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Part 5: In the twinkling of an eye
March 5, 2010
Dr. Richard Furman
Following the deadly earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010, Dr. Richard Furman, a Charleston Southern University Board of Visitors member, was with one of the first medical teams in Port au Prince. He operated on the injured, cared for the injured, witnessed the personal grief through the wailing cries and desperate, distant eyes of Haitians. Dr. Furman boarded a plane back to the United States on January 25, 2010. In a handwritten journal, he reflected on his experience. This is his story.
 And leaving the little girl and walking on past patients in the hall, my mind goes back to the drive I had from our hospital on the outskirts of town, to the government hospital downtown. We had passed a body lying in the gutter. Someone had laid a piece of plastic over it, and all you could see were the feet sticking out one end and the top of the scalp out the other.
A little further there was a single building that had fallen out over the street and covered half the road. As we passed in the only lane left open, I saw an automobile which had been crushed down to within two feet of the ground. Then I noticed a hand sticking out from under the roof of the car and immediately asked our driver to stop.
As I looked closer, I could see that the driver of the smashed car must have gotten out somehow, but the body whose hand and arm I saw was that of a lady who had reached for the driver’s door and was frozen in that position with her body lying across the seat and her arm and head almost to the door. It was as if I was seeing something where time has stood still from the moment of the quake.
I knew she had not died instantly, probably because the automobile roof had lightened the load of the slab somewhat and given her time to at least attempt to get out. But I knew it had been different from what I saw next.
Just behind the car, there was a bicycle wheel protruding from under the same slab. I bent down to look under the rubble and saw the body of a man in a uniform crushed beside what was left of the bicycle. I could see his arm completely. It had not been crushed at all. The khaki short-sleeved shirt he had on with some stripes around the sleeve was all intact, but his head was crushed and his shoulders were bent completely together, and I knew he had died in a moment. I couldn’t help but think of things that happen in the twinkling of an eye.
The woman in the car and the man on the bicycle were simply going down the road, and in a moment, their lives were taken. It is strange what runs through our minds all of a sudden when we see the unusual. Such thoughts brand themselves on our minds.
As I was bent over looking under the slab at the man on the bike, it ran though my mind that we had better be prepared right now for our lives to come to an end, because we don’t know if we will have a tomorrow or not. Parts of Bible verses came to mind.
I didn’t remember the exact passages that related to what I was thinking at the time but looked them up later and found one in James 4. It says, “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is our life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” And then thinking about the man on the bicycle, that one moment he was alive and the next he was gone.
The verse that speaks to such a time frame talks of the other end of the spectrum when our bodies are brought back to life: I found in 1Corinthians 15, “We shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed.”
In a twinkling of an eye was what flashed in my mind when I first saw the man on the bicycle. Anyway I looked at it, I was moved in a way I will never forget. If there are individuals who do not know the Lord, they need to come face-to-face with the fact that tomorrow is not guaranteed. They can make any decision they want, but they must decide one way or another. And the other thought that ran through my mind: what about friends that I have that I do not know if they are believers or not. I should talk to them about the Lord sometime before tomorrow.
As I left the hospital that night, I remember the heaviness of my heart; and I don’t consider myself an emotional type of person. I knew we had done our best, but there was still that feeling of inadequacy.
As I walked toward the main door out of the hospital, I had to pass by the 8-10 patients who were on floor mattresses pushed to one side of the hall. These were our new overflows that had been admitted that morning: one by taxi, one by bus, both with broken limbs.
The man on the last mattress was elderly with white curly hair. He was asleep as I stopped and looked at him. He had two broken legs and was all alone. It was 10 days after the quake, and he did not know where his family was or if they were alive. And they had no knowledge of his condition or whereabouts. He knows one of them had a phone but couldn’t remember the number. He hoped they were alive, but I had doubts. I pulled a Samaritan’s Purse blanket that had been given him up around his shoulders and left the hospital.
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University Relations Web Exclusives
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Web Exclusives
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