sustains all life. Rain brings us green and renewal. Rain, whether physical or metaphorical, can bring us the greatest gifts we will ever know as 3-D human beings. I caught a glimpse of the great golden thread that runs through humankind. I had left it on the ground as a burden because of my fear. Whether or not you believe we are guided by something greater to care for each other, we make something greater than ourselves when we do so.