Last week I had a strange experience. I woke in the night with a sharp pain in my chest and shoulder and with a pins and needles type of sensation in my left arm. This pain did not leave and, whilst it varied in intensity, it stayed with me into the next day.
I asked Jon to ring our GP who had no appointments.

So I rang my Doctor brother to get some advice. Having heard my symptoms he advised me to go to A and E. So I found myself in the Triage system being treated as a potential heart attack case.

Sitting and waiting for the ECG I found my eyes darting all over the department to see scared, ill people, fighting for the attention of the nurses. I was calm but incredibly tired and achey. I saw a young guy in his teens who had stabbed himself twice in the arm because he was angry with his girlfriend. I also saw a girl who was handcuffed to two prison officers – even when she went to the toilet.

I had some tests, none of which gave any cause for concern. The upshot of the diagnosis was that I had probably trapped a nerve somewhere in my shoulder and that this was causing the pain and the other symptoms.

I had to have one further blood test to make sure.

The test results took 8 hours to be given back to me. So, in that time, I was sent to the Clinical Decisions Unit and sat between three elderly women. It was not long before we got chatting. One lady, who I came to love very much over those next 8 hours or so, mentioned going for a walk ‘every fine day’ down by the river and seeing a heron. Now, those of you who know me well, know the significance of the heron in my life. It is my ‘God bird.’ It is the sign God sometimes sends me to say, “All is well, I am here!”
I shared my stories of herons with the ladies in the ward. One lady, especially, was really moved and inspired by them.

In the hours that followed, I discovered her amazing story and how she had brought up her three children. Her philosophy was not to shout but to LOVE. She told me that her mother had never raised her voice to her children either. I wish I could say the same.

This wonderful lady, Nora (“without an ‘H’ dear”) also spent her entire life volunteering for various good causes. The first time she found herself needed was as a teenager in the war. A lady standing behind her and her mother in the butcher’s queue began to sob. Her mother, who was kind-hearted and compassionate, asked what was the matter. The lady told her that her son had just been enlisted and that her husband was on firewatch duty that night. She said she was scared of being by herself. Nora was dispatched once a week to this lady for the next two years to sleep at her house and help her not to feel lonely.
Nora smiled as she told me that the man of the house worked for the Co-operative and was therefore able to literally ‘bring home the bacon.’ So for her trouble, she was given two rashers for her breakfast every week – something that would been unheard of in war-time-ration-conscious Britain at that time.

Then Nora begged to be allowed to join the group of young girls tending to the fields and crops. She was too young to be officially part of the movement, but her Father wrote her a letter and she was allowed to volunteer. She then worked for the land army for a number of years, growing skilled in tending to crops.

Her next job was as a worker with Stroke victims. She spent three mornings a week caring for a highly intelligent young Cambridge graduate who had suffered a severe stroke, teaching him to speak again. After three years she had the pleasure of being invited to hear him read the lesson in the local church. She said she would not have been more proud if he had been her own son!

Her list of what she had done got longer and longer. I listened with real amazement. She was never paid for a thing she did for 74 years. But her payment was in the joy it brought to other people.

Nora and I had a wonderful time together. We had a lovely cuddle and a pray and vowed to keep in touch.

She was my heron that day. And I was hers.